2009 — 14 March: Saturday
I had to smile a few minutes ago — it's 00:58 — when, before putting the chain on the front door, I opened it to have my usual last sniff of fresh air and to check the weather, temperature, what have you. What's that on the doorstep by the (long-unused) milk bottle container? An "Avon" catalogue? I don't think so! Not these days.
OK. Tonight's picture of Christa, which I took in June 2006 out in her beloved back garden:
Christa in the garden, June 2006
This was just a couple of days before we got the results of her biopsy and, in fact, just ten days before her surgery. It is indeed just as well that we can't see into the future... Ho-hum. She was very proud of the garden and its pool, and justifiably so. G'night.
The utterly reliable...
... musical choices of Brian Matthews are (as usual, for a Saturday morning) accompanying that initial cuppa. It's 08:29 and sunny, as it were, in parts.
It's too long since I visited Donald Simanek's site1 — I've just read a delicious piece (complete with a delicious typo) about "cargo cult" science by Richard Feynman, one of my heroes.
Throwing stuff out
I've mentioned (here and here, for example) dear Mama's tendency to throw out (or simply give away) my stuff more or less whenever she had the opportunity in earlier years. The BBC news has just told us of the $317,000 paid for a second-hand copy of issue #1 of Action Comics2 (bought for less than a dollar in 1950). Wow! Now that is an investment success.
It's amazing what you can find in an old jug, too. Yet people still seem to think we can safely store such material for the quarter of a million years or so mandated by its radioactive half-life. Idiots!
Physical challenges at the Hanford Site include more than 53 million gallons of radioactive and chemically hazardous waste in 177 underground storage tanks, 2,300 tons (2,100 metric tons) of spent nuclear fuel, 9 tons (8 metric tons) of plutonium in various forms, about 25 million cubic feet (750,000 cubic meters) of buried or stored solid waste, groundwater contaminated above drinking water standards and spread out over about 80 square miles (208 square kilometers), more than 1,700 waste sites, and about 500 contaminated facilities.
Indeed, check out the quote here from Catherine Caufield's fascinating 1989 book "Multiple Exposures".
Lazy afternoon
As the usual schedule of NPR programming (in this case "Car Talk") slips smoothly by, the sun continues to shine, kids' footballs continue to end up in my back garden, and a spectacular credit card bill plonks onto the mat (along with a replacement DVD), I have lunched and am now wrapping myself around a late orange juice. Since the forecast for tomorrow looks quite promising, Mike and I are planning our first walk since Mottisfont nearly a fortnight ago. In other news, I am nearing the end of letter "F".
60 minutes left...
... until my second rendezvous with "Rama" — after which, I think I'll treat myself to that rather wonderful movie Ghost Dog: way of the Samurai. I must say, as I scan my merry methodical way through all these DVD covers they are each bringing back whole sets of memories of when we watched these films, whether we first saw them in the cinema (very often the case, actually), what else we were doing around the same time, what was going on in the family, and in the wacky world of IBM, and so on. Life, it seems to me, consists of the sum of your memories. What else is there?