I've only been doing this blog thing for a little over a month now and it's already time to make a few adjustments to the Great Master Plan™, not that we'd really given it that much thought to start with.
Several of my friends, and a couple of total strangers, have commented that they would like to be able to open the blog and see what's new without any Not Safe For Work images or headlines jumping out at them from the home page. Mostly these are my friends who know that my vocabulary includes a whole bunch of highly descriptive Anglo-Saxon and early English agricultural nomenclature. A lot of these words are short, like only four letters. A few of them end with the letter "K". Some are even considered obscene. I vote we include "work" in that list.
So, what's going to change. Well, first of all, all the nekid women are moving to a page,or pages, of their own. Amy's Erotica will become a separate subsection as will several other categories or topics of posts. You'll know what they are as soon as I do. I'm hoping to have the Erotica section up and running by the end of this week and we'll see how things progress from there.
I'd love to hear your comments on the site so far either for publication or just for my ears. Your comments are always welcome.
Amy.
We'll go no more a roving
SO, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
--George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron. 1788–1824
On Tuesday, January 26, 2010, NASA announced that Spirit, that spunky little robot explorer thats been wandering around Mars for the past six years, is officially stuck and has been designated a fixed location science station. Operators are preparing it to hibernate through the long Martian winter in hopes that it can survive and continue to provide useful pictures and data for several more years.
Now, being rocket scientists, it only took them nine months to figure out that they couldn't go anywhere. I could have told them that when the bot first broke through the crust and started spinning its wheels. But I suppose I have an unfair advantage. Growing up on a farm you spend half of your time either stuck in the mud or pulling someone else out who is.
In the ongoing debate about sending men into space vs robots I generally side with sending the robots. The information return per dollar is much greater with robots than with humans. There is, however, something to be said for having a human around who can hop out, hook up a cable and come-a-long to the closest big rock, and ratchet the rover out of the sand pit when it gets mired down. A human operator on board might have avoided getting into the situation in the first place. But the original mission of Spirit was to spend three months exploring Mars. Had there been a human involved there would have been no choice but to pack up and come home before supplies ran out. And we would have missed out on almost six extra years of information that Spirit has been able to gather. The fact is that, despite 50 years of exploring and 10 years of maintaining a permanent crew aboard the International Space Station, we haven't learned to live in outer space: we just go there and camp out. We have to take everything we need with us. We can't just hang around for six extra years if we find something interesting.
If we, as humans, truly want to explore the outer solar system and beyond we should concentrate our efforts on the design and construction of a habitat capable of supporting human life outside the earth's atmosphere and independent of earth's support. Only then will we be free to explore.
Relief Efforts for Haiti
Nothing like a real disaster to put my petty bitching about the weather and a few dozen extra people in my house into perspective. I'm just grateful to still have a house and all those people to stuff in it now.
I'm aware that times are very tough for the majority of the average workers worldwide but, if you have anything at the moment, it's more than a lot of the people of Haiti can claim. Give what you can, and make your gifts count. Make sure you're giving to an organization that gets the aid into the field and not into the pocket of some fund raiser. Instead of texting $10 to the Red Cross and having $1 or more of it disappear along the way in bank and phone charges go to the bank and withdraw the money, take it to the local Red Cross office, and--while you're there--ask what they need in addition to money. They probably have a very long list of volunteer jobs that need to be filled to support their relief efforts. And there will be lots of other groups who can use your labor, your soon to be out of date canned food, serviceable used cloths, shoes, and lots of other items you just might have lying around. Check for local churches and civic organizations that are mounting relief efforts and pitch in.
I'm aware that times are very tough for the majority of the average workers worldwide but, if you have anything at the moment, it's more than a lot of the people of Haiti can claim. Give what you can, and make your gifts count. Make sure you're giving to an organization that gets the aid into the field and not into the pocket of some fund raiser. Instead of texting $10 to the Red Cross and having $1 or more of it disappear along the way in bank and phone charges go to the bank and withdraw the money, take it to the local Red Cross office, and--while you're there--ask what they need in addition to money. They probably have a very long list of volunteer jobs that need to be filled to support their relief efforts. And there will be lots of other groups who can use your labor, your soon to be out of date canned food, serviceable used cloths, shoes, and lots of other items you just might have lying around. Check for local churches and civic organizations that are mounting relief efforts and pitch in.
Synchronized Snoring
Yesterday's anticipated heat wave amounted to a blazing high of 33° F. Nothing thawed. The body count in front of the fireplace has actually increased by two. That's an even dozen people in the living room, four in the office, Emily and I in the loft above the office, and six more in the two bedrooms in the basement. So, I'm lying here listening to the collective breathing of everyone and wondering what kind of load rating I used when I designed the floor trusses for this place. Twenty-four people in a cabin I designed to be cozy for just Emily and I!
Well, it's just real cozy about now. I'm writing this at 3:00 AM while listening to the whole damn family snore, in unison. Except for Emily, the poor dear. Em and I have lived together for eight years now and my family considers her one of us. Her genes,though, just don't quit know how to adapt to some our ways. Like, apparently, snoring together. She's just not quite in sync. In fact, she's so out of sync that it's driving me nuts. So I wake her up.
If there were an empty couch in this house, I'd be sleeping on it for the next week.
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