Hasty Ruminations

from Crosswalk.com:

“We had this great 10 year old cat named Jack.

“Jack was a great cat and the kids would carry him around and sit on him and nothing ever bothered him. We have 3 kids and at the time of this story they were 4 years old, 3 years old and 1 year old. The middle one is Eli, who really loved chapstick. LOVED it. One day I showed him where in the bathroom I keep my chapstick and explained he could use it whenever he wanted to but he needed to put it right back in the drawer after he finished.

“That year on Mother’s Day, we were having the typical rush around. I am trying to nurse my little one at the same time I am putting on my make-up.

“We finally have the older one and the baby loaded in the car and I am looking for Eli. I have searched everywhere and I finally go into the bathroom. There was Eli. He was applying my chapstick very carefully to Jack’s . . . rear end. Eli looked right into my eyes and said “chapped.” Now if you have a cat, you know that he is right -their little bottoms do look pretty chapped. And, frankly, Jack didn’t seem to mind. And the only question to ask at that point was whether it was the FIRST time Eli had done that to the cat’s behind or the hundredth!?!

“And THAT is my favorite Mother’s Day moment ever.”

Author Unknown

The contract to check out, start up and validate pharmaceutical equipment in Wisconsin is completed for the time being.

The construction on the owner’s new three story building fell behind – to the chagrin of his major customer – and so the installation of the new equipment was significantly delayed. That meant that we couldn’t do our work, so it’s time to move on.

Wow! Two cancelled contracts in the same recession!

I have a good prospect out in southern New York state, so Lacy and I have left Wisconsin. I am planning to mosey out East, in a rambling fashion, to see some of the country while minimizing expenses.

I joined a group called Passport America. It’s a membership including select RV campgrounds, which offers 50% off the nightly stay rate. Some of the places are well off the beaten path, as is my first one, where we are now, in Connorsville, Indiana. We’re about 40 miles southeast of Indianapolis, in a very nice campground at $12 per night instead of $24. Now, many times, I’ll pull over and sleep at an interstate rest stop – in the truck, not in the trailer, since no state allows “camping” in the rest areas. And that’s free. But security is better in a RV campground, and ones like this offer electricity, water and sewer connections included in the price, plus a coin laundry (in which I did two weeks washing this morning!). So it’s money well spent, say two or three days a week. Now, there are sometimes some restrictions. This one in Connorsville limits the Passport America stay to two days, and only Monday through Thursday. I like it after my first night. We will leave tomorrow.

A great friend of mine from high school lives about 25 miles away, in Batesville, and I hope to get together with him and his wife, perhaps tomorrow. He is an attorney, and a MD (anesthesiology and emergency medicine), working now in areas improving children’s healthcare in the southern Indiana, western Ohio area. I told him today that I call that “giving back” – he is taking the blessings God gave him, and using them to keep small children’s clinics and medical practices from going out of business. The net effect is that many more sources of good health care are kept available to kids where they live. And that’s gotta be “pleasing in the sight of the Lord”. I am very proud to know Mark, and Molly.

So, stay tuned for our continued travels!

Look what I found!

Ireland, people and landscape. Music: “The Blood Of Cu Chulainn” by Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna. I post this in honor of my own small Irish clan in Hawaii: John, Tina, Ciara and Jack.

Wouldn’t it be great to live somewhere where such beautiful people all smiled like that?!

No, not “great”. I mean “grand”!

Evian Roller Babies US


Amazing!

This is becoming a continuing saga.

In 1969, the TV images of the action on the moon of the Apollo 11 crew were beamed from the moon to a receiving station in Australia. The very clear pictures were video taped in Australia, then piped to a TV set where a live TV camera caught the image and beamed it to a satellite, for broadcast to the world. It was received in the U.S. and transfered to network feeds. The images we saw (I was in a small town called Twin Lakes, WI) were ghostly, grainy and much degraded; these were taped and preserved. Now, NASA (Not Actually Smart Anymore) has hired a Hollywood company to improve these faulty images.

(Don't adjust your PC. It won't help.)

Why?

Because NASA has lost the original 3/4″ wide videotapes beamed down to Australia – the crisp, clear ones, which should have been copied and preserved in, oh, say, 1969.

In this age of rampant unemployment, why, oh why, do we keep giving paychecks to these people?!

“POLITICO (Washington) – Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin is aggressively pushing back against reports that claim an independent investigator has found evidence she may have violated Alaska’s ethics laws. The Associated Press reported Tuesday afternoon that an independent investigator for the state Personnel Board found that there may be evidence suggesting that a trust fund created to pay Palin’s legal expenses is in violation of state ethics law.”

Alaska has ethics laws? One would not so guess, looking at some other Alaskan laws:

Sarah Palin is an enthusiastic hunter who has proposed legislation and cash incentives to encourage aerial wolf gunning, the controversial practice of shooting wolves from an aircraft.

It seems Alaska is more interested in making laws about trivia rather than about ethics:

• Moose may not be viewed from an airplane.

• While it is legal to shoot bears, waking a sleeping bear for the purpose of taking a photograph is prohibited.

• It is considered an offense to push a live moose out of a moving airplane.

See more weird Alaska laws at: http://www.dumblaws.com/laws/united-states/alaska

I watched a program on the Military Channel the other day: “World’s Deadliest Aircraft, TBF Avenger”. This was an ugly, beautiful torpedo bomber in WWII. Carrier and shore based, it gave the U.S. Navy a huge advantage against the Japanese.

But, the narrator insisted on using feet for altitude specs (which we are used to) while defaulting to the faulty European standard of kilometers for range and kilometers per hour for speed.

What is wrong with the Military Channel?

ABC News just had an article on their website: “Apollo: One Giant Leap, or a Waste of Money?”

Well, heresy, I say; and so would Walter Cronkite, who lived almost twice as many years in style as M. Jackson, who lived in no style.

No, what the headline inspired in me is a wry observation: NASA (Not Actually Smart Anymore) wasted money by following Apollo with the useless space shuttle. It just supported the International Space Station (ISS), which so far is merely a place to send billions of mostly U.S. dollars.

What they should have designed was a space shuttle which could also go to the Moon. With a reusable lunar lander, 100 times simpler and more reliable than the ugly one Apollo had to use to afford the big rocket. Build a permanent landing pad on the moon big enough for four moon shuttles, so a simple mini shuttle could land and takeoff without that bulky, disposable, expensive bottom half of the lander.

(Wings would not be required for a Lunar shuttle.)

We could have left the mini shuttle in orbit around the moon, refueling it before we used it on subsequent flights.

Then we could have established labs on the moon, as we established in Antarctica. Then we could have really done science.

Oh, and in its spare time, the redesigned shuttle could have also dropped off supplies from Home Depot and workers from Complete Makeover to work on the ISS, too.

The space shuttle as designed was the real waste of money. Not Apollo.

The Germans passed laws at the insistence of the Allies after WWII to prohibit any Nazi stuff or Hitler salutes.

Now a guy in Nuremburg – site of many pro Hitler rallies in the late 1930’s and of the War Crimes trials afterwards – has put a gold colored garden gnome with his right hand raised in the Seig Hiel Hitler salute on display. Ottmar Hoerl, an artist, claims it’s art mocking the Third Reich. The German DA is leaning towards charging the guy with a serious violation of the law. (Drei Jahre im Gefängnis – Three years in das schlammer!)

See? The Germans could have displayed it with no problem in Euro Disney on Main Street, if they had only said OK to putting the park in Germany, not in France. Too late, Otto.

Ohmigosh!

It just occured to me.

They only had a memorial service.

We still have to get through the BURIAL!

ARRRGGGHHH!!!!