morrowlife

Here’s an old gasoline tanker.  Absolutely beautiful.  Great Art taken at the Henry Ford Museum and part of my famous Machinery and Vacation series.

Well.  It’s been a long time again, hasn’t it?  LRN4 correctly pointed this out in a comment today, so I thought I’d make a bit of an update.  There are actually a few things to talk about, too!

Let’s start with this past weekend, shall we?  LRN4 and I used our Groupon to stay Friday night at the bed and breakfast in Auburn, which is a very old gold mining town about 45 minutes east of Sacramento.  The place was nice and the people were very friendly and helpful.  We enjoyed it.  Saw a bunch of the town.  The old town area had a bunch of nice old buildings, a few small but interesting museums, and some other nice stuff. We did a bit of exploring on Friday afternoon, spent a nice evening and night at the hotel, got a very good breakfast, and spent a bunch of time in old town on Saturday morning.  We were done by about noon and were thoroughly hot and sweaty by then.

Hiked back up to the car and left for Sacramento to look at a few cars for LRN4.  Did I already mention we’re selling the Suburban to LRN3?  Well, we are.  That means I needed another car at the office.  My beloved Honda took that spot.  That means I needed another car at home.  The Taurus fills that bill nicely.  That means LRN4 needed another car.  So we went to look.

Drove a couple of Fiat 500s.  I have to say I was very favorably impressed!  The cars are way cute, very well-equipped, and all kinds of good things.  There’s just one problem – they have no power.  None.  Utter dogs.  Still, we came this close to buying one, and I think we would have been happy with it.  However, we decided to just drive down the block a couple of miles and check out the Mini Coopers, which LRN4 has been dreaming about for years.  They brought one out for us to test drive that was her favorite color and had just about everything she wanted on it.  One drive was enough to convince both of us and we bought it on the spot.  Got home with it at about 6:00, completely exhausted but happy.

That car flies!  LRN4 is worried about getting speeding tickets in it.  You start it moving and, before you know it, you’re way over the speed limit.  The handling is outstanding, it has automatic everything, navigation, bluetooth, Sirius, voice commands, automatic temperature control, and a whole bunch more stuff.  Not to mention traction and stability control and just about every other kind of “control” the nice folks at BMW can invent.  I love it.

Moving up to today, it’s LRN2’s eighteenth birthday!  Happy birthday. LRN2!  We’re celebrating on Saturday, which is convenient because that’s when he’ll be home.  I’m really excited to see him.

Moving up to tomorrow, LRN3 is coming!  LRN4 picks him up at the airport mid-morning.  We’re excited about his visit too.  The house will be full for a couple of weeks.  Fun, fun, fun!

But it’s time for bed now, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: therapy kangaroo!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s the steam train at Greenfield Village.  I don’t know why I love steam locomotives so much.  They’re just cool.  Great Art courtesy of my good old Minolta camera and part of my famous Train, Machinery and Vacation series.  A very rare Morrowlife trifecta.

Extreme Short Shrift tonight.  It’s late.  The missionaries came over tonight to get some help with a presentation they’re making to the Relief Society on Thursday evening about mormon.org.  That website has gotten quite good – I recommend my Loyal Readers check it out.

Sadly, my thousandth post has gone unnoticed and uncommented by my Loyal Readers.  Sigh.  I guess I’m just not posting often enough for anybody to think to read the blog anymore.  I have nobody to blame but myself, I guess.  Don’t know if I should really keep this up anymore.  Maybe Facebook and/or Google+ are the places to be these days.

Speaking of Google+, LRN5 gave me an invitation the other day, so I have an account there now.  Not many people yet – it’s going to take a LOOOOONG time to catch up with Facebook.  However, Facebook caught up with and utterly smashed MySpace, so it’s still anybody’s game.  Google doesn’t always win these wars, but they have a fairly decent track record.  Things I like about Google+: Circles.  You can choose which of your friends can see which messages.  Keep family separate from friends separate from work separate from hobbies separate from whatever other weird things you do.  Yeah, I know Facebook can do that too, sort of.  But it’s really easy with Google+.  Let’s see, what else do I like about it?  I don’t know.  Haven’t used it that much yet.  But it’s pretty much like a very barren Facebook.  It’ll grow.

Things I don’t know about Google+:  Not having achieved critical mass yet.  Time will tell.

Okay, that’s it for tonight.  Busy week ahead, followed by a busy weekend.  Oh, we’re going to a little seminar on Saturday for people interested in starting their own businesses.  I’m really excited about it, although I’m a bit worried I’ll find out I don’t really want to make the sacrifices necessary to build business up.  I’ll let you know!

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: neutralized fruit basket!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s an old-time scale.  Great Art taken at Greenfield Village and part of my famous Workbench and Vacation series.

Welcome to a Very Special Morrowlife Blog post.  Are you sitting down?  Okay.  It’s my one thousandth post!  That’s right – one comma zero zero zero.  A grand.  My kilopost.

Absolutely amazing.  A thousand posts without ever saying anything.  Must be some kind of record.

Anyway.  If I still have any Loyal Readers left, leave me a message of hearty congratulations.  Cash is always nice too.

Sadly, nothing happened today.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  LRN12 is here!  Yea!  She and LRN4 had an action-packed day, full of book-related activities (see LRN4’s book-related blog here) and a visit to Library Park.  LRN12 and I played restaurant, cars, balloon, and Spongebob Uno.  We also watched several Spongebob episodes.  Which I possibly enjoy more than she does.  They’re upstairs getting ready for bed now while I write this.  Then it’s lights out for the entire house.

Drove home from work today.  The train people sent me a text message in the afternoon, saying there was a wildfire burning somewhere on the route and the train would probably be delayed.  I wisely chose to drive.  I just checked their website, and the first AND second trains arrived in Lardville at 7:20 (should have been here at 5:21 and 6:21, respectively), while the third train arrived at 7:28 (a mere seven minutes late).  I would have taken the second train, so I chose . . . wisely.  Even though the traffic wasn’t exactly great, I got home shortly after 6:30.  Of course, I have to drive back tomorrow morning, which shouldn’t be too bad.  Friday mornings are usually good drives, followed by horrible drives on Friday afternoons.  Which I won’t need to worry about.

Anyway.  I’ve been thinking about the last space shuttle flight, which is currently on orbit.  A lot of people are predicting doom and gloom for American Space.  I disagree.  I was working for a NASA contractor in the 1980s.  We made expendable Atlas/Centaur launch vehicles one or two at a time, always under NASA’s direction.  NASA handled all the commercial sales and ordered our products to fulfill them.  We never built enough vehicles at a time to afford to upgrade anything until it either no longer worked or absolutely couldn’t be bought anywhere at any price.  We just kept on cranking out the same old NASA-spec launchers.

That lasted until shortly after the Challenger was lost.  NASA decided they didn’t want to be in the commercial space business anymore.  They stopped selling commercial rides on the shuttle, and they decided to turn us (and our competitors) loose.  Many (most?) people in the industry thought it would be impossible to commercialize the Atlas (also the Delta and Titan bad guys) – it was way too expensive and risky for private industry to be able to do.  Well, it turned out they were wrong.  General Dynamics invested a bunch of money to modernize the fleet and offer multiple versions, and it turned out there was a strong commercial demand that kept us building Atlases at a much faster rate than we had done with NASA.  We were able to afford to make a lot of updates – really started a program of constant upgrades that continues to this day.  GD ended up losing their shirts on us, but they eventually sold the division to Martin Marietta and wrote off the development expenses.  Without all that debt, Martin was able to turn a profit on the business.  The Delta folks lived a similar story.  Both vehicles are still flying and still being actively developed – now as a joint venture between LockMart and Boeing.

Titan was a different story.  Martin was never able to position it well for the commercial market, and they were so deep into the Government Contractor way of doing business that they couldn’t figure out what to cost to make it commercially affordable.  They eventually settled on being an Air Force contractor and flew them at a large profit until the Air Force couldn’t afford them anymore.

Anyway, my point is that I believe manned space will go the same direction as the Atlas/Delta/Titan business and its numerous newly-minted competitors.  Some of the old NASA contractors will leave the market, some will lose a bunch of money trying to stay in it and will end up selling their manned space operations to leaner operators, and some will prosper as-is.  Maybe I’ll try predicting who will do what in a later post.

When we were getting ready to go commercial, many people predicted that our customer base would evaporate without NASA to hold their hands.  They thought we’d never be able to afford the financial risk (turns out you can buy insurance!).  They thought there just weren’t enough commercial satellites out there to sustain a viable business.

I see some very distinct parallels in what people are saying about manned space.  How can we send people into orbit without NASA?  Who could afford to do that?  Where’s the commercial market?  There are only so many space-enthusiast billionaires to go around, after all.

My feeling is that the commercial manned space market will blossom exactly as the commercial unmanned space market has done over the past twenty years.  New businesses will appear that will discover novel uses for people in space, and they’ll make a profit at it.  Space tourism will become a reality.  An insurance market will develop that will help spread the risk around.  We’re already seeing an explosion in the number of launch vehicle and manned spacecraft developers.  Some of the old guard will survive – I’m hoping my company will be one of them, although they’ll need to get out of their Government Contractor mode to have a chance.

I think the golden age of space travel is right ahead of us.  What do you think?

I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: Evil Russian Hypnotist!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s the business end of a beautiful Packard in the Henry Ford Museum.  Ask the man who owns one.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Machinery and Vacation series.

Extreme short shrift.  It’s already late, but I haven’t blogged in several days (yet again), so I need to at least make a token appearance.

Good weekend.  Didn’t do much.  Worked on the yard a bit, washed the pickup (my leaf blower broke a fuel line on Friday and some fuel/oil mixture got into the pickup bed when I took it to the shop, so it needed to be washed – besides, it was dirty anyway), prepared a Priesthood lesson, swam a bunch in the nice warm pool, read, napped, and generally enjoyed myself.

Wow.  That’s all I’ve been doing.  Sheesh.  LRN1 continues to do well in Guatemala as he goes about doing good.  LRN2’s having a great time at school and work, LRN3 is making excellent progress, LRN4 is fine as always, and LRN5 is doing very well too.  So the Loyal Readers are great.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: cottage cheese assault!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a kiln.  A relatively large one.  Great Art taken at Greenfield Village during our recent trip to Michigan and part of both my famous Machinery and Vacation series.

Off Friday.  Good day.  Worked a bit on the pool and pond while LRN4 trimmed plants and did some lawn work.  Nice warm day, but not murderously hot like the last few days.  Nothing to complain about.

Let’s see, what else did we do?  Oh yeah, we practice our golf swings a bit.  LRN4’s getting it.  I’m quite certain that if she practices even a little bit, she’ll end up way better than me.  We also went to the store to exchange a shirt she recently bought that was a bit more roomy than needed.  I also got a new pair of flip-flops.  They had originally been $20, but they were on sale for $10.  LRN4 had a $5 off coupon and a 15% off coupon.  They ended up costing $4.63 or something like that.  Naturally, we were at Kohl’s.  Anybody who pays full price for anything there is making a mistake.

Great news from Provo!  LRN2’s computer came back to him this evening!  It turns out that it really was a case of mistaken backpack identity.  We’re all greatly relieved and convinced that there aren’t many places other than BYU where that would have worked out.  He’s planning to put his name/address/phone on a card in the backpack, and he’ll probably use one of the lockers at the cafeteria in the future, more to keep it hidden than to prevent crime.  Which still does occasionally exist there in the Happy Valley.

Anyway.  We’re really glad for him.  In other good LRN2 news, he had a great second day at work.  He’s working on setting up a bunch of new computers and routing some new ethernet cables.  Sounds like fun.  Definitely more fun than food service and janitorial work combined.

We’re getting all our ducks in a row for LRN4’s vacation-house-hunting trip to Las Vegas the week after next.  We’ve gotten financing approved and have our down payment money ready to go (huge down payments are required for second homes and condos and places in Nevada, so you can imagine how much we’re having to come up with – yikes!).  Now all we need is to find an outstanding place there within our admittedly miniscule price range.  Our niece Marcie has kindly contributed her real estate agent along with a few good leads, and now it’s up to LRN4 to find it.  Should be no problem.  Our family there seems pretty excited about trying to attract us out there.  We’re pretty excited about it too.

That’s it for tonight.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: watermelon dispute!

See you Monday.