Happy Halloween!

Posted on October 31, 2015 by RegenAxe

Bi-State Paranormal

So, it is finally Halloween our spooky little holiday, but you know what is really scary? Tomorrow, the Christmas decorations go up. I biked in the park today. It has been a wet and somewhat blustery day, but the latest forecast has the rain ceasing just in time for trick-or-treating. It didn’t rain while I rode either, but the threat of it must have scared most of the usual Saturday morning weekend warrior crowd away. The bike path was left eerily empty, so empty that it was downright spooky. I love it though, because it foretells that winter’s coming that season when Forest Park becomes my park, mine and a few of my long time bike path acquaintances, the regulars. I didn’t see any ghosts, but it was not for looking. We had a death in the family. It actually occurred last week. It was Dan’s car, a 2000 Ford Focus that had a heart attack or in mechanic’s parlance threw a rod, it died by the side of the road last week on the night before he flew to Saint Louis. This week he interred it with NPR. I asked him to start shopping online using our insurance company’s buying service for a replacement vehicle. If anyone knows of any better alternatives for buying a car in the LA area, let us know. The Ford had performed ably until this year. Dan was without a car for about four months this summer, because of some fuel computer problem. It was mainly a backordered part problem. He had only got it back for a little while, before it died, may it rest in peace. I may now have to reevaluate my decision to put Anne’s car on hospice. I don’t think that I can afford three car payments. That really would be a scary thought.

Happy Birthday, Doctor Alice!

Live Wire

Posted on October 31, 2015 by RegenAxe

Live Wire

Anne looks a little worried here, like in, “What are you doing, Mark?” But enough about me. Yesterday, Two Blind Guys showed up at the house. Anne had the day off and I took off from work to meet them too. It took less than an hour. When we had the living and dining redone this year are ratty old curtains were consigned to garbage bags and had been languishing upstairs until this week, when I threw them out. We got the new window treatment bid last night and it was as expensive as all of the advertised discounts foreshadowed. Still, we’ll likely get them. Them being five new Hunter Douglas top-down/bottom-up blinds. They will be very similar to ones that Jay and Carl got during their rehab. Installation should take even less time than the sales pitch and soon all the single women that surround me and the married woman who I live with can begin to rejoice and stop averting their eyes or telling me, “Get dressed, Mark!”

Pumpkin Moon

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Pumpkin Moon

Battle of the Dwarf Planets!

Posted on October 30, 2015 by RegenAxe

Come visit Pluto’s Tombaugh Planetary Regio Park
The coldest place in the solar system
– UN Department of the Exterior

STL UFO

It’s all fun and games until some body gets perturbed. Wednesday night was Science on Tap night at the Kirkwood Brewery. Bill McKinnon of WashU was speaking about this summer’s New Horizons flyby of Pluto. He is on the science board for this program. Last Bastille Day, the New Horizons satellite performed like a ballerina, pirouetting through the Pluto-Charon system flawlessly. Five plus hours after flyby first word of this mission’s success reached the NASA Mission Operations Manager in the form of a single so-so photo and a system status check. All the memory sticks were full, all the appropriate thruster burns had occurred and all systems were still a go. Even though the speed of light induced message delay is only just over five hours, only, New Horizons would require two months to phone home its cache of photos and data. In space, no one can here you cheer!

See the nitrogen glaciers of Sputnik Planum
that flow among mountains of water ice
– UN Department of the Exterior

Launched on an Atlas rocket in 2006, in just over a year New Horizons was slingshot around Jupiter, rocketing towards a 10 MPS rendezvous with Pluto, almost ten-year in the future. McKinnon showed an annotated diagram of the satellite. Most of its instruments were boringly named with just acronyms, but two standout, Ralph and Alice. Did I mention that the probe’s first slingshot was around our moon? The New Horizons team was by necessity a small team, because after launch there wasn’t much to do for ten years.

This Halloween why not try trick-or-treating
among the cliffs of Pluto’s Cthulhu Ridge?
– UN Department of the Exterior

Time to Switch to Decaf

Posted on October 29, 2015 by RegenAxe

Time to Switch to Decaf

Not a good week at Spacely Sprockets. We lost a big one. What a downer, because layoffs are now likely. After the bad news, some of the guys went out to the bar to drown their sorrows. Instead, Anne and I went to a retirement seminar. It was being sponsored by UMSL, so I thought that it wouldn’t be just another sales pitch. I was wrong though, but instead of coming right out with a blatant sales pitch, they were more subtle. Instead of financial products or services, they were selling fear and self-doubt. I had already arrived with a belly full of both.

Basically, what tipped me off, other than their insistence that even applying for social security would require their expertise, was the guy sitting next to us. He was a hoot and ran them off script. I hope that he comes back next week, but I doubt that he will. Before the talk began, the speaker told us that this seminar wasn’t designed to elicit personal advice. In the initial Q&A, designed to help set the tone, this one guy asked, “Can my Ex, who’s been divorced three times and married four times and is still married to the last guy still use my social security benefit?” After some hedging, the moderator told him yes, she could still use his social security, but that it wouldn’t affect his benefit. I think that he missed the whole point of the question, which wasn’t financial, but personal.

They opened their talk with two questions:

What are the colors of a stop sign?
What are the colors of a yield sign?

If you didn’t answer red and white to both questions, then you are showing your age, which was the whole point of this exercise: ‘You are old and decrypted and you need our help.’ Yield signs haven’t been yellow and black for twenty years. Fortunately, for us, Anne got this question right, because she had been working in preschool that day and she remembered that one of the kids had been playing with traffic sign blocks and the yield sign was red and white. I always knew that I had married Mrs. Right, but I hadn’t realize that her middle name was Always.

The other week, Anne had had a dream in which she was 120 years old. In this dream, she was in the kitchen making cookies with God and causes the next big bang. [1] Needless to say, I was not there. I guess that puts her nearer to God than me, but that’s always hard to predict. In a nutshell, this is my tension in this whole retirement thing. As our bread-winner, I want to enjoy our retirement together, while I also want to leave her the financial security that only more money can bring. This impending layoff may act as a forcing function, but I promise, I won’t put my thumb on the scale.