Trying Again to Leave Santa Fe

Tomorrow morning I will try again to leave Santa Fe and return to Maine. Hopefully I'll get farther than last time. Looks like the weather tomorrow should be ok.

Today has been a fairly satisfying day of work. I got a lot done: mostly email and a handful of phone calls. I'll be behind when I return to Maine, but not by much. Or at least not more behind than usual. No matter what I do I seem to be perpetually behind in various work, teaching, and research tasks.

The weather today in Santa Fe was beautiful. The high was almost 55 degrees---positively tropical by Maine standards. It was sunny and almost cloudless. I went for a short walk around 5:30 and watched the sun set. The round orange ball disappeared over the mountains. Once the sun was halfway hidden, I looked directly at it. I was wearing sunglasses, so it didn't hurt. Right before the sun was completely gone it looked like it was falling really fast.

Except, of course, the sun isn't falling at all. Rather, the earth is spinning away from the sun. This isn't exactly news, I suppose. But watching the sun today I got a sense of the rotating earth in a way that I don't often experience. It was suddenly easy to picture the earth as a big spinning rock floating in space.