Fly Me to the Moon

I feel so terrible that I've been ignoring my All Things Kelly blog for over two weeks. There are so many wonderful events I plan to blog about, to share with you, and I'd been so incredibly busy that when the "crazy busy" ended, I've just been sitting on the couch every evening savoring immobility and USA/SciFi television.

I haven't blogged about my Girls Weekend yet, partially because the following weekend was the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. The weeks before the UHCL event, I put together a two-case exhibit highlighting interesting materials in our JSC History Collection.

Friday when I went downstairs to set up the exhibit, we discovered that we didn't have keys for both of the exhibit cases. And because it was Friday, all "non-essential" workers on "summer hours" had left for the weekend. So I immediately went into salvage mode to adjust the exhibit for one case instead of two. After working Saturday gathering oral histories at the Timber Cove reunion, I brought the girls back to UHCL for the Fly Me to the Moon event. Instead of approximately 800 guests as planned, the campus easily had attracted over 2000 people! After three weeks of triple-digit heat with nary a cloud in sight, the skies erupted in a blazing thunderstorm that evening, resulting in moving the event indoors instead of the spread out outdoor picnic originally planned.

Before the rain, we waited in line to enter the NASA trailer containing a moonrock. Both girls seemed excited to touch it, though to me it was worn as smooth as glass. Guess it's been "touched" by quite a few in the past forty years.

Various NASA contractors displayed their own exhibits in the Garden Room, where Cameron enjoyed talking about the astronauts launch and landing suit. She's never expressed any interest in becoming an astronaut, but she liked the suit.

The Kids Zone had been moved upstairs with wonderful hands-on activities, from making your own mission patch, carving lunar phases into the cream of opened Oreo cookies, throwing golf balls at a plastic swimming pool full of sand (to create lunar craters). I snapped this one of Brenna checking the weight of an object in three different gravities: Earth, Mars, and the Moon.

The Eagle Has Landed

"HOUSTON, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed." Armstrong spoke these first words from the lunar surface 38 years ago today.

A few hours later, those on Earth heard another call from their moon. "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."

Now we live an age where ordinary people take space travel for granted, they ignore it, they grumble about all the money it costs the US. Talk radio hosts wonder why we should spend US dollars for the good of mankind, for exploration, for pushing the boundaries, for learning about ourselves, our planet, our universe.

The United States today lacks the fortitude to commit to any project and see it through to the very end.

Shall I ever look up to the moon and know that human beings walk on it again?

Spring Flowers

April showers bring May flowers.... but here on the Texas Gulf Coast, it's March rains that bring April flowers. Today was THE PERFECT DAY for being outside, and I'm pleased to say that we spent the vast majority of daylight outdoors. We spent a good amount of time (and $) buying and planting the front yard flower bed. We do this every late March, early April as the weather improves. We water every other day, and usually can keep the flowers alive, if not blooming, into mid-July. Sometime then the 90+ heat wears on the plants and everything dies. Then each spring we shovel, turn over, and fertilize the bed and put in new plants.

If you love flowers, be sure to check out the link on the left to "Friday Flowers" where Sonny Carter posts his weekly image. And I'll leave you all with an image of the flowers Bryan sent me for our 11th anniversary yesterday.

11 Years Ago