Stay for just a while
Stay, and let me look at you
It’s been so long, I hardly knew you
Standing in the door
Stay with me a while
I only want to talk to you
We’ve traveled halfway ’round the world
To find ourselves again
September morn
We danced until the night became a brand new day
Two lovers playing scenes from some romantic play
September morning still can make me feel this way
Look at what you’ve done
Why, you’ve become a grown-up girl
I still can hear you cryin’
In the corner of your room
And look how far we’ve come
So far from where we used to be
But not so far that we’ve forgotten
How it was before
September morn
Do you remember how we danced that night away
Two lovers playing scenes from some romantic play
September morning still can make me feel this way
Team TechShop RDU (or NC Nearspace, as they are now calling themselves) had the balloon they thought was lost located yesterday. It turned up in the field of a soybean farmer in Wendell. Like the second balloon they launched, this one took some amazing photographs of near space.
I was cleaning off the hard drive of one of my old computers here and came across some photographs from our 2007 Orcas Island vacation. It amazed me to realize that was three years ago, and that we took much smaller kids with us. Boy, the time just flies.
Like many people, I spend much of my life on autopilot. Every day is a routine; get up, walk the dog, shower, eat, head to work. At work, grab coffee, catch up on emails, get to work, eat lunch, work again, go home. Repeat every day. If anything upset that carefully-crafted apple cart it would throw my whole day off balance. I’d have to engage my thinking brain, damn it. And thinking can be hard. It’s much easier to coast through life. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday was my last day at my last job so, being in-between jobs and with the kids in school, I took the opportunity to spend the day bike riding with Kelly. We rode from our house through downtown Raleigh, then on the Chavis Way greenway to Chavis Park. While at Chavis we got a chance to ride the beautifully-restored carousel before heading on. The Little Rock Creek greenway brought us past the Walnut Creek Wetlands Center, at which point we headed west along the Walnut Creek Greenway. Read the rest of this entry »
I have plenty more topics upon which I’d like to pontificate tonight but I’ve been burning the midnight oil at both ends (as my former boss and world-class metaphor-mixer Buck Bohac might say). My Skylab post kept me up later than I should’ve been up but that wasn’t the worst of it. At 4 AM our son roused us out of bed to announce that he “needed a drink of water.” Argh! Needless to say, sleep was quite fleeting after that episode.
I’m just looking forward to finishing my last day tomorrow at my current job. Then I’ve got a few days off before jumping all-out into my next gig. I’m really psyched about it but it’s been really tough splitting my attention between the two worlds. I’ll be really happy when I’m settled in with my new job.
The recent balloon launch and it’s subsequent pictures of near space has gotten my thoughts lifted skyward. I was pondering the 4-pound weight limit of the balloon and contrasting it to the heavy lifting that was once done in this country by rockets like the Saturn V. That led me to some online videos of Skylab.
Skylab was America’s first space station, launched in 1973 on a modified Saturn V rocket. The station itself was made from spent Saturn V rocket stages and was so roomy that it makes the current International Space Station look like a toy. Sadly, Skylab fell from orbit in July 1979. Read the rest of this entry »
A new weapon in the Chinese military arsenal is said to be causing a stir in the U.S. Navy: the Dongfeng 21D anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM). Some experts are calling it a “game changer” because the missile is the first ballistic missile with the capability to take out a moving aircraft carrier. Because it’s ballistic it can travel at incredible speeds: this missile reportedly clocks in close to an astounding Mach 10!
It is more commonly known as the gas that fills cheap party balloons and makes your voice squeak if you inhale it.
But helium is actually a precious resource that is being squandered with Earth’s reserves of it due to run out within 25 to 30 years, experts have warned.
Earth’s resources of helium are being depleted at an astonishing rate, an effect which will spell disaster for hospitals which use it to cool MRI scanners.
