Happy Tax Day

Triumphantly I report that I have put my taxes in the mail. I owe the government $43.18 this year, so I wasn't exactly in a hurry to get them filed. But I owe the state of Massachusetts nothing at all. Hooray for rental tax credit!

I feel worlds smarter after attending the free lecture at the Museum of Science last night. Planets R Us, given by David Charbonneau, Ph.D., assistant professor at Harvard University. He's at the forefront of the new scientific frontier: the search for earth-like planets around other sun-like stars. It was really very interesting. I learned about the Kepler Project and the Spitzer Telescope. If you haven't heard of it already, you will start hearing about it soon. The Spitzer telescope, like the Hubble, is going to play a big part in the search for new planets.

Book Recommendation: For anyone interested in learning more about Iran and its culture--especially in regards to women--I suggest Reading Lolita in Tehran. It's the memoir of Azar Nafisi, an Iranian woman who left the University of Tehran to teach her own private literature classes in order to escape the suffocating restrictions of the government. Through the eyes of her and her female students, literature--especially the works of Nabokov--becomes a way to provide both distance from, and a whole new way to view, life under a strict totalitarian regime.