soapbox

The original plan:  Supposedly it’s cheaper, for insurance, to leave my car registered in PA and have it noted that it’s being driven in MD.  I was under the impression, as was true I believe with NH (but maybe I was somehow wrong there - I don’t recall my info source), that if the car is not titled in your name, you’re free to change your license without worry about changing the car registration if it’s not in your name.

Not true in MD.  If you drive a car with out-of-state plates in MD for 60+ days, you have to either have it titled and registered in the state, or apply for a non-resident permit.  But to qualify for the permit, you have to have an out-of-state license.  I wasn’t planning on keeping my PA license, because I didn’t want to have to pay PA taxes on top of the MD taxes I’m already paying.  So, I have 3 avenues to pursue here.  There’s apparently a “dual registration” which I’ll have to look into for further details, as the brochure is rather vague.  I can search the PA tax code to see if I have to pay taxes if I keep the license, even though I’m studying/working and paying taxes down here, and apply for the permit.  Or I can have mom sign over the car (which, when dad signed the metro over to me, was a pain in the ass cuz it had to be notarized), get my insurance policy changed to my name (cuz if the car’s in my name, the policy has to be - learned that the hard way), and change the title and registration to MD and get a MD license.

And how did I find this out?  I went to get a dog license and happened to see a brochure with the title “NOTICE TO CAR-OWNERS WITH OUT-OF-STATE LICENSE PLATES”.  Isn’t that something the University might want to warn people about?  It’s a $280 fine.

I got a chain email last week that I really should have forwarded to everyone.  It mentioned that, because Mars and the Earth were going to be close, Mars would look as big as the full moon in the sky.  I didn’t particularly believe it because I know that the Mars-Earth near approach was about 3 years ago.

I figured it wouldn’t hurt anything to take a look though, so I got up at 4am yesterday morning and looked towards the west.  No shit, but there was a huge reddish thing in the sky the size of the full moon.  Since I’m an astronomer, I know that Mars is red and it wasn’t anything near as bright as the moon, so it really did look like Mars was huge and the size of the moon.  It was dim like Mars too.  The only thing I had to think about was if Mars could actually get that close.  Of course, I know that Mars is bigger than the moon, so it doesn’t have to be as close to the Earth as the moon is to look just as big.

I’m going to have to pay more attention to mass emails in the future.  They can show us a lot about astronomy!