Air shows hold a special place in my childhood memories. My dad, who had served in the military and worked on the space program, shared his passion for flying. As a result, I developed a fascination with aircraft and flying. My first job at Boeing further fueled this passion.
Mom and I at a open house at Holloman Airforce Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico
Patrick Air Force Base (now known as Space Force Base) is just south of where I now live and brings in a lot of great aircraft activity. As a young child, I remember going to open houses there to look at the aircraft. I loved doing this and still do.
Seems like the Cocoa Beach Air Show has been a regular occurrence ever since I moved back here. It’s now a major event with premium experiences for riding yourself off those cumbersome wads of cash! The best news is I can see a lot of it just from my backyard! Jets swooping a hundred feet overhead at 500 miles per hour! Yeah, baby!
This year, the special treat was a B-52 flyby. These iconic planes have been a constant presence since the Cold War era. Before the construction of Orlando International Airport, Orlando was home to McCoy Air Force Base, which housed a 52B squadron. When you drove by, you could see them all lined up on the tarmac. In the early days, commercial flights used to depart from there.
In 1989, I spent Christmas with my family. One of these suckers blew through then with devastating effects on the foliage. I specifically remember the Thousand Islands in the following years. Most everything was either killed or suffered serious damage. But the nice thing about Florida is that stuff grows back quickly!
Cold February Sunrise 2026
35 years later and now I live here. This one had plenty of warning, unlike a hurricane, but not really a lot I could do. It dropped down into the upper 20s in the early mroning which persisted until about noon. The next moring it dropped to just above freezing.
I have some nice, mature plants in the yard. Seems like most everything took a hit, including the two philodendron plants passed down from my Mom 50 years ago now planted in my backyard.
By the beginning of May, I managed to clear out the damage from the front. The Bismarck palm doesn’t seem to have sustained much of a hit. The Areca palms shown piled on the curb for pickup are growing vigorously. Hard to say what will happen to my beautiful azalea hedge. It’s coming back in places, although not so well under the living room window.
Valhalla street view after the cleanup. The remains of the acacia palm await pickup.
On the patio, the two plumerias are now gone, and the bird of paradise is cut way back. Mom’s two philodendrons look like nothing even happened. Very happy about that!
Valhalla patio view after the cleanup. The view will be different for some time.
The backyard fared the worst. My six-year, unsuccessful experiment to grow my own mangoes came to a close! The existing bamboo trunks, some of them very large, look to be all dead. The Traveler’s Palms took a big hit but seem to be coming back.
I remember, about 10 years ago, mentioning to someone that it felt a bit odd to turn 60. He said something to me about himself turning 70 that has stuck with me for the past 10 years. Not actually what he said but the way he said it. I see his point now.
😳
It’s been fun being retired. I simply can’t understand why anyone who can afford it would want to work again. It’s not like I actually needed all that activity to fill my day. I’ve really enjoyed the time to explore the things I always loved. It’s been a bit tough to have to give some of the stuff up and on the other hand a joy to be able to do so much more with the other interests I have.
Life, The Universe and Everything
When I first retired I was very interested in gaining a better understanding of the world around (or perhaps more appropriately within) us. I could draw on my 18 or so years of big brain stuffing to try and understand it. There was much less to distract me.
You are full of protons that actually look nothing like this. The point is that protons are made up of quarks and virtual particles popping into and out of existence . The whole bubbly mess is held together by gluons (no shit, that’s what they are called). Gluons have no rest mass like a photon. Any particle that does not have rest mass has to move at the speed of light. Motion, indeed!
I started with attempt to understand time, only to find out how little we really know about it. More recently I have become interested in consciousness, something we seem to know even less about. At its core I now understand time and consciousness both to be simply about change and change is simply due to the fact that everything that exists is constantly in motion.
So here I am at 70! QED!
And one peculiar point I see As one with many ones of me As truth is gathered, I rearrange Inside out, outside in Inside out, outside in Perpetual change
Yes, Perpetual Change, 1971
I feel lucky to be born in an age that we’ve finally been able to overcome some of the trappings of earlier humanity in order to see existence for what it really is.
Red or Blue?
Morpheus and his pills
My brother and I recently talked about why the followers of Abraham have had humankind by the short hairs for so long now. He argues that it’s sort of like the blue pill in the movie the Matrix. Sometimes I feel a bit like Cypher in the movie The Matrix.
I certainly learned a lot of pithy sayings over time in the cult of Bill and Dave. I’ve tried to use some of them to correct my behavior with limited success. One of my favorites:
Things are exactly the way they are supposed to be, otherwise they would be different.
Pithy AA saying
This certainly does not imply determinism on my part but it does imply acceptance. Alternatively, the only thing I can truly control is the way I perceive and react to any given situation.
Yes – acceptance is the answer for this Dude it seems.
Acceptance – The Dude Abides 😎
Free Will & 73
Clan Tubridy, among others, was recently touched by the birth of a baby girl Georgiana Marisa. First female Tubridy in my branch of the Clan since 1891! I have determined that bodes well for me!
Georgie T – The most photogenic Tubridy ever!
I am now facing a legacy of 73: As long as any male Tubridy that I am directly descended from has lived. Wow!
I will choose (because of my free will and nothing else) to look at it like this:
The fact that we have the first Tubridy girl since 1891 surely means I can make it to 74!
Time, what ever it is, will tell. In the meantime, I will continue to relax and enjoy the ride!
Cape Canaveral, a prominent feature of Florida’s east coast, has played a significant role in safeguarding the region from hurricane attacks and facilitating rocket launches eastward. In the late 1940s, Port Canaveral was established to support the operations at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Today, it has transformed into one of the busiest cruise ship ports in the United States.
Cape Canaveral in 1950, before the development began at the Cape. The port was essentially created by digging a channel through the beach area. Land was added to the area in Banana River through dredging.
Beach Replenishment 2025
When the port was created (1951 to 1957), it altered the natural migration of sand from the southern part of the cape southward. Consequently, the beaches south of the port are not replenished to the same extent, resulting in a narrower beach. Moreover, severe storms exacerbate this issue.
To protect the property and provide a wide beach for tourists to frolic, the federal and state governments regularly bring in the Army Corps of Engineers (responsible for such work) to replenish the beach. This will be the third time they have done this since I moved back here in 2014. It was never done the first 20 years I lived here in the late 1950s to early 1970s.
The last time they did this, they removed sand from offshore. In my opinion, the result was disastrous. The beach has been severely damaged over the past five years. The drop-off is much steeper, resulting in an unnatural beach formation. Rip currents have been extremely dangerous in the past couple of years, and several people have tragically lost their lives after being caught in them.
The pumped slurry is discharged into a basin where the sand settles and the water flows off. The buldozers create the basin and move the sand around.
The most recent result has restored what, in my recollection, was the norm during my childhood here. It’s too early to predict the success of the new replenishment, but the sand appears to be of much higher quality (less coarse).
The sand was dredged by a large dredge that pumped the slurry southward. Several booster stations ensured a steady flow rate. The specially modified bulldozers created a dam to corral the slurry, allowing the sand to settle out as the water drained through the open end. This was a significant improvement over the previous replentishment method, where the slurry was pumped onto the beach while the bulldozers repeatedly passed by the opening.
After they filled in the beach and moved south, you could get a good look at the large pipe emerging from the ocean. The final result looks great – I just hope it holds up better than the previous attempt. Overall, it’s better than the giant seawalls further south.
I made one of the best fucking decisions of my life(more recent) life when I decided to drop out of the bullshit. I feel so much better now. I have been accused by some (well, my near-divergent brother who will remain nameless) of being a phoney hippy. For not caring. Then another brother, who will also remain nameless dropped this gem on me:
The Opposite of Love is not Hate. It is Indifference.
I can tell you it is tough in this day and age to drop out of the never-fucking-ending stream of bullshit that is being thrown at us at an ever-increasing rate. But I have trained myself to skip the bullshit and focus on better things like puppy dogs and penguins dressed up in clothing.
Anyway, the text below is when I got first pissed off at the bullies now running things. I really try not to give a fuck about it now, and for the most part, it seems to be working!
For no apparent reason, it was announced that the once-known Free State of Florida has been renamed MoonPieTown.
People have been encouraged to ‘not think about it too much’, as it makes common sense to a minority of Americans.
Banana
Today, as the Chief Dude of the town formerly known as Cocoa Beach, I signed an Executive Order to rename the city to Banana.
This highlights our fair town’s position as the capital of the Banana River Empire.
The Banana River Empire: Banana is arguably one of the most significant cities globally, as evidenced by the Cape Canaveral Space Force Command on the left and Patrick Space Force Base on the right.
Once known as Ulumay Lagoon by some illegal Spanish alien in 1640, renaming it more accurately reflects the glorious beginnings of our beautiful tourist trap of a city.
Remember our old dream, Manifest Destiny? Well, it’s back! First, we had the Gulf of Waffle House, then MoonPieTown, and now, get this – a Banana MoonPieTown on the menu at the Mars Cafe!
MoonPie’s on Mars – It is MANkind’s Manifest Destiny!
I first met Billy in 8th grade Latin class. I quickly discovered that he had a speedboat, and Billy and I became friends. I also quickly discovered that Billy had a sidekick—his sister, Laura. We automatically became friends as I hung out a lot with Billy. I fondly remember her riding around on her Yamaha minibike!
Shakey’s Pizza Parlor late 1970s
Later, when I went to Community College, I got Laura a job at the Pizza Parlor where I worked. She would tend the bar when I went out back to smoke a joint or partake in other similarly nefarious activities. She worked there when she came home from school in the summer. After she graduated and started working, she supplemented her income by working at a pizza parlor in Atlanta.
My parents’ house in Irvine, California, where Laura came to visit during her first year of college in Colorado. My girlfriend Holly is sitting next to Dad.
When I moved to Califonia in 1975, Laura started college in Fort Collins, Colorado. I would end up living there some 15 years later. She only spent one year there before transferring to the University of Georgia. In the meantime, she visited me around the holidays before I started school.
She got a Master’s degree in education and began teaching in the school systems north of Atlanta. One of the towns she was teaching in became famous for modern-day Klu Klux Clan meetings!
With my brother Rick on his boat in Cocoa Beach sometime in the early 1990s.
Many years passed. Laura was great about staying in touch, and I knew I would get a birthday card from her! We occasionally saw each other in Cocoa Beach during the holidays when we were home visiting family.
Laura at her condo in 1996. She was living there when I moved to Atlanta. Several years later, she moved into her house in Lawrenceville. I made her a cabinet as a housewarming present!
In early 1996, I moved to Georgia to become rich during the software boom of the 1990s. It all happened quickly, and I didn’t tell her I was coming. After I got settled, I went to her house, but—alas—she wasn’t home. I left my business card on her door, which had a similar effect! She was surprised!
Laura with my brother Dave and his family while they were visiting me. This shot was taken in the house I rented on the northern outskirts of Atlanta.
I ended up living in Atlanta for 19 years while she was there. In the first 10 years, we spent a lot of time together. We had season tickets to Broadway shows at the Fox Theater. We probably saw three dozen different performances. We saw a couple of concerts; one that I remember was Crosby, Stills, and Nash. She helped me out often, including letting me live with her for a while when my second marriage was crumbling. I became her furniture designer, making several lovely pieces over the years.
In my kitchen in Cocoa Beach with my pup Jake during one of her visits. She came down regularly to help her Mom, who was on her own by then. We would go to art shows during the holidays and find good places to eat.
Alas, I never got rich and moved back to Cocoa Beach in 2014. She was coming there frequently to help her Mom. Her dad had passed away several years earlier, so she would travel here three or more times a year.
Laura with Ziggy at her Mom’s house. We would meet there to watch the boat parade held in early December every year.
We spend time together going to art shows and various places to eat. In 2015, we went on a Caribbean cruise that hosted Progressive Rock concerts.
Cruise to the Edge 2015: Laura and I went on a cruise with the Turner family, featuring Yes and other bands Laura had never listened to! We had a great time and got to spend some time together after my last disaster of a marriage, where I saw her very little (sorry, Laura). We had a great time and often spent time with Robin and his family.
My brother has a house in North Carolina near the Georgia border. Laura visited me on a trip I took there in 2017. We had dinner at Wolfgang’s in Highlands, North Carolina. We both were fond of German food, and Wolfgang’s was one of the best!
Laura was a gifted seamstress, making me this beautiful bedspread and a quilt with drums on it.
We had been contemplating a cruise to Alaska for quite some time. Finally, when I retired in 2018, we embarked on a week-long cruise, followed by a land adventure to Denali National Park.
Yakutat Bay – Hubbard Glacier – Alaska 2019
It was a fantastic trip, and we got along great for two weeks. The highlight was an unbelievably fantastic helicopter ride to a glacier. I will never forget that ride and was happy we did it together!
We felt on top of the world when we took a fantastic helicopter ride to Yanert Glacier near Denali National Park. The trip to Alaska was spectacular, with clear skies and warm temperatures. It was a superb memory!
Her Mom passed away in the early 2020s. She made plans to move to Tennessee to be near Billy. I got to see her a couple of times there. On my last trip in June 2024, I saw her beautiful newly remodeled house and spent some time with just her.
I visited Laura twice in Tennessee. In 2022, I was with Bill and her on a visit to the Oakridge National Laboratory near their homes outside Knoxville.
Laura was one of the few people I knew who genuinely made a difference in the world. Although she didn’t have any children of her own, she nurtured hundreds of students as a teacher. She specialized in working with kids with learning disabilities, serving as a bridge to the real world for many of them.
Laura on my boat in the Indian River Lagoon in the late 2010s.
I was married to a woman with a young daughter, Lindsay. Laura and Lindsay became good friends after I bowed out, and I was always pleased about that. She had a natural way of dealing with young children that I admired.
At the Sled Dog kennels in Alaska
But most of all, she was an incredible friend. I was not always a good friend to her, though. Regardless, I was able to make amends for my more dastardly behavior, and she forgave me. She did insist on reminding me about it from time to time afterward. That was a part of her personality, which I also learned to accept—part of the process!
Laura chows down at Tracy’s King Crab Shack in Juneau. Although she was allergic to fish, crab was one of her favorite seafood dishes.
She used to say she was my little sister. I liked that, especially as the years went by. I could talk to her about most things, and she would listen. Not a lot of people do that very well. She was one of them, and I am thankful for that.
Travel on Inside Passage in 2019. Life is good!
In Memoriam
Laura collected miniatures for her doll houses. She teased me long ago about playing the drums on her head and breaking the stick shown. I don’t remember the details anymore, but receiving this from her brother was a pleasant surprise.
Laura’s brother surprised me with a bag of her ashes and expressed her wish to be incorporated into my backyard. She’s now resting with the plant my mother gifted me nearly 50 years ago when I was in school in California. After over four decades of living in pots, I finally planted the plants in the ground. This moment brings me immense joy as a cherished reminder of the significant individuals in my life.
Rest in Peace, Little Sister ❤️
But Wait! There’s More!
Yes, my childhood friend Robin decided I didn’t have enough of Laura, so he gave me another bag of her ashes. Another example of the kind of behavior I came to loathe hanging around the dude after my return to Cocoa Beach 12 years ago.
What ever! I decided that an appropriate place for this part of her would be in the canal behind her childhood home in Cocoa Beach.
I have always been fascinated by numbers. There are two from my early childhood that stick out.
45
When I was in elementary school, I was a crossing guard. If you can believe it, they let elementary school kids stand at the crossing for the other kids attending school. I wanted the job because you got this ultra-cool sash that you wore.
Respect My Authority!
I remember standing at the corner of Minuteman Causeway and Brevard with my cool crossing guard sash on, helping the other kids who basically ignored us 🤣. For whatever reason, I was thinking about the turn of the century, which was still many years off. I did the math and determined I would be 45! I was stunned – I guess it was the first time I actually wondered what my life would be like as an adult. I know for sure now that whatever happened, I would be 45 at the turn of the century.
I thought about this over and over until it actually occurred. At the time, I had gotten married for the second time to a woman with a six-year-old daughter. I didn’t see that one coming! 😳
69
This year, I turned 69. It is a unique number in a couple of ways.
It is known as a semi-prime because it is the product of two prime numbers, 3 and 23. Prime numbers have always fascinated me
If you multiply 69 by all the individual numbers preceding it (aka factorial), you get the value 1.711224524×1098. When electronic calculators came out, they had an upper limit of 10100 (also known as a googol). So, if your calculator had a factorial operation, you could get this number to appear. Any number higher than 69 would give you an error. I remember trying it out on my brand-spanking-new TI-56 programmable calculator when I was in engineering school.
As an image – well – I don’t need to tell you what that means. It is universally known!
♋️
I was in junior high school riding home from school one afternoon. The junior high school was further away than the old elementary school, and in the afternoon, you always had to fight the strong breezes coming from the ocean to get home. I used to dread it 😆.
Somebody earlier in the day told me the ‘naughty’ meaning of 69 😍. For whatever reason, I remember riding home that afternoon fighting the hurricane wind and thinking to myself:
Merkaba, also spelled Merkabah, comes from a Hebrew word meaning chariot or vehicle and can also be defined as light, spirit, or body. The origin of Merkabah is attributed to the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, who described his vision of the throne of God, or Merkabah.
Mythology
The Merkaba Symbol is a shape made of two intersecting tetrahedrons that spin in opposite directions, creating a three-dimensional energy field. Hidden within these combined tetrahedrons is the whole divine self and divine knowledge. The star tetrahedron is a 3D representation of the Star of David. This shape is believed to be a tool to aid us in merging with the Source, helping us connect our ethereal and physical bodies.
The Merkaba is a powerful protection tool for light-seeking and deep healing. According to its description, “From helping activate your third eye chakra to encouraging you to access higher dimensions and embrace unconditional love, there’s a lot in store for those who welcome the Merkaba star into their lives.”
Wow!
Merkaba Crystal
Crystal Merkabas are made of pure Quartz Crystal. According to Gongs Unlimited:
“Mer” means Light, “Ka” means Spirit, and “Ba” means Body.
Merkabas represent the spirit and body surrounded by fields of light that transport energy from one dimension to another. Each combines and embodies the raw elemental and spiritual power of Quartz and the Merkaba.
Quartz has long been sought after for its spiritual and energetic healing qualities. It is known to have Piezoelectrical properties. Piezoelectricity is an electric charge that accumulates in crystals in response to applied mechanical stress, like pressure and heat, which converts into an electric charge. Clocks, record players, and all kinds of other technology have used piezoelectric crystals. Crystal healers use them to help regulate and balance their spiritual energy and EMF field.
When used in meditation, a Merkaba-shaped crystal enables one to experience expanded awareness, connect with one’s Higher Self, and achieve elevated states of consciousness.
In recent years, I have turned to star gazing. I am particularly fascinated by how the Moon, planets, and stars move through the sky. The Moon, in particular, never seems to be where I think it should be or oriented the way it is!
Today is a very special, interesting day. For the longest time, I thought that the extra day added every four years was to account for the fact that there are approximately 365 1/4 days per year. So 4 times 1/4 is equal to one day. And since it’s not exactly 1/4 of a day, we skip the extra day every 400 years.
Sort of….
It turns out the real story is much more complex and interesting! I recently read an article in Big Think about what a day and year actually mean in terms of Earth’s orbit around the Sun and the influence of the Moon on Earth. It points out how this has changed over the millennia. For example, days last only 6-8 hours during the early days of the earth!
Rotating While Rotating
As the Earth rotates daily, it is more slowly circling the Sun. This introduces a variation when the Sun peaks during the day. The result is that what we perceive as a ‘day’ from the Sun’s position is a little longer than it takes for Earth to complete a complete (360-degree) rotation (23 hours and 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds)
To travel once around Earth’s orbit in a path around the Sun is a journey of 940 million kilometers. The extra 3 million kilometers that Earth travels through space per day ensures that rotating by 360 degrees on our axis won’t restore the Sun to the same relative position in the sky from day to day. This is why our day is longer than 23 hours and 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds, which is the time required for the spheroidal Earth to spin a full 360 degrees. Similarly, a “year” is not the time it takes for Earth to make a complete 360-degree revolution around the Sun but is determined by the return of its axis to the same position relative to the Sun to the year before.
I’ve always found it interesting to think about how ‘fast’ we are going on Mother Earth relative to a fixed point in space. The earth moves at roughly 67,000 mph in its journey around the sun. It seems that Earth’s cruise control doesn’t work very well as we are slightly changing speed during the course of one revolution around the Sun!
Before we understood how the law of gravity worked, we were able to establish that any object in orbit around another obeyed Kepler’s second law: it traced out equal areas in equal amounts of time, indicating that it must move more slowly when it’s farther away and more quickly when it’s closer. For extremely elliptical orbits, such as comets, the velocity near perihelion is enormous, while the velocity near aphelion is relatively tiny.
This means that the length of one-day changes and doing so in the most interesting way!
This graph shows the equation of time for a specific location on Earth. Where the slope of the graph is positive, days are shortening; where the slope is negative, days are lengthening; where the slope is zero (at the four locations marked), the day is precisely 24 hours. This happens four times per year in a latitude-dependent fashion.
This is another very cool example of complex sinusoidal motion and waveforms. Fascinating!
What Exactly is a Year Anyway?
The next cool fact is a little hard to grasp at first. I’ve always known that the Earth’s rotation axis is tilted (23.5 degrees), but it turns out the axis precesses over time (20,000 years).
Think of a spinning top where you see the very top wobble to trace a circular path.
The Earth, moving in its orbit around the Sun and spinning on its axis, always defines “noon” and “midnight” in the same fashion: where the Sun’s height above or below the horizon is maximized. This moment in time doesn’t correspond to when Earth has rotated 360 degrees from the prior day, but rather closer to 360.9856 degrees, owing to the added effects of Earth’s motion around the Sun.
The net effect is that every time the Earth completes a full rotation around the Sun, it is positioned slightly differently than the previous rotation. The time it takes for four complete seasons (for example, the time between summer solstices) is 20 minutes shorter than for one full rotation around the Sun.
Long, Slow Burn
Finally, it makes sense to me that everything is slowing down. It’s sort of like increasing entropy. I was surprised to learn that over the course of Earth’s history, it has slowed from 6 to 8 hours a day to 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds.
The Moon exerts a tidal force on the Earth, which not only causes our tides but also causes braking of the Earth’s rotation and a subsequent lengthening of the day. The asymmetrical nature of Earth, compounded by the effects of the Moon’s and Sun’s gravitational pulls, causes the Earth to spin more slowly. To compensate and conserve angular momentum, the Moon must spiral outward. For this reason, Earth will no longer have total solar eclipses after another 600 million years, and the length of each day will get longer as time progresses.
If we keep using our current calendar, we will eventually not need a leap day and will even have to eventually remove a day from the calendar rather than add one.
Just How Fast Are We Going, Anyway?
One other cool fact. While traveling at 67,000 mph around the Sun, the Sun is rotating with a fantastic velocity of 448,000 mph around the galactic center (a big black hole called Sagittarius*). The Milky Way itself is moving 1,300,000 mph through the Universe.
