It was a lovely Christmas. The kids had a great time and our families are very generous. We, of course, spent Christmas morning here before driving to Diane’s parents’ in nearby Lewisville for dinner and additional present opening. The following day–yesterday–my parents, along with my grandmother and my brother David and his wife Rachel, drove into town and there was more gift exchanging. I can say, here on the other side, quite contentedly, that it was a very satisfying Christmas. Seeing family is the most important activity for me, really, since the baton of getting excited about opening presents is being passed to the kids somewhat… As it should be.<\/p>\n
I received, among other things, some much-needed clothes and some movies: Ratatouille<\/i>, which I hadn’t seen before and that Diane and I finished watching tonight–great movie–and a DVD collection of the Discovery Channel mini-series on the entire NASA spaceflight program from Mercury to Orion (thanks David and Rachel!). It’s four DVDs worth of material on the space program, which is an absolute treasure trove for me. Reading about it is one thing, even a firsthand account like in Moon Shot<\/i>; hearing the astronauts describe themselves and seeing the actual footage is another thing entirely: It’s deeply affecting and just arresting in the knowledge that we have been there<\/i>, to space and the moon and space stations and all the rest. I’m already through the first two DVDs (less the bonus material) and am really eating it up. Most of the early astronauts came from test pilot backgrounds, and even from my meager vantage point as a private pilot with barely 60 hours under his belt, I’ve had a taste of what it feels like to fly<\/i> something, to interface with a machine in that capacity, where my interactions affect its behavior in ways that could quite possibly kill me, and to that degree I have a very visceral reaction to the events described in the mini-series. It scares you to death but it thrills you at the same time, and it draws out every single resource you have within you in order to perform a set of tasks. It focuses the mind like absolutely nothing else I’ve experienced…<\/p>\n
And on another level, as my parents can attest to, my attraction to spaceflight goes back as far, if not farther, than my love of airplanes. One of my very earliest memories was when my parents and I went to the mall to purchase a model kit of the space shuttle Columbia<\/i> as a reward for some important childhood milestone, possibly even being potty trained. And I can also remember drifting off to sleep staring at a picture on the wall of the space shuttle my mom had cross-stitched and framed. Sometimes I wish that early love of space exploration had persisted and driven me on a path to become involved with the space program in some capacity, maybe even becoming an astronaut, but in any event I think my eventual height–6’4″–would have ruled me out. It will always be a passion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was a lovely Christmas. The kids had a great time and our families are very generous. We, of course, spent Christmas morning here before driving to Diane’s parents’ in nearby Lewisville for dinner and additional present opening. The following day–yesterday–my parents, along with my grandmother and my brother David and his wife Rachel, drove […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}