Does anyone do exorcisms for highways?

As far as me and my car are concerned, the Route 15 corridor between Frederick MD and Carlisle PA is cursed. In less than 2 years I have had 2 flat tires, two warning tickets, and yesterday.....well, yesterday, the head gaskets in my engine failed. For you folks who know nothing about engines, this is a very bad thing. Very bad -- engine overheats, lots of steam and smoke, fire potential. And both very expensive and time consuming to fix. Car will be in shop all week, not just a day or two. So in addition to the costs of fixing the engine, I also have the expense of having a rental car for a week.

Bright notes: This was not an instantaneous, catastrophic failure, so there was plenty of time to react and get safely off the road. And I had plenty of time to read -- while sitting in the car over an hour waiting for a tow truck, at the auto repair shop for several hours, at the rental car place....

Quantum Leaping Revisited

I decided it’s time to post my answers to the question I asked a while ago (24 January, to be exact). And maybe hear some thoughts on this from someone other than Amb Bob! Come on, folks, let’s hear from the rest of you!

To recap, if you’ve forgotten, the question is, “If you could go back to any place, to any point in time, when & where would that be, and why?” Remember, too, that there are caveats against changing history.

1. The Age(s) of the Dinosaurs, as in the Jurassic and Cretaceous. I’d love to see dinosaurs, what they really looked like, sounded like, smelled like, felt like, how they behaved, what their environment looked, sounded and smelled like, what the night sky looked like (the stars have moved since then, and the constellations were different).

2. North America, circa 1400. I’ve always wondered what America, in particular, was like before the Europeans came. What was the land like, when all was still wilderness? What did Manhattan look like before it was turned into a concrete jungle? What about the Chesapeake Bay, and the DC Metro area? What did San Diego look like, what critters were there, before it was settled? I’d like to passenger pigeons and other animals and plants that are now extinct. I’d love to see the Great Plains before the iron plow came, when the Plains were an ocean of grass and millions of buffalo roamed. I’d like to see, experience and study Native American culture before it was corrupted and/or wiped out by the Europeans. Variant – but when I visit the Native Americans of the Great Plains, I’d want to jump forward several times at 20-50 year intervals, up to right before the settlers came. This would be so I could observe the changes that occurred when they discovered horses – horses didn’t exist on the North & South American continents until they were brought there by the Europeans. The great horse cultures of the Native Americans of the Great Plains existed for only a very brief time as horse cultures.

3. 3,000 BC and forward – Druids, Stonehenge & New Grange. As with America, I would love to the see the British (and Irish) islands back in antiquity. In particular, I would really love to see Stonehenge several times throughout its history, to see it being built, to learn how it was built, why it was built, and how it was used in all its various phases, not just the last. And to learn why it was abandoned – long before the Romans brought Christianity to the isles. I’d like to learn about the Druids and the other religions of the Irish & British native people (including the Welsh and Scots (Picts)) before the Romans and Christianity suppressed them and eventually wiped them out. New Grange, in Ireland, is a fantastic, circular tomb/temple, built @ 5,000 years ago, that, like Stonehenge, also marks the Solstices. Why? How?

4. 500 AD – the Oceans. I’d like to cruise the oceans before large scale pollution, before the age of whaling, before large-scale commercial fishing - before man decimated most species of whales and what are today’s commercial fish species – to visit breeding and calving and migrating areas when there were far more whales, when they had a chance to grow to full maturity, before they had a reason to really fear mankind.

5. 60 – 100 AD, Jerusalem/Israel and Rome. I had decided long ago when I first came up with this little exercise that I would not want to go back to either the birth or death of Jesus of Nazareth – that would be tempting fate, tempting God. But it would be really neat to see the beginnings of Christianity, when it was just what we today would call a cult, to see how & what the early Christians back then believed & worshipped, and to see the beginnings of how Christianity grew from a cult in Israel to the great world religion it is today. Alternatively, I think it would be enlightening to meet with the original writers of the various Dead Sea scrolls.

See a lot of common themes here? Besides Nature, a lot of what I’m interested in is seeing how things were before, or how they truly were – kind of along the lines of history being written by the victors, there’s a lot of human history, culture, etc., that’s been suppressed and forgotten over the last several thousand years because it was no longer consistent with whomever was now in power.

Settings Update

I have updated the settings on my blog so that you do not have to be registered with Blogger to comment on a post --- just in case this was the reason that some of you out there weren't making any comments (except, of course, Amb Bob & E).

Kelly!!!!!

Today out of the blue I got an email from Kelly Wack Gousious, who was my best friend for years (starting when we were both young, unencumbered and zipping around Heidelberg, Germany), and my Matron of Honor at my wedding. I lost touch with her a couple years ago (my fault, something I’m very bad about), and have often wondered what was up with her and her family. It was really, really, REALLY great to hear from her, to exchange a few emails. It’s made my day, my week, my month. And it was great timing, because now I’ll be able plan a way to see her during my terminal leave from the Army.

Flying Around the Earth

So a week or so ago I downloaded the free version of Google Earth. Wow! Cool! Amazing! Lots of other superlatives!!! If you haven’t yet tried it, do so! This is one of those things that makes the Internet such a great part of modern life, that you can get something like this for free.

I’ve been having fun adding placemarks at all the places I’ve lived in my life, or spent a lot of time at. As luck would have it, a lot of these have been in the high-resolution areas of Google Earth – areas where you can zoom in all the way to seeing individual houses, with cars in the driveway. It’s been particularly fun looking at places where I grew up as a child, which I haven’t been back to in years (if at all), and seeing what’s still the same and what’s changed….like the roads I walked to get to my elementary school, and how the school and school yard have changed, and the housing development where there used to be just woods (which my siblings and I weren’t allowed to go into, because train tracks (still there) ran through it, and my Mom was worried about hobos), and the park down the street, where they had built a snow sledding hill (also still there, but the rest of the park has huge changes). Even the non-high-resolution areas are fun to visit.

One of the other cool things you can do is “fly” – using your mouse, you can “grab” onto the ground, “pull” and “let go”, and the terrain underneath will start moving in whatever direction you pulled, giving you the illusion that you’re flying over the Earth. It will keep going until you grab onto the ground (or perform some other function), so you can actually circumnavigate the Earth this way. It works at any altitude (zoom), and how fast you go depends on how much of a push you gave at the start. It can be really neat, and somewhat mesmerizing, to just fly, and watch the ground change, especially if you do something like fly north from South Africa, over the savannahs and jungles, then the Sahara, then the Mediterrannean Sea, Europe, the North Pole, Russia....

Masked Bandits

It hasn’t been a great week. Monday and Tuesday I was at a workshop that was basically a waste of time. The only good thing to come out of it was that every organization briefing told the office in charge that their process was flawed from the very beginning – something we have been telling them, but they weren’t listening. Now maybe they’ll do something. But since no one was tasked with doing anything, I still have my doubts.

Tuesday morning I also had a class on the federal employment system, one I’d been looking forward to. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that great. Too broad brush to get into the details I needed. And they changed the location at the last minute, so I was late (I had taken the metro and a shuttle bus, so I was on foot). And the room was very crowded and consequently very hot and stuffy. I spent the first part of class sitting on a piano bench.

Wednesday, yesterday, was a really bad day at work. We’re entering our busiest time of the year, and I’m just swamped (which is why spending two whole days at events that weren’t productive was really annoying). And I found out that I had overlooked something a couple weeks back, and had now missed a suspense – but not a suspense for me, a suspense for someone else who had wanted to get something published. This is a long-time colleague and so I was feeling pretty bad about it.

And then…

When I pulled into the driveway last night, at only a few minutes to 8pm, since I’d worked late, there standing in the middle of the driveway right in front of one of the garage doors, was a very large raccoon.

Now, normally, I would think this was a really cool thing, as I love being able to see wildlife, and there was a part of me that was going, “neat!”, as it stared at the car for a moment, and then sauntered off along the porch and around the corner of the house. But unfortunately the first thing that crossed my mind was what would have happened if the raccoon was in the driveway when I let the dogs out in the evening. This just added to the stress of the day.

When I finally did let the dogs out of their new kennels, after turning on all the floodlights and walking around the house with a flashlight, the dogs immediately picked up on the raccoon’s scent, and were going nuts outside, and even inside most of the evening. They were just all wound up, which wasn’t helping my mood.

And to top it all off, the TiVo was acting up again – I had to unplug and restart it, and it spontaneously turned off and restarted itself twice during the evening, so the stuff I was trying to record is going to have breaks in it.

Needless to say, I was not in a very good mood when Amb Bob got home from the HOG meeting late in the evening, and I tried not to ‘bark’ at him. He wisely went upstairs and left me alone.

This morning I’m back to thinking the raccoon thing is cool; I just have to make sure I take appropriate precautions (like turning on the outside floodlights before letting the dogs out, and making noise when I open the door, before the dogs go out). When I let the dogs out before I went to bed last night, I saw a dark shadow go along the far side of the orange construction fence and into the big pine trees separating our yard from our neighbors. The only dog to spot that shadow, too, was Jodeo. She went to investigate, but fortunately didn’t start barking and didn’t pursue outside of our yard.

I’m also going to have to check up on raccoons today. Amb Bob spotted two large raccoons in the woods patch behind our house on Sunday morning; I’m sure one of them was the one I saw around the house. I’m actually surprised that we haven’t seen more raccoons in the time we’ve been at the house. The little patch of woods behind our house is perfect raccoon habitat, with lots of dead and fallen trees, and surrounded on three sides by corn fields. The only thing it’s missing is a stream, and it’s a little small – too small, I think, to support two raccoons. So, I need to look up and see when breeding season is for raccoons, and when they have their kits. And territory size. It may just be that these two are swinging through their territory and just spending a few days in our area.