Indulgence

It was forty years ago last month that Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I don't remember if I saw it or not. I was only six years old. The space missions didn't mean much to me until years later, when SkyLab was in orbit, and people were talking about how we'd be able to live and work in space in my own lifetime. Maybe even colonize the Moon. Or Mars. Or both.

We all know how far that went.

So it is with a strange sense of bittersweet obsession that I ordered a set of DVDs from Amazon, including the "From the Earth to the Moon" set, which we already own on VHS but wore out from watching so much; "The Right Stuff", which is a movie I've never actually watched from beginning to end; "In the Shadow of the Moon", which contains interviews of several of the surviving astronauts; and "Magnificent Desolation", which is the IMAX movie that came out a couple years ago and promised to give viewers an impression of what it is like to actually walk on the moon.

The space obsession thing is one of the areas of indulgence in my life. I read the books, I watch the videos, I wonder what ever happened to my dreams of being an astronaut. Oh, yeah. I found out too late that getting into aviation and avionics and computer design is not the proper method for getting into space. NASA likes to hire people with Masters or Doctorates, and I have absolutely no desire to go back to school. Can't stand tests. Lectures bore me to tears. Research papers aren't bad. But why go to all that effort and expense when one can get all this free information on the web?

When I'm finally to old to get out of my recliner, I'll still be watching my space videos. If the nice nurses in the rest home will indulge me.

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I'm a rotten parent. I let my kids play video games, even though the games have absolutely no redeeming social value. At least, it doesn't appear that they have any redeeming social value. Except that the girls like to play them together. This particular game, Territory Wars, is apparently quite fun, but I don't understand how it works. They march around in this 2-D world doing weird things, and they have characters, and these characters interact with each other, but you can also play it "off-line".

They laugh a lot, though. They don't take it too seriously, and it doesn't stop them from going back upstairs when they're done and playing other non-computer games together.

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I had a free hour tonight, so figured to get some shelves hung in the garage. Simple plan. Take an 8-foot 2x4 and cut it into two equal parts using my favorite saw, then attach the boards onto the wall of the garage so as to have something to hang the shelf brackets on. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention and grabbed a short board first, so instead of ending up with two 48" boards, I had one 48" board and one 32" board. Which wasn't in the plan. So I had to go grab another board. Luckily, I found a 64" board that could be trimmed to 48" instead of using up another 96" board (hey! these things are going for $2.35 per board around here!).

The toughest part is always getting the board leveled up while attaching it to the wall. I pre-drill the holes and put the screws in half-way, then put the board up against the wall with the level sitting on top, holding it as best I can, then tighten down two of the screws on either end of the board. Mounted both the boards to be the same position as the shelving that already existed, then put the brackets on and leveled those out as well. Got the boards laid up, then Cheryl started stacking some of the extra boxes and things so we could make a bit more room for the cars and bikes.

Maybe tomorrow I'll find the time to put up some more.