Saturday's the equinox! Yaay. Mom's got this weird fishing and hunting calendar hung up next to the computer that for every day lists the local sunrise and sunset times, prime fishing hours, how good the fishing's going to be, and any random bits of information they think will be useful. Today's is "Pickerel fishing in Chickahominy." Tomorrow's are "Begin planting orchard grass and clover" and "Virginia Peanut Festival, Emporia." I like it because it's funny and gives the phases of the moon.

Let's see . . . today on the bus Bridget scolded me for publishing uncomplimentary things about ABBA and threatened me with bodily harm (not really) if I didn't go home and listen to them. So I did, and they're as awful as everyone makes them out to be, but most of their lyrics are pretty stupid and their tunes are sort of boring. (Now she's going to be really mad.)

Oh, and yesterday while trying to find my algebra homework I came across the following in the textbook: "For some initial values, called prisoner values, the iterates approach a limit value. For other initial values, called escape values, the absolute value of the iterates increases without bound and the points drift away. The remaining initial values form the Julia set, the boundary between escape values and prisoner values." Then there's a graph with "imaginary" and "real marked on different axes. A red circle is drawn in the center of the graph and all the numbers falling on that circle are the numbers of the Julia set. The explanation is all about fractals, which we haven't covered yet and I don't understand at all, but I thought it was very cool. The boundary between Apparently it's named after some 12th century mathematician named Gaston Julia, which is a stupid last name. It's worse than naming children Carter and Riley and Turner.

September 15
September 21