Tag Archives: happiness

Weekend Update 8/5/2017: Let’s stick with happy stuff

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Voyager: The Grand Tour and Beyond. Image © NASA
Voyager: The Grand Tour and Beyond. Image © NASA Planetary Science Division
As often happens, several interesting bits of news that I would have included in my weekly round up of links if I had seen them before Thursday night have turned up. And some of them are things I could write a bit of a rant on, but I’m just not in the mood to rant or be outraged. We can find bad or disturbing or worrisome news everywhere. So I will just save that for next week, okay?

I really wish I’d seen this story before I did this week’s Friday Links, because it would be a great candidate for Link of the Week: The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe. “As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.” It’s bittersweet to think about: two devices built in the 70s that can only understand a programming language that has been considered obsolete for decades, billions of miles away, but parts of them are still functioning and sending their data back. It’s just a really good story. You should go read it. I’ll just point out that Voyager 1 launched just 20 days before my 17th birthday.

In much less serious news, this story (and the adorable video that accompanies it) is just funny: Gay Dads Obsess Over Baby’s First Haircut In Adorable Diaper Ad. Go, watch. Have a chuckle.

And then, in case you need some heartwarming family friendly goodness: In a Heartbeat – Animated Short Film:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

The learn more about this short film: YouTube Falls Hard for ‘In a Heartbeat,’ a Boy-Meets-Boy Story.

In contempt

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RichardWagnerQuoteA friend recently posed a question online about how many of his friends and acquaintances who read that blog enjoyed the holidays. I first responded with a simple, “Do I really need to answer this?” because I figured that he knows me well enough to know how crazy I go with Christmas decorations and such.

I saw only a couple of other replies before one mutual acquaintance posted that he doesn’t like holidays, and has often wondered if the “joyful people” are brain-damaged or perhaps have butlers to handle all the stressful tasks.

Continue reading In contempt →

So, what are ya gonna do about it?

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It’s a cliché to say it rains a lot in Seattle. Jokes about long-time residents having gills, or webbed feet, or that we don’t recognize that blinding bright ball that appears in the sky sometimes passed both cliché and passé decades ago.

This year was unusual. We had a drier than usual July. August, which is statistically our driest month anyway, wasn’t merely drier than usual, it was the driest that has ever been recorded. September nearly tied the record for driest September, ever, and for the first 11 days of October, the dry streak had continued. We had experienced just over 13 weeks of extraordinarily dry, warm, sunny weather. It was not as bad a drought as the midwest was experiencing, but it did effect crops throughout the state.

On Friday morning the dry streak ended with a light misting of just over a tenth of an inch of rain (though more was in the forecast, and heavier rain was falling nearby). I was checking my usual collection of news blogs and sources on line, and there, on one of my regular places, a reporter who I know has lived here for more than seven years, was already bitching about the rain.
Continue reading So, what are ya gonna do about it? →