I was enjoying my birthday weekend tooling around with my wonderful wife, scouting out book stores, yarn shops, listening to Keith David narrate "Master and Man" by Leo Tolstoy. We had returned from our perambulations and were getting ready for Halloween here at castle driftglass my favorite holiday) when we got a call from Junior Dude telling us that he'd been in an accident. No injuries except to pride, but his car was undrivable (later confirmed by the insurance people to have been totaled) and he and his friend were stuck 60 miles from home.
Of course, me being me, once we confirmed that everyone was OK and had saddled up the van to bring them home, the second or fourth thing that occurred to me as we were driving through farm country past vacant cornfields, down asphalt roads, through tiny towns (Pop. 920) hard by the railroad tracks was, "I'll be damned if this doesn't feel like the start of some fine, cidery Ray Bradbury story that I never got around to reading."
So our to-do lists for yesterday and today have changed considerably and my cute callback-to-2015 blogging idea has had to be postponed for a little bit, but I did want to make sure and put up one more birthday-related post to bring your attention to this little gem I spotted tucked into a corner of a funky little independent bookstore in Bloomington, Illinois. It's a souvenir glass of the Apollo 12 mission, which caught my eye and which my wife promptly marched up to the cash register with a "Happy Birthday."
Pretty good life I've got.
7 comments:
Yes,
On to the future and beyond and beyond.
No injuries is a blessing. inconveniences slow things down.
But unlike the Senate. you do not have to deal with obstruction of the filibuster of people who just want you to fail so they can blame others to somehow make themselves think they look good and are helpful.
So are you going to tell us?
What was your choice to dress up as for Halloween?
That figures. On your drive through a small part of rural America you failed to notice that you were passing through hell. Despair, ruin, desperation, starvation, and anarchy envelop the land because of liberals. How can one survive in such a dystopia and not notice? America has been a living hell for at least 70 years. A nightmare world of wheelchair ramps and stop lights. That's right, stop lights. As the trained sheep that are most Americans stop for stinking red light because the government says so. Their freedom crushed by communists.
Apropos of nothing, saw this in another comment thread. Don't know if it's authentic.
A response to With "Let's Go Brandon" Conservatives Are Showing Their Charming, Cheeky, Funny Side Again
"And it's a breath of fresh air in an often too serious Democrat dominated political wasteland"
By David Brooks
Bluegal is a wonderful person, and that glass is an AWSOME find :-) Happy birthday!
Apollo 12 is an underrated highlight of the Space Race. That's the one that got hit by lightning -- twice -- during its launch, which caused the spacecraft to "lose the platform" -- i.e. completely banjaxing all the electronics. John Aaron, who later would solve the critical power problem on Apollo 13, told the flight director to order, "SCE to Aux," a command that nobody understood except Astronaut Al Bean, who remembered it from simulator training. It worked, to the amazement of the crew. Here's the event itself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWQIryll8y8
Happy Birthday to youse, and to the gal.
Here's Scott Manley, YouTube's premier rocket nerd, explaining the Apollo 12 lightning strike and subsequent recovery:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4TXNZW3JBo
-Doug in Sugar Pine
We have a full set of these (almost - a couple have been broken over the years)! They have an interesting history to a now defunct gas station chain.
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