Rain Storms

Those of you who know me know that I love driving. One of the hardest things to get used to after injuring my ankle was how hard it was to drive, since I have no vehicles that have functioning cruise controls.

Yesterday, my mom, brother, and I drove up to the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, to have lunch in their coffee shop (my mom and dad used to go there every year for their anniversary, except for the year I inconveniently was born, quite early, 3 days before their anniversary, and until several years after I was born, likely due to my dad opening his alarm business).

In any event, I volunteered to drive part of the way back because I know my way around Santa Barbara better and wanted to stop at the huge Borders there (Merry Christmas to me!). Well, we hit the north end of the storm on the way back; we'd stopped in Santa Maria for gas, and it wasn't until I got off the freeway at Carrillo in SB that I was even able to open the soda I bought -- not because of the rain, but because of the wind...yikes.

In other news -- there's a video of Julia Ecklar's (well, written by Leslie Fish, but sung most famously by Julia Ecklar) "Hope Eyrie!" Written to commemorate the Apollo moon landing, the song is a gorgeous tribute to the feeling of wonder that folks, especially the scientifically inclined, must have felt, knowing that human feet had, for the first time in all of recorded history, set foot on the rock and soil of another planet.

(It's more than thirty years later, and we can't even get a flippin' shuttle off the ground, which is sad....) Not that I don't feel for the families of the crew of Challenger and Columbia, but they're not the first to have died to explore space -- and certainly not the first to have died in the pursuit of exploration.

Wow, that got philosophic...sorry.

Happy Wednesday, everybody!