🌜Dear Moon*

What’s not to love about Peter? He takes his time but nobody can craft songs like this guy…

‘Some of what I’m writing about this time is the idea that we seem incredibly capable of destroying the planet that gave us birth and that unless we find ways to reconnect ourselves to nature and to the natural world we are going to lose a lot. A simple way of thinking about where we fit in to all of this is looking up at the sky… and the moon has always drawn me to it.’

Peter Gabriel – New Release 2023

Check this out:

Panopticom

* This is also fucking awesome: dearMoon Project

4543002023

I live on a pretty famous road. Mostly it’s renowned because of Jimmy Buffet. I was a Parrot Head from the early 80s and knew all of his best songs by heart. A misplaced Florida boy living in dreary Seattle!

Jimmy Buffett A1A

If you leave my house and head south (which is the only way you can turn because it is a one-way road at this point) you will eventually end up in Key West. It also happens to be the singular path south through Cocoa Beach. You cannot often get a selfie standing in the middle of the road!

South A1A
South A1A

It’s been a foggy couple of mornings so there is no sunrise this new year. Looking forward to a healthy one if possible and the third installment of ‘Excellent Adventure – The Left Coast’ come spring.

4th Street overpass to Mother Ocean

Peace out ✌🏻😎🐶☮

Winter Solstice 2022

Another year has gone by, and time seemly speeds up with every passing year!

Tis the Reason for the Season

Since we have now entered a post-fact era, I decided it makes much more sense for today to be the last day of the year as well as the celebration of last year’s trip around the Sun. It makes a lot more sense in light of the fact that it is the shortest day of the year (at least in the Northern Hemisphere where thing count 😂) and it’s all uphill from here. Plus it gets rid of all of those other wanna-be celebrations that are, in fact, all derived from the Solstice.

Mother Earth

So in our little corner of the space-time continuum, tomorrow will be New Year’s Day and 2023 will begin! And since we’re at it we should really append the age of the earth onto the date too.

Happy New Year 4543002023*!

*Plus or Minus 50 Million Years 🤩

Jake 🐶 and Grogu 🐸

Moral materialism

I have been trying to gain a better understanding of how we Americans have gotten to the point we are – as fucked up as it seems. I found an article that summarizes a view taken by the late historian David Potter:

The European settlers who first came to the country found forests stretching on forever, flocks of geese so large that they required 30 minutes to take off. All of this possibility drove the settlers sort of mad. They found themselves walking more in a day than they had ever imagined, dreaming dreams bigger than they had ever imagined. These immigrants, the ones who weren’t brought here in chains, turned entrepreneurial, disordered, antic, religiously zealous, morally charged, messianic, and perpetually restless. They measured their life by how much they had grown and how far they had climbed. They were propelled by a central contradiction: They had this intense spiritual drive to complete God’s plans for humanity on this continent—and they also had this fevered ambition to get really rich. They were propelled by a moral materialism that would never let them rest.

This follows several ideas that continually pop into my head: Manifest destiny and the fact that – indeed – America was founded as a Christian nation. I have, in the past, confused freedom of religion with freedom of belief.

Artemis SLS Launch

After several tries, starting in August, NASA was finally able to launch SLS (Space Launch System) with the unmanned Orion capsule as part of the Artemis program (Artemis I). The capsule will orbit the moon and return in a shake-down run for sending astronauts there in the coming years.

Apollo 17 – December 19, 1972

I watched the last Saturn V rocket with Apollo 17 launch at night 50 years ago. My girlfriend’s father got us to Kennedy Space Center to view it. It was delayed but finally went up in the early morning hours. It lit up the sky and the roar was deafening. It was fantastic to see the successor launch all these years later.

Splashdown

I watched the splashdown and did some screenshots as it landed off the coast of California.

Interestingly, the splashdown occurred on the same date as the last lunar lander on Apollo 17 landed on the moon – 50 years later – during my senior year in high school 😵‍💫.

Excellent Adventure 2022 Final

Logging 5200 miles over 35 days, we wove our way along the Appalachian mountains north, west, and south again to visit destinations on my bucket list.

We headed north out of Florida with overnights in Georgia and North Carolina. The first stop was in Virginia and Shenandoah National Park and a drive on Skyline Drive. From there we drove through the badlands of Pennsylvania visiting my old nemesis Three Mile Island Along the way. This took us through the land of legends to coastal Maine.

We visited Acadia National Park and spent some time along the coast. We traveled inland to stay one rainy day at a stunningly beautiful pond in Maine on a lot belonging to my friend Bill. We then drove across the top of New England with stops at Mount Washington, New Hampshire, and the Adirondack Mountains near Lake Placid and Whiteface Mountian. Fall colors greeted us along the way!

Driving south now we visited Watkins Glen and the famous raceway and state park there. Our new two stops were to explore my roots with stops in Pennsylvania at my father’s ancestral home in Snow Shoe and my mother’s hometown of Connellsville. Continuing south we drove through West Virginia and saw the New Gorge National Park along the way.

We ended up in Tennessee, near Knoxville, at the home of my friend Bill. We visited the Smokey Mountains and toured the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. From there I spent a day with my friend Laura in Georgia and then headed south to Panama City.

We finished up there with a great visit with my brother Dave and his family including my 10-month-old grand-nephew Theo! Back home to access the damage from Ian – fortunately not too bad.

Excellent Adventure 2022 Final

Next trip – Excellent Adventure 2023 – The West Coast!

Left Coast here we come!