Unexpected Voting in Parliament and Alabama. Citizenship Bureaucracy. Geminid Meteors!

Jane's mince pies

Two unexpected votes today. In the UK House of Commons, MP's voted 309 votes to 305 against the government and insisted on giving Parliament a legal guarantee of a vote on the final Brexit deal struck with Brussels. It was rebel Tory MPs who held their ground, voting on a matter of principle rather than on party lines.

In Alabama, Democrat Doug Jones inflicted a surprise defeat on the rather extreme Republican Roy Moore. Whilst older voters and men voted more for Moore, it was the younger generations and, most importantly women, who voted for Jones.

Half the day spent on generating a kindle picture book for a client. Because of its square format, it was particularly suited to being able to display facing pages on PC, laptop and landscape held tablets. Also started a mixed wholemeal loaf, flavoured with soudough, fried onion and roasted pumpkin and sunflower seeds. It was set for a slow rise using just a teaspoon of dry yeast.

In the evening, attended the last meeting of German friends before the festive break, by a fire and with Christmas snacks and warm drinks. Another member had been through the process of applying for British citizenship and had also experienced some of the demeaning bureaucracy and negative attitudes at the apparently slightly dilapidated test centres, remembered by others in the group. Fascinated and slightly appalled that this involved not only scanning body, bags and clothing, but also extended to looking behind and in ears without any explanation. The rationale is presumably that there have been cheats using broadcasting /communication equipment linked to outside help to try and pass the tests. And the applicants are paying for this treatment

On return later that evening, the bread was almost ready, baked a bit later and recovered from the oven by midnight.

The Geminid meteor shower was due to peak tonight. Unfortunately, cloud prevented decent viewing apart from a short window around 7 pm and again later after 1 am. Setting up the camera at 7pm simply revealed the cloud coming over. However, with the camera taking 10 second exposures at 3200 ISO, f 3.5, there was a good period of cloud free cover. ~I saw four quite bright meteors as I stood for a couple of minutes with the camera at several intervals, before dashing in to warm up again. Inevitably, they all seemed out of the camera view at the time. Looking at the pictures tomorrow will hopefully reveal at least a few captured.

Most meteor showers originate from comets. The Geminids are unusual because the are linked to an asteroid, Phaethon. According to Wikipedia, 'the meteors travel at medium speed in relation to other showers, at about 22 miles per second (35 km/s), making them fairly easy to spot.' This certainly seemed to be the case, once your eye caught one, you could react and see it follow a pace that was slower than I remember from other showers. There also seemed to be a number of quite bright meteors, burning up as they entered the atmosphere at about 39 km above sea level.

Checked at 2 am - caught at least three on camera!