“Is That Trouble?”

Over two and a half decades after a the loss of Challenger, an amateur videotape has surfaced:

You can start seeing the exhaust trail from the solid rocket boosters in the middle of the shot at the :38 second mark.

Listen for the voices of the people speaking to one another, trying to piece together what happened.  After a while someone goes inside to check the TV news.  We had already, then, entered the era of Get The Answers Now.

It’s chilling, and instructive; we’ve all seen the close-up footage shot at the Kennedy Space Center, but this is the first time I’ve watched the detonation of the solid rocket boosters.

It took longer than I thought it would. I mean, I knew this took place rather shortly (about thirty seconds or so) after the explosion, the range safety officer just doing the job he was hoping he’d never have to do.  I really don’t want to imagine what was going on throughout those thirty seconds in that person’s head.  That was a long, long thirty seconds.

This has just been hanging around the basement of the man who shot it, and then its distribution was further inhibited by the fact that this was recorded on… wait for it… a Beta tape, and nobody could find a player.  Annnnnd further proof that even in the darkest moments, God finds a way to make us smile.  Even if it’s over 25 years after the fact.

This seared all of us old enough to remember, but just when we think we know everything there is to know… there’s another angle.

wondering which part of Central FL this was at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Hey, NASA: In Honor of Dark Week*, the Moon Program Has Been Cancelled

Not.  Cool.

*Dark Week, or “Remembrance Week,” honors the crews lost on Apollo 1 (January 27),  Challenger (January 28),  and Columbia (February 1.)

Shrinking

Okay, we’ve got some more Important Research for you here.  Josh The Pilot is applying for a Little Einsteins orientation course, and he has to take a physical fitness test.  Some of the requirements are horribly reminiscent of the President’s Physical Fitness Test (flexed arm hang! endurance run!), but I’m thinking he won’t be allowed to stand on a metal folding chair to grasp ineffectually at a sawed-off broom handle like I did back in The Day.

So now he’s working out and drinking some sort of horrible water-and-sawdust thing that, judging by the impossibility of chipping clean the glass it was once in, should keep him in a fibrous state for at least the next two geologic ages.  I am also researching weight loss supplement pills, which is much easier than I thought it would be.  For example, I was able to toss the products which had the following comments on consumer sites:

“Little chunks of something were coming out when I peed.  I’m pretty sure that’s not supposed to happen.”

“My patients on (PILL PRODUCED BY POTENTIALLY SUE-HAPPY PARENT COMPANY) often find that when they eat a high-fat meal, several hours later they may have diarrhea or loose stools. In extreme cases, they can’t control their bowels — they’ll leak all over their pants.”

“This was dumb. I tried (some idiot cookie-based diet) for 3 months and gained 12 pounds. Instead of helping me lose weight, it led me to believe that I could eat any cookie I wanted.”

“If you want to alternate between s——-g and puking then you will be fine.”

“It took all of 8 hours for this stuff to make me so sick that I ended up losing 10lbs plus more, but unfortunately it was because it made me violently vomit and have diarrhea.”

“Lost 14 lbs in 12 days.. and I cheated. Threw a little vodka in the grapefruit juice at dinner… then more…and more…forgot to eat.”

might just take up that last one at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Bubbles in the Domestic Sparkling Wine

Our pending relocation means that I’m concentrating more on writing than teaching at the moment, which means I’ve become BFF’s once again with the Writer’s Market.

I heart the Writer’s Market, because not only does it provide me with everything I need to know as a freelancer except for how to siphon away the bourbon resting in the cracks of my keyboard, it also gives me an out when people–for some reason–come to me looking for career advice.  I hurl them in the general direction of Writer’s Market, because  then I can’t possibly screw up.  They suck, its the book’s fault.  They succeed?  Hey, look at this great book Mary Beth showed me!

I notice some new entrants in the 2010 version, mostly small literary publications which no one reads, save the writers themselves and the occasional writer’s parent who wishes to check in on the current form in which his child is pissing away an $80,000 education.  These magazines have names like “Tweed Goat” and guideline suggestions such as “We are earth and sky.  Are you fire and wind?”

The problem is, sometimes writers assume that all publications, even the larger ones, are like this, necessitating such guideline notes as the following:

“We are not interested in descriptions of your chemically-induced hallucinations.”

“Rants against men are not accepted.”

“Please do not tell us what to think about God, politics, abortion, or baseball.”

“No ‘How I Overcame My Disease’ stories accepted.”

Well, there goes my year.

next page at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Oh, and…

Guess what’s coming.

Olympics coverage is by far the most popular feature on this blog– actually, the only feature– so stay tuned.  Actual work every two years or so, you know.  Gotta keep in shape.

Sugar

There’s an enormous battle going on over at RateYourStudents, an academic blog where college teachers gather to 1) yell vicariously at idiot students 2) yell vicariously at idiot administrators 3) yell for reals at one another.  With student loan debt on a trajectory not unlike that of your nearest friendly forty-five degree angle, with bachelor’s degrees rapidly becoming worth less than the faux leather in which they’re encased, and with more and more twenty-two year olds unleashed into the workforce wholly unable to discern Karl Marx from Richard Marx, we proffies are in the midst of a titanic battle over cookies.

I’ll bring baked goods to class every now and then, because I like to try out new recipes, and prefer to try them on people I don’t actually like first.  Otherwise?  My Thin Mints are my own.

having the honor to remain your most humble and obedient origin of gingersnaps at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Lady of the House

Josh The Pilot and I have undertaken the first of many and many moves.  This took us three miles across town (in Virgina, towns are three miles across), and the next one could be another three. Could be thirty.  Could be many multiples of three.

What’s happened here is that we were under the impression that we’d be staying in the DC area for ever an’ ever, and then announced the FAA informed Josh that is going to be transferred.  We don’t know where.  We don’t know when.  Because telling us would make sense, that’s why.  We’ve heard possibilities ranging from Lexington (KY) to Fairbanks (AK) to Daytona Beach (FL) to Charleston (WV) to Detroit (Hell.)  We just know we’re going, that there will be a stop in Oklahoma City at some point (possibly before heading to the new location, possibly after, possibly for two and a half weeks, possibly for three months.)  It makes me awfully glad I once stopped cold a budding relationship (okay, a date) (okay, he bought me a drink) (okay, I made eye contact with this guy in this bar once) with a Marine because I didn’t want the instability of life as a military spouse.

This meant we had to sell our house.  This was a problem, because the real estate market waited a polite four and a half seconds after we closed before plummeting to pre-Ice Age levels.  We owed more, much much more, on our home than it was worth.  And that is what the housing biz calls “underwater.”  And I call “really, really f-ing terrifying.”

Well.  It did sell, after several days of curling in a very small ball in my office as various strangers trooped past, making such tactful pronouncements as “THIS IS WAY TOO SMALL FOR THE PRICE THEY’RE ASKING.”  But, of course, it sold far, far short for what we paid for it only a couple human gestation periods earlier.

The bank was okay with this.  The bank had given up long ago.  The mortgage insurance agency covering the bank against situations like ours, well, it was not okay.  It would like forty thousand dollars, please, in small bills and by the time people really are flying around in rocket jet packs.  And so yesterday I sat a a big oak table and signed a promissory note, which I previously thought only existed in the cardboard bank of Life.  But as it happens, they’re out here beyond the roulette wheel as well, and they totally aren’t a pretty red color.  They’re pages and pages of tiny Arial font long, announcing that the note would be due in full if I miss a payment, or become incapacitated, or fart in the wrong direction, or fall into some sort of puddle inhabited by piranhas — which is really best case scenario, because then I probably won’t be caring about the Arial font too much.

Our temporary rental house is very nice.  My office has a window seat.  It has a roof and a door that doesn’t wham the enterer between the cheeks because the previous owner couldn’t afford to fix the springs.  We are grateful that we’ve found it, this home with a larger square footage than our first home at nearly half the monthly price.

It is not, however, the threshold my husband first carried me over, and because Josh and I chose the best possible time to move– the day after New Year’s, with highs soaring to sixteen degrees–the bay window where I first pointed and said, “That’s where the Christmas tree will go” remained dark this year.  I don’t know where we’ll stand it up next year, if at all.

In the meantime, I am filling the ice cube trays.  Because the icemaker is broken.

bubble wrapped at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

A Good Day to Have Shaved Legs

I turned thirty-three years old last week.

This is the first year I’ve gotten a “HA-ha, you’re OLD!” card.  At first I was sad, and then happy, because it gave me an excuse to drink.

Josh The Pilot did an excellent job of being all hushy about my present, which he presented to me in the middle of the afternoon.  I heard the doorbell ring, and he led me downstairs, where I was confronted with a women wearing scrubs and unfolding a long table.

“This is your present,” he said.

“You got me a pap smear for my birthday?”

It was a massage therapist and her table, and as I lay braless beneath a towel, clenching my teeth as a total stranger made hand-to-fat contact with my cellulite, I stared at the ceiling and thought about babies.

Babies can be had, of course, when I am well into my forties.  I myself was born to a mother who was 36 at the time.  But, well– you’ve seen how I’ve turned out.  I’m officially at an age where it’s crap or get off the Lady-Comp.  Also, babies, as I understand them, have a way of showing up even when not specifically requested.

For the moment, however, when the phone rang, I had the ability to wave it off, announcing, “I am with my massage therapist.”  That’s 33, and that is okay.

will the small child nephew wanted to know if his aunt was going to, quote, “blow out the fire,” because of course there was going to be a LOT of it at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Purge

Sam The Newborn Nephew was enjoying a nice Pack-n-Play- based nap last month when he awoke the sounds of his brothers and all their posse enjoying a playgroup Christmas party.  He stirred, announced his displeasure at having been awakened from his late-morning pre-lunch nap, and found himself lifted into the air by a stranger.

It was the Mr. Mom of the group, a perfectly safe daddy who had certainly held him before, but this mattered not to Sam, for not only was this person Not Mommy, he didn’t even have the courtesy to have boobs.  There followed much wailing.

I’m pretty much doing the same thing, sitting as I am amidst a sea of cardboard and bubble wrap.  We’ve moved three miles away; it might as well be three planets.  I hate all my belongings right now.  They are not useful objects or cherished mementos; they are crap to be heaved outside on a day when the high temperature is 16 and winds are out of the East at Double Hurricane.

At the same time, there’s a sense of desperation in not having at hand the smallest, most necessary items which I take for granted on a daily basis.  Where’s the dental floss?  Has anyone seen the drinking glasses? Or a pen?  But you, eighty-seventh box of Christmas ornaments… you can go f-off.

Today I collapsed the contents of two totelockers and an enormous plastic tub into one still-aggravating container.  The second-place plaque for the Cheviot Fraternal Order of Eagles “God, Flag, and Country” speech contest, really?  I have carefully preserved the September 1987 issue of Sports Illustrated for Kids… why?

The endless pile of self-generated newspaper clippings made slightly more sense; there was a time when I needed 47 copies of an article entitled “Seniors Proudly Anticipate Pleasant Prom Party” while submitting writing samples for a newspaper job after graduation.  As we all know how healthy the industry is now, I suppose I should be grateful that I never really entered it; in the meantime, I blame all alliteration, ever.  But… this 8×12 framed snapshot of my high school’s 1995 Mock Trial team?  The hell?

It helps that I am currently not on speaking terms with my brother school.  The plastic cups, the stuffed leprechaun bears, the Officially Licensed index cards… toss, toss, toss.  If it didn’t serve in my freshman dorm room or function as a campus-only ornament, out into the cold it goes.

This is a wholly unfamiliar sentiment.  As a weepy history minor, it’s programmed into my DNA to keep it all.  I lived for twenty years at the same address, and, when I left my parents’ house, the Crap Collection did not.  Result:  Thirty-two year’s worth of empty binders and the power cord for the MP3 player I owned two MP3 players ago.  Every other move has been made piecemeal, or with only the benefit of such bare necessities as the secondary filing cabinet and a box of cassingles featuring Linear.

I suppose I kept most of it to confirm to myself that I was kind of good at some things, once; the third-place plaque for a writing competition I don’t even remember entering stands as testimony that every now and then, in my best hours, even if in the flower of my youth, I rose to the level above Participation Trophy.  Maybe I just want to leave behind proof that I was… you know… here.

Then again, that proof weighs something, and takes up space which may be better dedicated to liquor.  I shall re-box on.

Goodwill run at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Happy New Year, The Readers

And happy birthday to any and all racehorses currently tuning in.