Dirty Bachelors In Space

Well, it is just the three of us men and Gypsy. Toby, Sully, and I are doing the bachelor thing (I don’t think Gypsy really counts as a girl, since she is a dog[yes, Toby is of the Canine persuasion, but, he acts like a kid, and Sully is of the Feline persuasion, but sometimes acts like a dog…and other times as an annoying, crying, dirty sweater]). Cora had to go to Portland for some HACCP training…food safety for those of you not “in the KNOW.” She has two days of classes. I had hoped to go with her, since I love exploring new cities alone…yes, even Portland, which, as you will recall, was planned by an epileptic cartographer….hmmm, you know what, scratch that, he was a drunken, blind, epileptic cartographer with a poor sense of smell. I am not sure how valuable a sense of smell is for a cartographer, but I thought it sounds just bad enough to add a sense of worthlessness to the man…hmmm, or was he a man? Well, I had better not piss off half of the population…let’s just say this cartographer was gender neutral, not too bright, and he liked squiggly lines, and hills, lots of hills. Besides, there is that LCI museum I would love to go see.

Cora drove down the Washington side of the Gorge…Columbia Gorge for those of you out of the area. It is beautiful in spring…lots of wild flowers. She took some pictures, so I say that they (flowers) are there with some certainty. Also, her pictures are pretty darned good! You can see them here.

I promised her I would clean house…looks like I may have lied to her. Oooops. I have been watching TV. Discovery Channel is advertising a six part series, “When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions.” It is in HD and from NASA’s film vaults…I think that is cool. I have always been interested in anything from our (US, err, U.S., as in United States) early days of space flight…the Shuttle made things so HUMDRUM. I still have National Geographic magazines from that era with pictures of all the major missions…I kept them specifically for that reason. Space Rocks…no, not meteors… space is just cool. When you consider they did all that (Apollo Moon missions, Gemini, and Mercury, Pioneer, Mariner, etc.) with computers that probably could not hold a candle to a modern cell phone…well, you begin to feel the AWE that I do. I think the Cold War was good for spaceflight. I think the Cold War was good for the US…maybe not the rest of the world, nor, is it now good for us, but, at the time, we gained some major advantages in technology and wealth because of our “competition” with the Soviets.

Well, I need to finish Dirty Jobs…the show, not that I actually plan on doing any dirty job. No use me living up to what I told Cora, now that I have come to the realization (Stunning realization) that I lied, there is no use of me trying to make it right with her, I may as well, just suffer (I feel REAL bad) with my terrible-ness and not do any cleaning.

This picture is of Alameda, and you can see the USS Hornet Museum. It picked up the Apollo 12 Astronauts and their capsule. The ship still houses one of the Airstream trailers used to keep the Astronauts in quarantine. I took this out the window of the airplane after our short stop in Oakland on our way back from Arizona in April.