Window to my world
Some choice morsels from the last twenty-four hours in my household.
My newly four-year-old son is hell-bent on being able to wipe his own butt these days. So I’m showering, he’s pooping, same bathroom. He wipes with enough paper to cover a house in a John Hughes movie. Proceeds to bend over to the ground, ass aloft, and smashes his rump against the shower door glass. He asks me to check to see that he is clean. Let me tell you, this kind of scatological evaluation is not easy from the other side of a steamy shower door. I tell him I think he should wipe again. So he loads up with toilet paper again and proceeds to run out of the bathroom. He comes back about five minutes later and explains that he had to go to his room so that he could wipe in the mirror. I still don’t know exactly how he accomplished this. Best guess is that he was bent over looking through his legs backwards at the mirror. OK can we stop talking about this?
Today same son looked outside as dusk approached and said, “Mommy, its nighttime. When does the babysitter come?” Nice Pavlovian reaction to the end of the day, son. We don’t go out that much.
The youngest son was napless and ornery at the restaurant tonight. We had to scoot his high chair away from the table so he had nothing within banging distance. Mama offered him some crunchy chip thing. He took it, stared her right in the face with a completely emotionless expression, and crushed it into dust with his hand still outstretched, like a Hollywood villian pulverizing the hero’s antivenom as he sits in a snake pit. This is when you ask for the bill before your food arrives.
Careful with those clippers
A couple of thoughts on the emergency repair of the shuttle tile fillers that will take place soon.
This kind of unrehearsed response to a potential calamity is precisely the kind of thing we need to be comfortable with if we are ever going to leave Earth orbit again or go to Mars. So, on the one hand, I feel that there is a bit of overreaction from NASA at play here — that filler fabric has come undone thousands of times before and it was not the result of any impact at launch. But this could also be a sign of a new risk-tolerant NASA, the “old” NASA so to say. Not a NASA that accepts risk cavalierly but one that has confidence that a task that has not been dissected from every angle and rehearsed for months might still be worth the effort. Jim Lovell (of Apollo 8 and 13 fame) has suggested that one of the problems with NASA post-Challenger has been a reluctance to embrace the unknown, to push boundaries where the risk seemed worthwhile. Certainly NASA has attempted first-of-a-kinds since Challenger, but this statement rings true. Conducting this ad hoc repair is a good thing for NASA’s confidence, even if not 100% necessary.
Good luck, Stephen Robinson!
If I were in to garden gnomes
This is what I’d have.
I need to start a new category called Found On The Walk To The L.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
