It’s quiet on the farm at the moment, with winter in full ignore mode and the farmer never quite sure if it is going to dump back on us in full swing. The weather forecast promises us the mid 40’s as an average for as far forward as it dares to predict. It has been in the 50’s, so I guess this is winter’s return without a vengeance. Well, it is what it is.
I was just cleaning my glasses with my hand Walmart aspirator that came with the specs, and was a bit disturbed when I realized how it smells exactly like Windex. There you go then. They charge a few bucks a bottle for three ounces of Windex. How nice. That’s a racket I need to get into!
Someone asked in a homesteading forum this morning if the old timers were smarter than we are now for living lives of self-reliance, and in a more sustainable way than we do now. I never responded, but my thought was that while an Etch-A-Sketch does not require batteries, it also does not perform complex computations. That leaves me only this conclusion; we live in complex times, and we know a lot more than we did back then. We have also forgot a lot about how to live on this planet and who we are as a species. So, while some of us are not enamored, there is a lot to be enjoyed in a post-Polio world where we can open Google and find solutions to our problems.
The girls and I went to visit grandma today, and took her down to Logan where we did a little shopping and had lunch. It was a pretty normal visit. Grandma talked somewhat seriously about moving down to Salt Lake City, but wants me to bring the girls down once a week to visit her. She said she would cover the gas, but I am honestly not sure I want to put us on those roads every week with a two hour drive down, a long visit, and a two hour drive back. I am not the spry young buck I once was. Every other week might be more realistic. But even then, it is a long day. The airport runs are okay because I go down, and I come right back up. Staying for a few hours is a good opportunity to find myself asleep at the wheel on the way home. I want to be ale to, but it is a lot, and it carries a lot more risk than a ten minute drive to the home here in Preston where she lives now. Besides, she has a neighbor named Gail who is loud and obnoxious, and why would I want to see her give that up? Gail is actually very helpful to grandma.
This week Elon Musk launched his Tesla Roadster into space on a test of the Falcon 9 Heavy rocket. I had Kirynie on my lap and Khallarnie stood next to us to watch it online. It was the coolest thing I think I have seen since I was ten years old and watched the first Space Shuttle launch. The Shuttle launch marked the beginning of one of the great era’s in space, and was thus hugely significant. As for the Falcon 9 Heavy’s significance, I won’t be surprised if in ten years or so we are watching Musk do donuts on Mars in a Tesla. It is also significant because here was a guy who decided to do space despite what the government was doing, and by putting his personal car up there, announced to the world that space travel was no longer the sole jurisdiction of world governments. Space now belongs to people, even if it is just very rich people at the moment. That’s how everything begins. I paid $20 a bulb for my first LED lightbulbs. Now I can get multi-packs for $10. Time will bring the price down, and eventually maybe my grandchildren, or their children will have the chance to casually step off the earth and float into the vast dark expanse. This week has, I think, marked the beginning of that moment. What excitement to witness it!
On a personal aside, I am getting my computer set up so it is more useable by clearing the monitors off my desk and mounting them on the wall, and I am shopping for a printer and a few other things to make the computer into a workstation and not just a place to look Facebook over. The monitors are old and mismatched. I plan on getting a matching pair. I also am looking into a good scanner to put me back to work on scanning all of my photos and negatives and slides. I really want to get the photos of my life digitized. Why? To put them on Facebook, of course!
So much to do, so little money.