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Saturday 4 April 2015

Princess Andromeda


Hi dear friends and followers. I am pleased to see you here. Today I have a story for you, the legend behind the name of the Andromeda Galaxy


Princess Andromeda

The Andromeda Galaxy (/ænˈdrɒmɨdə/) is a spiral galaxy approximately 780kiloparsecs (2.5 million light-years; 2.4×1019km) from Earth. Also known as Messier 31,M31, or NGC 224, it is often referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older texts. The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way, but not the nearest galaxy overall. It gets its name from the area of the sky in which it appears, theconstellation of Andromeda, which was named after the mythological princessAndromeda. The Andromeda Galaxy is the largest galaxy of the Local Group, which also contains the Milky Way, the Triangulum Galaxy, and about 44 other smaller galaxies.

The Andromeda Galaxy is the most massive galaxy in the Local Group as well. Despite earlier findings that suggested that the Milky Way contains more dark matter and could be the most massive in the grouping, the 2006 observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that M31 contains one trillion (1012) stars: at least twice the number of stars in the Milky Way, which is estimated to be 200–400 billion.

The Andromeda Galaxy is estimated to be 1.5×1012 solar masses while the mass of the Milky Way is estimated to be 8.5×1011 solar masses. In comparison a 2009 study estimated that the Milky Way and M31 are about equal in mass, while a 2006 study put the mass of the Milky Way at ~80% of the mass of the Andromeda Galaxy. The two galaxies are expected to collide in 3.75 billion years, eventually merging to form a giantelliptical galaxy or perhaps a large disk galaxy.

At 3.4, the apparent magnitude of the Andromeda Galaxy is one of the brightest of anyMessier objects, making it visible to the naked eye on moonless nights even when viewed from areas with moderate light pollution. Although it appears more than six times as wide as the full Moon when photographed through a larger telescope, only the brighter central region is visible to the naked eye or
 when viewed using binoculars or a small telescope.



Andromeda is a princess featured in the heroic Greek legends. She had the misfortune to be the daughter of the vain Cassiopeia, wife of King Cepheus of Aethiopia. Cepheus was the mythological king of Ethiopia. He was deemed worthy of a place in the sky because he was fourth in descent from the nymph Io, one of the loves of Zeus – and having Zeus as a relative was always an advantage when it came to being commemorated among the constellations.


The kingdom of Cepheus was not the Ethiopia we know today, but stretched from the south-eastern shore of the Mediterranean southwards to the Red Sea, an area that contains parts of the modern Israel, Jordan and Egypt. Ptolemy described him as wearing the tiara-like head-dress of a Persian king.

Cepheus was married to Cassiopeia, an unbearably vain woman whose boastfulness caused Poseidon to send a sea monster, Cetus, to ravage the shores of Cepheus’s kingdom. Cepheus was instructed by the Oracle of Ammon to chain his daughter Andromeda to a rock in sacrifice to the monster. She was saved by the hero Perseus, who killed the monster and claimed Andromeda for his bride.


King Cepheus laid on a sumptuous banquet at his palace to celebrate the wedding. But Andromeda had already been promised to Phineus, brother of Cepheus. While the celebrations were in progress, Phineus and his followers burst in, demanding that Andromeda be handed over, which Cepheus refused to do. The dreadful battle that ensued is described in gory detail by Ovid in Book V of his Metamorphoses. Cepheus retired from the scene, muttering that he had done his best, and left Perseus to defend himself. Perseus cut down many of his attackers, turning the remainder to stone by showing them the Gorgon’s head.

The constellation of Cepheus lies near the north celestial pole. Its most celebrated star is Delta Cephei, a pulsating supergiant star that varies in brightness every 5.4 days. It is the prototype of the Cepheid variable stars that astronomers use for estimating distances in space.

Perseus would go on to be the founder of Mycenae where Andromeda would be queen, but first, she gave birth to their first son, Perses, who stayed behind to rule when his grandfather died. (Perses is considered the eponymous father of the Persians.)



Perseus and Andromeda's children were these sons: Perses, Alcaeus, Sthenelus, Heleus, Mentor, Electryon, and a daughter, Gorgophone.

After her death, Andromeda was placed among the stars as the Andromeda constellation. The monster who was sent to ravage Aethiopia was also turned into a constellation, Cetus.
Andromeda was the name of a TV series by Gene Roddenberry, starring Kevin Sorbo, the actor who played Hercules in the TV series.


Thank you very much again, dear friends, for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts with us, if you will. have a great Week.
ڰۣIn Loving Light from the Fairy Ladyڰۣ


Friday 3 April 2015

KEEPING IT REAL with FRIZZY LIZZY



Hi dear friends and followers, thank you, and welcome to my blog 

KEEPING IT REAL with FRIZZY LIZZY

Greetings, Everyone, and thank you so much for sharing your time with me! I am thrilled to see you!

Sometimes I have a logjam in my mind, and I don't know what to write. You don't need to hear about my bad times because you have your own to handle, and I can't always think of a funny story that will fill two or three pages. What to do? If you allow me, I will share some short, short stories with you as they come into my mind. Either you'll like them or you will send this feature and me into earlier retirement than I had planned. Here goes!

As soon as I left the military I tried a job selling life, accident, health, fire, and auto insurance. I was trained by the owner of an insurance agency in a small town not very far away from the farm where I was living at the time.

For a variety of reasons, mainly because I was too young to understand the power of being in business for myself, that opportunity did not go well for me. I then found work in a factory in the same locality. I mentioned this job to you earlier.

That part of Pennsylvania has a problem keeping jobs in the manufacturing sector. In 16 months, the plant closed, and I was out of a job and collecting employment insurance benefits. $90 a week is what I was being paid back then. My job was paying $180 a week. The sooner I found work, the better.

I watched the newspaper (there was only one in the region) for advertisements of jobs, and finally I heard of one. It was an opening at a trucking terminal for a freight driver dispatcher. I was not sure what the job entailed so I called my father and asked him. He got me in contact with a man who retired from the trucking industry who told me that it was mentally and emotionally tough work. I did not shy away from that challenge, and I arranged for an interview with a fellow, one Mr. Babb.

It was January, and snow and mud and slush were all over the place, but I decided not to wear my barnyard boots and went with my best pair of dress shoes on instead. They were not polished, but I figured that no one would object. Right.

Mr. Babb met me and we talked for a few minutes. I was not impressed with him. He was a little guy, and I was taller than him. It was possible that he felt intimidated by a woman who was just a tiny bit under 6 feet (183 cm) tall. He decided to show me who was boss by asking me why my shoes were not polished. I was not going to offer excuses like the mud in his firm's parking lot or the winter weather. They made more sense than his silly question, so I asked him if he needed a shoe polisher instead of a freight dispatcher. I never worked a day in the trucking industry.

Over time, I moved to the Washington, DC area where I lived for 28 years and had a fulfilling career. I moved rapidly up the ladder in purchasing, from an inventory control technician to a senior contract specialist.

It was 1985, as I recall, when my second ex and I went to Florida with that other couple that I wrote about a few weeks ago. We agreed with them that we would wander freely during the daytime and meet with them in the evening for supper.

That was my first trip to Florida, and I liked what I saw. The climate was hospitable, and the people I had met were nice. Visions of living there began to come into my daydreams to such a degree that I began to look at the local newspapers to see what kind of jobs were available.

I did find one that interested me. It was for a position as a buyer and production control coordinator. I had performed both of those functions in the past, so I called the potential employer and spoke to the hiring manager and told her that I was in town on vacation, but I wanted to move there.

She asked me many questions to which I had the correct answers. I was a qualified candidate, or so I was told. Then came the fun part: salary. She asked me what I wanted. I replied that I was, and these were my exact words, “...hot shot northern talent. What is that worth to you?”

Her reply startled me, and I told her so. She asked by how much was it too little. I replied that I could hire her part-time, with benefits, for the difference between what I earned up north and what she was offering in Florida.

As you can see, so much of my life revolves around my work. I never had children. It's not that I didn't want them, I just never had any. Mother Nature can play tricks on a body. Without children, I had to do something to fill my life so I became the best I could be at the work that I did. And I loved it. My work got to be more like my play!

I was seldom scared when I interviewed for a job, even if I hated the one I was looking to leave. I was always confident on the outside like I was in this exchange I had with a hiring manager about a job that offered me a 50% raise in salary:

Manager: “There are ten applicants for this job, and you're the first to be interviewed.”

Me: “That's either very good or very bad.”

Manager: “What do you mean by that?”

Me: “It's very good if I impress you so much that the other 9 are just an obligation that you need to perform. It's very bad if I do so poorly in this interview that anyone else could get this job.”

Manager: “You're one of the few people I have met who knows how to go after a job.”

I sent him a letter of thanks after that interview, on the same day. I got that job.
My work life has taken me places and shown me things that the average woman never thinks of, much less sees. I have been in the bowels of an ocean-going tanker ship and inside of a working lighthouse. I have walked in subway tunnels and on the raised deck floor of a computer room, back when mainframe architecture was still the standard and cloud computing was not yet a possibility. I have been on all levels of an office building, from the boiler room to the roof, and inside the machinery spaces, like the elevator motor room and hoist way. It's been a lot of fun.

But the greatest experience that I had during all of those years is meeting the wonderful people who have made my life that much richer. And I need to thank one man who gave me a tool for interviews that I have never forgotten how to use. His name is Rick Smith, and he was the manager of a machine shop in Pennsylvania. He taught me that the one who asks the questions is the one who controls the interview when I asked him how to handle the most uncomfortable of interview questions: Tell me about yourself.

Please ask if you want to know the answer that he gave me.

Thank you for sharing your weekend time with me. Have a much-blessed Easter weekend!

Thank you very much again, dear friends, for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts with us, if you will. have a great Weekend.
ڰۣIn Loving Light from the Fairy Ladyڰۣ

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