Last night I was laying down tubing for a radiant basement floor.. until almost 11pm. The basement floor is being poured today, so it needed to get finished, and I had volunteered to help. It wasn't bad, just time consuming. It also gave me a lot of time to think and ponder things, as if I didn't already do that enough.

Stars. Wow. It's been forever since I've just stared up at the sky and tried to find meaning in all those bright points of light. The sky was perfectly clear, it was dark.. it was perfect, very calming. I'm really tempted to try to start up a grassroots movement to fight the light pollution around here. There's just way too much light at night to enjoy the night as much as I could.. seeing the glow on the horizon from neighboring cities at 11pm is not what I want.

Anyway, back to the stars – it's amazing how insignificant you can begin to feel when you start to contemplate the totality of everything that exists. Those stars are farther away than I can comprehend. They're bigger than I can even imagine. And there's so much more out there besides them. Here we are, on this little spinning rock, less than a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. It could all end right now.. fwoosh.. and we wouldn't have any idea, and it wouldn't really affect anything else.

We're only important because we perceive ourselves as being important… but really, that's all that matters. I think it's important that every so often we stop and look at the big picture.. the one where we're hardly noticeable, if even at all.. otherwise we start to take things way too seriously, and get too caught up in ourselves and our daily lives that we forget to have fun and enjoy the things and people around us.

Cold. Bleh. It was like 50 degrees (Fahrenheit) last night. Brrr. I had to put on a jacket. It's way too early in the year to be putting on a jacket. I feel like I've failed in some sense just because I had to do it and couldn't hold out for a few more weeks.

Mosquitoes. It's too cold for them! Why are they still out?! I had to cover myself with mosquito repellent last night to the point where the smell was almost making me nauseous. It worked though. The little buggers were hovering around me trying to penetrate my anti-them forcefield. There were tons, it was disgusting. At one point there were so many around me, that it felt like I had a buzzing blood-sucking aura.

They also seemed to be grouped together in areas like those little gnats that just hover in a big pack. I decided to play a little game with those ones – I sprayed my hand and arm a bit more just for good measure, and them slowly stuck my hand into the middle of the pack. It was strangely satisfying to watch them diverge from me, rather than trying to give me west nile virus. At the time, it felt like I was getting some sort of revenge against them for all of humanity, making them suffer maybe just a little bit. Tempting and repelling them both at the same time. If we're such a small part of the universe, imagine where they fit in in the grand scheme of things.. and then laugh at them.. and then itch one of the million bites that they've managed to get in in the last few weeks.

How did this turn into a "mosquitoes suck" post? Oh well. It's done now. 🙂