Saturday February 20th, 2016

As I didn’t do much of interest today, I’ll mention two historic events that happened on this date, both very important in their own way.

On February 20th 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.

On February 20th 1985, the Irish government approved the sale of contraceptives.

You could argue that the citizens of both countries must have felt that these events should have taken place a lot sooner but hey, the Americans were up against the formidable Soviet Union and the Irish were up against the even more formidable Catholic Church so we should cut them some slack !

John Glenn only made 3 orbits before returning to Earth but when you think that just over 7 years later we were watching live images of 2 men bouncing around on the moon, allegedly, then it’s clear that once they got going, the Americans didn’t hang around.

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that I’ve no memory of Glenn’s 5 hr mission. I was 9 at the time.  Actually, despite being 32 at the time, I’ve no memory of that Irish vote either !  If they’d taken place the other way round, then I dare say I’d have remembered Glenn’s flight as my interest in all things NASA began with the first Gemini mission in 1964.

It’s one of the big regrets of my life that I never got over to America to see an Apollo launch. It must have been an incredible experience to see (and feel) that massive rocket blasting off but the Apollo Program ended when I was 20 and I was in no position financially to go abroad, never mind to go to America.

On 19th May 2000, on the way back to Michigan from Key West, Florida, I did get to see a shuttle launch. It was STS-101 and we’d bought viewing tickets at the Kennedy Space Centre a week or so earlier when on the way down to Key West.

On the day before (18th), we’d already driven 363 miles from Key West and then we had to get to the KSC very early the next morning. So we just timed our drive to get there at about 2:30am, parked up and waited with others inside the centre for the shuttle buses to arrive to take us all out to the Causeway Viewing Area, with an unrestricted view some 5 miles across the water from the launchpad.

Then came a long wait, standing in the dark or sitting for periods on the causeway grass (keeping a wary eye out for gators which shared the area with us) until the launch at 6:09am and boy were we tired. That was also when I experienced the vast difference in speed between light and sound. At T-6.6 seconds the shuttle’s 3 main engines fired and at T-0 the solid rocket boosters ignited and the pre dawn sky lit up on the horizon across the water.

But we heard nothing except the voice of launch control being broadcast to us over the pole mounted speakers along the viewing area. The shuttle cleared the tower and still we heard nothing !  What was going on ?

Well sound travels at 343 metres/sec and with us being about 5 miles away, it took just over 23 seconds for the sound to reach us. When it did, you could feel the ground tremble, the air vibrate and it was like being next to a stack of speakers at a WHO concert. It was also a bit like watching a badly dubbed movie as when the T-0 sounds hit us, Atlantis was at T+23 and already speeding down range at about 300 mph.

It’s an experience I’ll never forget.  Yes despite my shocking memory.

I’ve got video footage of it somewhere and even some still photos but really standard cameras can’t do justice to a launch as the light is so bright that you just get images of a blinding fireball – so here is an official photo of the launch of STS-101………

I could claim I took it……but if I’d been THAT close, I wouldn’t be around to tell you about it.

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Today was Round 6 of the FA Cup with 16 teams left in the oldest football cup competition in the world.  And somehow Leeds United was one of them ! I never expected them to win today and on this they didn’t let me down, despite it being a close game and us losing by a soft own goal.

Oh well, as they say, we can now concentrate on finishing in the bottom half of the table, AGAIN.  I miss the good old days when we were the best team in the country, regularly playing in Europe and everyone hated us.

Happy days.

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I’m sure you’re wondering if I’m fully over my cold.  Well no I’m not, thank you for asking. Oh all the usual symptoms have gone but I’ve been left with a dry, hacking cough which I really don’t want. After a few hours it gets both annoying and sore and even the prospect of a nice salmon supper this evening did little to lift my spirits.

I watched a few recorded shows on the TiVo and then, before bedtime, some of my fav US shows like Elementary, The Blacklist and Grey’s Anatomy. Then it was off to bed and a few pages of “Winter Of The World” which was all I could manage before sleep overcame me.

Given this rate of progress, I doubt I’ll finish the book before proper winter is over !

 

Wednesday January 27th, 2016

If I had a dream last night, I don’t remember it.  As usual.

Just sayin’.

Actually I should say “this morning” as I didn’t go to bed till about 6:30am.  I was watching the Andy Murray game at the Australian Open which didn’t start till about 3:30am.  I told myself I’d watch the first 2 sets and if Andy was ahead, I’d watch till the end and if it was 1-1, I’d go to bed.

Well the first 2 sets took so long that I decided to go to bed no matter what.  But ever the sport lover, I still kept an eye on the score while in bed…….and reading Treasure Island.  I know.  How sad is that.

By the time it was all over, I could hear people going to work and even the mail had almost arrived !

When I got up at midday and put on the telle, the rerun of the game was almost at the point where I’d left it.  So yes, despite knowing the outcome, I watched it.  Of course I did.

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After breakfast….at 2pm………I put on a load of washing and went upstairs to bleed the radiators.  As you do.  My central heating system was installed by the Romans and needs a lot of TLC to keep it ticking over. Once a month or so I go around the 8 radiators and bleed them, by which I mean I use a special key to open them up to let out any air that may be trapped in the system. I do this even if a radiator is uniformly hot, just in case.

Today everything was tickety-boo but when in my little bedroom, I made the mistake of glancing at some photos that I store in that room…..and that was it for the next 2 hrs.

I have hundreds of photos.  Old school.  Non digital.

My love of photography started when I first went to boarding school as it had a great photographic society with a well equipped darkroom where I could develop and print my own photos. From then, until I got my first digital camera, I was an avid clicker and amassed a huge collection of photographs.

The things is, for some time now, I’ve been trying to find one particular photograph. It’s a black & white one I took and developed at school and when I recently made Facebook contact with one of the boys in it, I naturally wanted to find the photo to send him a copy of it.  Despite having seen it loads of times over the years, now that I really want to get my hands on it, it’s gone awol.

This isn’t that unusual for me. Several years ago I mislaid a mobile phone for over a year. Last year I mislaid a power pack (for recharging mobile devices) for months, even having to buy a new one.  I’m currently “missing” half a bag of baking potatoes I got at Costco.  I opened the bag and gave half to Daphne but I’ve no idea where the other half is.

It’s not like I live in a stately home with dozens of rooms and lots of hiding places. I only have a modest castle !

So anyway, this school photograph is keeping the tradition going and every so often, when I’m in the small bedroom, I go through all my photos somehow hoping it will magically appear each time.  My ability to lose things in this house is matched only by my optimism in eventually finding them again.

Yes, you could argue that even my optimism is misplaced !

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I haven’t actually got many photos of myself over the years because I was usually behind the lens, as they say.  Back when I was a solo tourist in N. America, I did sometimes set my camera up on a tripod and basically take a selfie.  I mean if you are standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, at the top of the CN Tower, in front of Mount Rushmore, getting sprayed at Niagara Falls or (with someone) eating crab chowder at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, you want yourself in at least one of the photos !

But holiday times aside, I have very few photos of me.  Today I found one or two in the very old collection and here they are.

First up is me with my older brother.

Although it may look like my brother was putting a protective arm around me, he was actually holding me steady so he could smash that ball in my face as soon as the photo was taken.

Most of the photos taken of us in those days have us with our hands held as if we were praying. My parents were VERY religious and my mum would go to Mass every morning. That’s every morning, not just every Sunday morning. Often she’d be the only one there. In fact, sometimes even the priest wouldn’t turn up so mum said Mass.

Nah, that bit’s a lie.  She only performed weddings and christenings.

Moving along a few years, it’s 1962, I’m now 9 years old and I’m at primary school.

And that’s about it as far as my memory of it goes. My primary school days are a blank except for two events. The first was when we were playing outside and I threw a brick like a shot putt and hit another boy on the head. Needless to say he bled like a stuck pig, was carted off to hospital for stitches and I got into trouble for that little escapade.

Being a Catholic I had to punish myself and so for some bizarre reason I told myself that I’d take responsibility for the boy’s death if he dropped dead within the next 2 years. Being 9 years old and therefore not being known for thinking ahead, I gave no thought to what that would involve.  As luck would have it the boy was as healthy as an ox for the next 2 years, we both left primary school and a huge weight was taken from my young shoulders.

Ironically, speaking of a huge weight, when he was 15, that same boy was passing a building site when a loose brick fell from the 10th floor of a new hotel and killed him instantly.

Yeah ok that’s a lie too.

Skipping ahead many years now and here is one of me with some friends I met on my very first trip to America in the summer of 1989. I met them when I stayed a few days at Daytona Beach, Florida and we got on so well that they invited me to spend that Christmas with them at their home outside Atlanta, Georgia.

I returned to visit with them several times after that but sadly, we’ve drifted apart over the last decade.  This photo shows me with the husband, Donnie and his/their 2 kids, Kayla and Korey. I’m holding Kayla, who is now married with a few kids of her own and as Donnie’s wife Cheryl was heavily pregnant with Korey when we met in that summer of 1989, it’s easy to work out that he’ll be 26 now !  Yikes.

Moving swiftly along, here is one of me in my work attire. I don’t know where it was taken or why, but there aren’t many of me at this age, whatever age that might be, so I’ll hang onto it.

Actually I do know where it was taken….my back garden.  I think it may have been taken by my mum as, being a mum, she always wanted photos of me and rarely got them. After my dad died in 1986, mum would come over to stay with me most years and would never leave without a photo.

When she died in 2003 and I was the executor of her will, I was clearing out her house in N. Ireland and made sure to keep all the albums and boxes of photos she had collected.

This one was in there.

Finally a photo from one of my many visits to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. I love that place as I have always been a “space geek” and this was a proper selfie I took when on the viewing platform near the Apollo launch site.  I put my SLR camera on a metal railing, set the timer and as this was in pre digital days, hoped for the best when the photos were developed.

It’s a bit “in your face” and doesn’t show much of where I was – but I know where I was, and now so do you !

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Enough of this photo trip down memory lane; the movie I watched before bedtime was “45 Years” starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling.  It tells the story of a married couple preparing to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary but receive shattering news that promises to forever change the course of their lives.

I suspected it would be slow going, given the age of the actors and the storyline but I felt like I’d aged 45 years watching it.  If you thought Nebraska was slow, that was turbo charged compared to this.  I’m all for allowing time for character development but there isn’t much point if the audience is falling asleep.

The acting, when it happened, was as excellent as you’d expect from these veteran British actors and the Norfolk scenery was delightful, although we seemed to get several seasons in the space of one week but maybe that’s how it is in Norfolk.

I also have to say that I was well impressed with Charlotte Rampling’s slim, youthful figure although her legs were like two drainpipes which didn’t seem healthy to me !

I’m just not sure there was a story worth telling. I read that the short story it was based on only had 12 pages and if they’d allocated a minute to each page, the resulting movie might have held my attention.

But they didn’t, and it didn’t.  By the end I didn’t care what happened to either of them as long as SOMETHING happened.

It didn’t.

Suddenly Treasure Island seemed like a much more exciting proposition so I went to bed.

Friday January 15th, 2016

When I rolled out of bed at the crack of 11am, the sun was beaming down from a clear blue sky. I’ve not been able to say that for many weeks.

Because I usually get up even later !

The trade off, and there is always a trade off with weather in this country, was that it was cold. As in…..freezing cold. Then again it’s mid January so that’s fair enough. I love the people who trot out the old chestnut…..”it’s too cold to snow“.

Tell that to the people who insist that getting down an Alpine mountain on two planks of wood is a great way of spending a week off work. Or the Emperor penguins of Antarctica who waddle for miles to the water to get food to bring back to their chicks.

They’ll tell you it’s cold when it snows. Well maybe not the penguins as they don’t say much.  I wish they did.  Maybe then one of them would have the sense to stand up and say “oi, why the hell don’t we just live closer to the water ?”

I ask myself these questions all the time.

I need to get out more !

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Over the last couple of months, my Fridays have evolved from being Chinese & a Movie evening to a Subway, Chinese & a Movie afternoon and evening.

This came about when I visited a disabled friend who can’t get out due to a life long back problem.  I usually see her once or twice a week as she lives both locally and on the way to where I go for the Chinese & a Movie which has been a rock solid Friday calendar entry for many years now.

On this particular occasion she asked if I could bring her a steak and cheese sub and a latte and also whatever I wanted.  I had the same sub but with a hot chocolate and I so thoroughly enjoyed this arrangement that we’ve been doing it most Fridays since then.

After a few weeks, the staff at the Subway came to expect my visit and would ask “the usual ?” when I’d go in. I liked that.  And using my Subway phone app, I’ve quickly collected 2100 points which would get me 20 hot drinks, or four x 6″ subs or two x foot long subs for free.  Good to know that if I’m out and about with no money, I can use my phone to get food and drink.  Assuming I pass a Subway of course !

Being a canny Scot, I feel Alexander Graham Bell would’ve approved.

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The Chinese part of Chinese & a Movie just means any takeout meal. This time we fancied fish and chips, and to keep the fish batter nice and crispy, we don’t get it by delivery.  At the appointed time I drove to the nearby chippie to get the meals and the quality was as good as ever.

Most of the movies we watch on a Friday have already been watched by me. I may be wrong but I believe I know what my friends like to see so I try to make appropriate choices. Of course they may just be too polite to tell me when I’ve made a crap choice but I think that overall I’ve made good choices over the years.

This time we watched “The Revenant” which, as you’ll know from a previous post, I watched earlier in the week. I think it was well received and it provoked a fair bit of positive discussion afterwards which is usually a good sign.

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Looking at the corresponding Friday in my 1970 diary, I was making plans to get an early summer job in England to make enough money to go touring in America, which would include a dream visit to the Kennedy Space Centre.  Schools in N. Ireland always finished for the summer holidays up to a month earlier than those in England. This gave us a head start on getting the summer fruit picking jobs over there that were popular for earning good money back then.  I was due to finish my last A Level exam on 16th June and hoped to be leaving the school before the ink dried on my papers. Still not fast enough for me !

That last part became true and less than 48 hours after exiting the school gates forever, I was on a plane heading for England. The rest of the summer did NOT go as planned but more of that as this year goes on.

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Back to now and overnight it got down to 30.7f or -0.7c.

It didn’t snow.  Too cold probably !