blasting off into the weekend...

Happy Friday earthlings. 

{image of the space shuttle Atlantis from Nasa}

the levees melted like sugar...

This old footage of the Great Mississippi flood is amazing. It's wild to think of 700,000 refugees being sheltered in those little old fashioned tents.

{footage found here, at the CNN website}

Do it more.

My husband just sent me an interesting article about how having more sex could save a persons life. Read the scientific facts here.

In a Blue Moon

Enjoy the blue moon New Year's everyone! We won't see another until 2028. I hope you are all spending the holiday in good company and making toasts for love and good luck. Cheers.

{image from BostonBill~'s photostream on Flickr}

abre la Ventana

Little City Designs and Lindsay Miller are in this months Ventana. That's a monthly magazine here in Ventura.

{I hope my Spanish is OK}

Prize for Peace

I was in shock and awe this morning as I heard the announcement that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Price. My heart swells with patriotic pride for the first time in a long time.

{found image, I'm sorry I don't know the photographer to give proper credit}

Welcome home, Atlantis

Did you all feel the landing of space shuttle Atlantis yesterday? It made our house shake and woke me up. 

The video above is of Atlantis returning to Kennedy Space Center from another mission. It was supposed to land there again, but bad weather brought the shuttle to the deserts of California. I love how the video shows the shuttle as slow and elegant, when really, the landing is an event so fast and forceful that we feel the earth shake from 133 miles away. So amazing. Here's a pretty good article about the most recent Atlantis mission.

As Ian and I sat around in our PJs discussing space travel and air force bases, I remembered a mix up I had as a kid. I thought that Nasa and Napa were the same thing. My Uncle Louis and his family lived in Napa Valley and to me that meant that Louis was an astronaut. I can recall asking my parents where the spaceships were we'd go to visit.

Pig flew over the moon

...and the story blew up like a balloon.

As the news of the swine flu broke last weekend, Ian and I were on another planet. Planet Langham of the Luxury star system, in the galaxy of Lavish. The New York Times is delivered on this planet. It's actually one of the last places in the universe where delivery of printed news still exists. That's how we found out about the fear of pandemic on Earth.

Planet Langham, on the other hand, was quiet and serene. Creatures roaming there were healthy, relaxed and well fed. The sun shone on flowers and cocktails, and had it not been for that paper and the TV broadcasting Earth stories, we might never have known there was anything wrong at all. At least not until we checked out that afternoon and flew home on the 101 North in our Mercedes spaceship.

Click here to see more images from Planet Langham...