Continuing to follow my tales of my addiction to caffeine, and my search for more palatable, inexpensive, and less sugary distribution systems, I finally come to the point. I’m trying to acquire the taste for coffee right now.

I’ve always glamorized coffee drinking in my mind. Older, wiser people I wanted to be like when I grew up drank it.  It smelled so good, that the taste was a huge disappointment. I remember my first cup vividly. After I begged him to pour me a cup one time, my Peepaw poured me a cup of milk, put about a tablespoon of coffee in it, and handed me the sugar bowl. He told me to put “maybe 4 big ol’ spoons rite cheer” which I did. Heaping spoonfuls. (This is the same set of grandparents that let me add as much sugar to my cereal as I wanted. Including Raisin Bran! Yeah, they were cool.) I took a drink, and all I could taste was bitter, like a pecan pit. “Add more sugar, baby.” He finally stopped me at half the sugar bowl, and I gave the cup to my brother, who gladly slurped it down.

For many years, I never tried coffee again. Coffee flavored ice creams, coffee in pastries, any of it, made me gag. I figured I just took after Daddy, who hated the stuff too. Then, around the time he turned 40, he started drinking it too.  I thought it was part of a midlife crisis, because around that time he also started wearing jeans that already had a washed finish and quit looking for non-buttoned down collars on all his dress shirts.

About a month ago, one of the game night regulars, let’s call him Vonapier, came early. I was sitting around, mopey and bummed, and he said, “I know what will cheer you up! I’ll be right back!”

He ran to the store and came back with two Starbucks frappucinos. These were the bottled kind, which were basically coffee, sugar, and cream. One was mocha, and the other vanilla. “I want you to start drinking coffee, T.”

I have no idea why, but I took it as a challenge. It was something to do, right?  I have always liked the idea of being a connoisseur, and this was much cheaper than wine or cheese tasting classes.  Plus, it kept me going in the mornings, when I’m inclined to go back to bed many days lately.  Oh, but those frappucinos were gross, both flavors. But I tried to like them, and I ordered a coffee a couple of times when I needed a buzz in the mornings. I wasn’t sure what I was getting, though, and didn’t know how much sugar or cream to add to things at all. I’d drink maybe a quarter of the cup and then throw it out.

And then when Mom came up the next time, she stopped by a Starbuck’s and got a frozen frappucino. I ordered an iced green tea, which she made a weird face about and asked, “Isn’t that bitter?” After I laughed at her for drinking coffee and asking that question, she offered her drink up to try, and it was yummy! I’d overcome at least the aversion to the coffee taste! Woot!

I spent about a week making homemade frappes with instant coffee. But I knew I was making basically what amounted to a cheap milk slushy. So I broke down and bought a coffee maker and excitedly ground some of my very own Starbuck’s French Roast. Heck, I like dark chocolate, so I should like the bolder coffee, right?

Oh, wrong. So wrong! That crap tastes like ashes!!!  I can find no redeeming value for this junk.  It doesn’t even give the apartment that delicious coffee smell!  Instead, it smells like I burnt some fudge.

I didn’t dive in with my normal research like I should have, that’s for certain. I now know that the darker roast means, well, duh, that they roast the beans longer.  That translates to less coffee flavor and more smoke.  No wonder that stuff gagged me out and set me back to square one.  I’m cheap, though, so I’ve been trying to make do all week.  I’ve read up on how to brew the best pot of coffee in a home pot.  Brewing it right helped a lot, but it’s still insufferable.  I was adding… oh, 4, 5 teaspoons of sugar, and who knows how much half and half, and sometimes cocoa powder.  And I’m still holding my nose while drinking it.  Luckily for me, all the research I’ve done tells me I’m only supposed to keep coffee about a week before it goes stale.  So I have an excuse to try again.

Having done my reading, my next purchase is going to be the highly acclaimed Eight O’Clock 100% Colombian.  It’s been very highly rated, and is cheap.  The medium roast should allow me to taste the flavor of the beans and have that yummy smell I was expecting.  I hope so, because I’m actually leaning on the freeze-dried instant coffee I bought to make those first frappes lately.  And, sad to say, thanks to my need for caffeine, I’m starting to like the instant stuff.  It only takes one packet of Truvia or spoon of sugar and a spoon of half and half to be palatable.

So, all of you coffee experts, help!  Lay your best tips on me.  I’ve got to do something, before all my efforts at becoming a coffee snob actually turn me into someone who only likes junk coffee.

One of my favorite kids’ shows is ending.

Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading — like phonics and spelling.

Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that’s not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do.

“Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read,” Grant says. “You know, the love of reading — [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read.”

This makes me so sad.  Kids don’t get enough reinforcement on the joy of reading.  Also, as someone who just had kids leaving that age group, most of those newer “how to read” shows on PBS are terrible. The only notable exception I can think of is Between the Lions, which bridges the gap between the classic how to read show, Sesame Street and the niche Reading Rainbow filled fairly well.  The next best, Super Why and Word Girl, have served as mostly mediocre entertainment to my children.  I guess it’s just a good thing I didn’t rely on the television as a teacher.

When I went off to college, most of my friends thought drinking coffee was super cool.  That wouldn’t have bothered me, but someone actually tried to pressure me with the sentence, “Everyone drinks coffee!”  Peer pressure is a major turn-off for me, for some reason.  Plus, it tastes disgusting, so I passed.  My husband even had coffee maker that I mocked him for, until he quit trying to like coffee himself.  Then I commandeered it to make Earl Grey and other forms of hot tea or herbal tisanes.

Game nights, which started around that same time, are the big consumption time of the week.  Even if it’s been beans and rice all week, we manage to pig out most weekends.  They have historically been alcohol free, though.  The youngest of the group just now turned 21, and my husband is definitely Lawful in his alignment.  Anyway, drinking doesn’t always make for the quickest thinking, and some of us are rather attached to our characters.  My characters would get naked a whole lot more if I drank on game nights.  Wooo!  Not that they don’t have plenty of opportunities anyway, but it might get to a distracting level.

Anyway, our beverage choices for years consisted of copious amounts of water, sweet tea, Dr. Pepper, Coke, and whatever anti-freeze colored drink we could consume to keep ourselves from crashing.  At some point, one of our more caffeinated friends started bringing energy drinks.  This has met with some entertaining results and memorable quotes, such as, “But it’s Jared’s fault.  He fed me strange caffeine!” and  “I’m so energetic now, I bet I could beat Michael Jackson at basketball!!”

Uh, yeah dude.  Bet you could.  This was at least a year ago, by the way.  It would be even more hilariously inappropriate now.

Anyway, it took a while for the boys to find an energy drink that was easy to come by and I would tolerate. I hate Red Bull and all the knockoffs.  There were grand experiments.  They tried agave flavored drinks since I do drink tequila on occasion.  Bleah.  Eventually, we discovered two that worked for me.  The passion fruit flavor of Sobe’s Adrenaline Rush combined  well with the caffeine bitter.  A close second was NOS, which is also passion fruity.

In addition to game night, I began to drink one of those choices or a 5 hour energy paired with a Coke to get me through double shifts of never sitting and always smiling when I worked at the Village Tavern.  Sarah pointed out in the comments yesterday that B vitamins can produce good results, too, so I should mention how much I really enjoyed the 5 Hour Energy.  The niacin flush is part of it, but I’m sure I look like a beet.  I’m the only redhead I know who gets the Asian flush after drinking half a drink.  It’s a bit embarrassing, but there it is. I’m very sanguine.  There is also a game around here wherein people get points for every time I blush.  I often win that game without even seriously competing.  I say the most wildly inappropriate things at times!

Also to respond to yesterday’s comments, Shadowhelm is exactly right, Mexican Coke made without corn syrup is delicious, yummy, scrumptious crackrock!  I rarely can find it, but when I do, it’s delicious and wonderful and I bet it might even be nutritious!  I could happily drink that every single day.  Not exactly a cheap solution, but one that definitely holds a temptation.  I will definitely seek it out the next time I’m in the Pig.

This is getting to be long.  I’ve got to spend some time with the kids, so I’ll pick up again later.  I’d never have guessed I had so much rambling in me on the subject of caffeine .  Maybe the oral fixation really is more pronounced than I realized. And trust me, I was aware of it before…

Caffeine is my friend. I truly feel a bit of euphoria in addition to the burst of energy. My thoughts line up so much more clearly and I stay on focus and motivated when I’ve had a Coke or two first thing in the morning. I always work out on days I’ve had a little something.  Of course, with that morning Coke comes a bit of heartburn and my teeth feel all gross. I’ve tried Sucralose based diet drinks because aspartame gives me migraines, but they’re hard to come by. Every time I cut out the daily Coke (or three) I lose ten pounds in a month.  Whether it’s from working out or from the calories, they’re the most important ten pounds, so I don’t want them.  They’re my psychological set point between New Hotness and Old and Busted.

I’m pretty much a lightweight, if you couldn’t tell by the fact that I referred to a caffeine buzz as euphoric. Caffeine and tequila are the hardest substances to pass my mouth… (Shhh.  I’m avoiding the obvious sex joke, mmkay?)  My pharmaceutical innocence notwithstanding, I realized one day I had an addiction. It was driving me nuts that Mondays were twice as hard because the Spousal Unit had been in the house over the weekend and usually all of my precious elixir was flat and gross or gone. The headaches and lethargy on days I skipped it were driving me nuts.  I didn’t want to live my life needing anything to get by.  I have about a day of withdrawal that’s pretty severe if I go cold turkey, but that’s what I did.  I went several months with very little caffeine, except for game nights.  Otherwise, the small amounts in my not very sweet mint tea were all I got.

As always, whenever I’m interested in anything, I did research.  I wanted my buzz that much, so I actually set out to prove to myself that it was beneficial to me.  And, of course, it turns out that many highly intelligent people who would otherwise be diagnosed with ADHD self-medicate with caffeine.  There’s plenty of doctors who actually suggest that people who think like I do simply start drinking coffee.  My addiction was based in Science!  Hooray!

For a while, I tried caffeine pills.   They’re the best delivery system so far, but, the caffeine comes all at once, and I actually get jittery.  I’ve tried green tea, too.  I actually love green tea, for the taste.  It’s got some buzz there, but just not enough for my needs.   So now, I’m in the process of acquiring the taste for coffee.  It’s rather late in life to make this decision, but there it is.  I’ve never set out to overcome a revulsion before.  It’s been interesting.  I’ll write more on learning to like coffee tomorrow.

Last night, I went to the Survivors of Suicide group for the third time.  It sucked.   It’s been a rough couple of weeks, and I needed to go.  I needed to talk about things, but when I got there, I found myself unable to articulate anything.

What the hell is there to say?  My brother is dead.  His youngest daughter’s FIRST birthday is next week, and he’s dead.  I was thinking about it, and before this happened, if I had been asked about grieving for suicide, I’d have probably said something along the lines of, “Dead is dead.”  Meaning that the why doesn’t matter, if someone is gone, that’s all there is, and why complicate it? But it’s not true, everything is more complicated, and dead is more than dead.  There’s all this OTHER to deal with. Skeletons keep tumbling out of closets.  Reasons he hated his life come leering at me, complicating my dreams, interfering with normal life that is supposed to not be about him.  Yes, he was part of who I am but I shouldn’t be so fixated on him.  I should not have to go talk to my kids’ teachers and counsellors about how something my brother did is affecting their lives!

I’ve been screwing things up lately.  Mostly money.  Have I told you all how I wrote a check to the water company for the account balance on my checking account?  Yeah, good times.  I’m still waiting on the check back.  I get lost, and forget where I was driving.  I forget to eat.  Actually, I don’t forget, because I see the clock and know it’s time.  I just still don’t care about food, so to trick myself into eating, because I’m such a tightwad, I’ll eat out.  I’ve been so wasteful, but if I pay someone to fix my food I’ll eat it.  I say the wrong things to people.  I’m usually very careful about my words, but I’ve been living with the taste of shoe leather for a while now.  Or I’ll forget to talk altogether at other times, and think I’ve said things when I haven’t.

I’m all full of rage at the moment.  Just white hot anger and frustration.  Impotent, twisted, gnarled, defeated vexation.  I can’t direct it! It’s so useless.  Anyway, tears keep on coming, and it’s hard because the kids aren’t here to distract me, and maybe that’s good?  To have to face it, I mean.  I go back to almost vomiting at times, if I sit still for too long with nothing on my mind.  It’ll pass, I know it will, and later there will be sad, or happy, or whatever.

I’m learning to ride out the emotions somewhat. I started playing this game that somehow gives me a way to focus my brain just outside of where I want so that I can think through things without crying.  The family knows now that if they see that on the computer screen, just to give me a bit of space.  How do I keep living with this daily?  I want to get on the other side, see this making sense, and at the same time I want to totally avoid it, deny it, walk away.  And I see people at that meeting still coming after 6 years, and I know that this is how it is.  I’m forced into this weird depression place, and all this pain.  It’s like the energy of his own personal pain was not destroyed at all, just displaced onto all of us.

Part of the reason that the children going to school is hard is because I run into other parents who expected to see me over the summer.  And I missed all the play dates, and so they know we did something.  When I have to answer how my summer was, I’m unable to lie to smooth it over, because they’ll ask next what we did and I just can’t say a trip to Virginia.  So I’ve been simply telling people he died, and leave it at that.  If they start asking details, I give them, but I don’t seek it out.  But I can’t bear to be the cause of their discomfort.  It hurts to write here, because I feel like I’m causing people who read my pain to feel a piece of this horror I have to live.  But to deny what’s going on with me is to deny my brother, and I refuse to do it.  And if I hold it in, the buildup of emotion is too bear. I’ve got to displace some emotion myself, to share it.  According to my counsellor and my reading, it’s a normal part of the grieving process that is stunted by suicide because of the associated stigma.  So telling folks is a good thing, and I remind myself of that when I’m tempted to clam up for everyone else’s sake.

I’ve been trying to journal, to write, and it goes into these spirals and I can’t get hold of it. I write a sentence and I delete it.  I try to reword it properly and the emotion changes.  I flay myself for feeling “wrong” but I know I shouldn’t do that. I try to feel the way I feel and I get mired into it and have to rip myself out of it to do the next thing. Someone at the group last night suggested I write to Lauren when I write.  Maybe that’s good.  I think I may try it, because it’s been 2 months.  We should have had anywhere from four to eight telephone calls that were two hours long in that time.  And I want to talk to him, so maybe that’s a way to go.  I miss hearing his voice, though.  And his wife deleted his myspace account, which was her right, and I’m not mad, but all my letters from him are gone, except a couple of emails I kept but they’re so full of hope and “it’ll be alright”-ness that it breaks my heart, and my voicemail deletes messages after ten days so that’s all long gone!  So I think I’ll try to start writing him.  But dammit, he won’t write back, and that just pisses me off.

But it’s not all terrible, right?  It’s not. I’m writing this, for one.  I may have had a hard time articulating last night, but in the course of writing this, I went through one of those gut-wrenching grief bursts and came out the other side and feel peaceful again.   I actually missed the realizing it had been two months exactly until a day after.  Little signs point towards an integration on the horizon that is bittersweet, melancholy, but somehow reconciled into the beauty that life breathes.  In some ways, I’m learning to like myself a whole lot more than I ever did.  Asserting myself is simpler. People have always told me I’m unduly hard on myself, and I’ve never really believed it til now, but it’s true.  Forgiving myself for whatever gaffe I’ve made is necessary, so I’ve learned to extend the compassion I have for others towards myself.  So that trite cliche that keeps being passed around is true. I’m not dead, so I’m getting stronger.

Both of my kids are officially school aged now!  I don’t know how that happened, but here it is, fall again.  The summer is over, and suddenly I find myself with a bunch of free time.  Right now I’m adjusting by keeping myself super busy and not allowing myself much time to stop and think.

The oldest one calls himself Thing One, from the Cat in the Hat.  He dressed up as his favorite Dr. Seuss character and the name just stuck.  The little one also has a literary nickname.  It’s Red Chief, after the O. Henry short story, The Ransom of Red Chief.  He’s got the hair and the attitude. My parents called me that as a kid, too, so it’s actually an inherited title. “Son of Red Chief” was a paper company, though, wasn’t it? So we’ll go with the aliases, so as to protect the guilty til they are of an age to out themselves on the internets.

Thing One is a second grader now.  School is old hat to him.  He slid out of one routine of television, reading, computer games, and bike riding and into walks to school and a new class with remarkable ease.  He’s itching to play either flag football or soccer this fall, but hasn’t made the final decision yet.  I’m glad, because he’s a bit of a couch potato lately, and while we’ve been getting to talk a lot about some good books, I’ve been a bit lax about cattle prodding him to run and jump.  He’s also looking forward to Cub Scouts again, and all that goes along with that.  So he’s just great.

Red Chief has been very apprehensive about school.  It started well before he was 5.  Thing One was clamouring to get on the school bus as soon as he knew what one was.  Red Chief has been the opposite.  He tried to convince me that he didn’t need to turn 5 years old, because he didn’t want to go to school.  I pulled out the Rainbow Cake and convinced him to go on and age another year.  While he was scared, he’d also been very protective of me, wanting to make sure his Momma didn’t cry any more for any reason. He’s been saying he wants to take care of me, which is just proof he’s my kid.  Even the very first day,  he was trying to make a deal.

“Momma, if I hide under your covers, they won’t find me!  They’ll just look under mine.  Then I can stay home with you!”

It was a tempting offer, but I took him to school. He was nervous, but then he saw a cute girl with curly hair that was sad, too.  He pointed her out to me, and I asked did he want to talk to her.  He nodded, and said he could make her smile.  The little charmer went over and got a small smile out of her, and eased his own fear by taking care of someone else.  After that he was fine.  When I picked him up, I asked how school was.  “Momma, I was just kidding when I said I was scared.  There was a gingerbread man  and we had a mystery and we found the clues and guess where he was?  In the LUNCHROOOOOM!  And I got to eat a gingerbread man and I didn’t eat him like the fox did but I ate his head first!  Omnomnom!”

A new friend of mine, Becky Santo, who I met through my brother’s suicide is going through a terribly hard time right now. Her son died the same way last year.  I’ve been surprised how you form fast bonds in a situation like this, because the level of openness it takes to discuss the pain and other issues involved breaks down a lot of barriers.

Becky is a small business owner — she refurbishes furniture and sells knick knacks and candles and other bits of charming sunny home decor .  Business fell off with the recession, and her son’s death didn’t help things.  She thought she would have to close the store, but, friends helped her out with a move to a new location in Homewood. She was making a fresh start.  Though it is so very hard to move on, her outlook was improving.  But this Saturday, she got robbed at her new location. Ironically, it’s one of those places that you’d actually feel very safe visiting.  I suppose that was the idea, a nice low profile little boutique on a shaded street.  No one would expect it.

I’ve visited her since then, and other business owners on the street have been introducing themselves and offering to help her watch.  Still, she’s been manning the store all alone, and is frightened and simply overwhelmed.  Every time she seems to be doing better, she gets kicked off her feet again, she says.

So, if anyone is in the mood to do something just plain nice and helpful, maybe you could stop by Minerva’s in Homewood this month. It’s on Linden Avenue, which is just a right turn off of Oxmoor.  Even if you don’t buy anything, every moment a legitimate customer is in the store, it eases her mind.  And if you do find something cute, hey, all the better.

Yeah, I know, this is a month late to say anything about Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, but I just saw it last night. I really expected the normal disappointment at seeing a well written book translated to film. As usual, I was careful not to read too much ahead of time, so as to spoil my enjoyment. My anticipation wasn’t very high.  I was hoping for good enough. Kinda like Goblet of Fire.  Instead, I’d say the movie rated about a D.  That’s not good enough.  It’s only a passing grade because it hit enough of the crucial plot points that I suppose there’s a justification for the next two movies.

I would quit watching the Harry Potter movies by now if I hadn’t read the books. But having read the books, somehow I can’t tear my eyes away from the train wreck. Just so you know, in the book, there’s crazy stuff about the freaking HALF BLOOD PRINCE in and also Lord Voldemort and some other apparently unimportant junk. The book is the most powerful of the series, I think. But somehow this movie was utterly boring! For such an emotional book, too!  I cried at the end, but only because I knew what it should have been, so I cared about what was happening. Or really, what should have been happening.

Did J.K. Rowling just quit with the input?  I remember when they were making the first few, she’d insist certain seemingly unimportant details be kept in because they were crucial to the story line.  Did she decide to just quit once the last book came out, figuring that now that the whole story was out there, any idiot would know not to give Bellatrix 4th billing?   Or to cut out all those pesky bits of information about Snape, Harry’s parents, or most all of the stuff about Voldy’s childhood?  They even cut out the interesting bits of the love stories, and left us with half a movie about how annoying Lavender was!

Flat out disappointed, even going in with low expectations.

The blog is about to undergo one of those major overhauls that everyone else’s blog gets from time to time. I’ve decided I don’t like the width of the paragraph, because I can write forever and it seems like I’ve written nothing.  My screen is a widescreen, and then I’ll see the same blog entry on someone else’s monitor and think I’ve written too much.  I came across a recommendation of no more than two alphabets wide, anyway, and this way blows that.  My feel of what I’m doing here is very different now than in April when I started on this thing, anyway.   So the construction signs will be up and I’ll be fiddling around a lot in the next couple of weeks.

For now, though, there was a ray of sunshiny news from the Montgomery Advertiser last week, so I thought I’d share it with you.   The largest tree in the state of Alabama is an American chestnut!   It’s estimated to be 25-40 years old, and is producing nuts.  The really neat bit is that this wasn’t a study tree, planted by conservationists.  The only special protection it had was being part of the Talledega National Forest.

The American chestnut was nearly destroyed by an Asian chestnut blight, and researchers have been working my entire lifetime to restore it.   They’re getting closer to restoring the once dominant tree back to its home here in the Eastern US.  When I was a child, I’d go to the Arboretum at Auburn University and be all cooled out about the research they were doing to make the tree more resistant to fungus, including creating hybrids with Chinese chestnuts. I’ve always wondered what the Appalachians looked like when they were in their full glory.  I’ve only really seen images like these.  I hope I will get to see them in their full glory by the end of my lifetime!

Relatedly, here’s an article on 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the world.  Enjoy!

Last week I listened to streams of meetings of the Human Space Flight Review Committee.  While listening, I was reminded of how many people I know see the space program.  When I say I’m going back to school either to get an aerospace or mechanical engineering degree, I usually get greeted with  overwhelming enthusiasm.  People who’ve known me a very long time, especially, know that the dream of working in this arena goes back to my earliest grade school days, and that I’m certainly bright enough to do it.  All I need is to figure out the “how.” But there’s that other camp, who react to my news with wrinkled noses and confused faces.  They start talking, and it becomes clear that they view the space program is a big laser light show, full of dazzling displays of expensive frivolity.  In times where the economy is sinking, it’s a wasteful indulgence in their eyes.  The practicality is lost on them, and they just kind of boggle at me for a bit.   Usually they recover, after a little bit of listening to me rave about how happy it would make me, and leave me with something along the lines of, “well, you are pretty weird.  I guess it does sound like a good fit.”

Over the past week I heard a lot of talk about how NASA is failing to capture the imaginations of adults and youth alike.  Most of the people at these conferences had a vested interest in NASA, so they were looking to rekindle the pioneering spirit of Americans.  My daily interactions confirm the lacklustre image that human spaceflight has taken on lately.  More and more often I’m hearing people rant about how we need to get rid of that “waste of a space program.”  This, from Alabama natives — who have cell phones in their pockets, who use the Internet daily, and probably ate a microwaved meal or two in the last 24 hours!  It’s becoming a more mainstream, accepted viewpoint that NASA is utter frivolity.

Now, I do understand there are valid concerns with how money is being spent, and what goals the government and private industry should play.  When we’re talking about health care, no one (well, almost no one) starts shouting about how we don’t need doctors anyway, do they?   When we argue about education, even those people who would abolish the Department of Education still believe in the value of education.  They just don’t want it dictated by the government.  But with human spaceflight, people will skip arguing those issues and start arguing that humans have no business leaving our atmosphere, and everything we need to do can be done with robots, end of story.  The status quo is just fine, thankyouverymuch, why do we have to push forward any further?  Unfortunately, when people start talking in such terms, I tend to shut them down before they can get very far.  While I’m glad that my passion is evident, I really would like to understand why people feel that way.

It exasperates me that 40 years ago NASA’s work was our shining achievement, but now they’ve fallen largely out of favor.  It’s not a matter of squandering money, either.  Unlike most government spending, NASA’s work has paid for that investment hundreds of times over in returns to the quality of life of the people.  Working on a shoestring budget, NASA has continued to do wonderful work that outstrips their own projections by years and years.  Look at the shuttle!  We’ve made do with equipment that is far past it’s prime, and people are suggesting that we still try and extend the life of the shuttle a few more years.  That kind of thrift is extraordinary, but we take it for granted now.  NASA’s exceptional track record is the reason, yet it’s vilified consistently and incorrectly as a boring, wasteful program that does nothing for anyone but a few academics in ivory towers.

Is it a breakdown of the PR machine? Are people frightened?  Or just plain unimaginative? 35 years of not leaving Earth’s orbit?  Bored now?  Unable to see past the next decade?   I imagine all of those factors are in play, as well as a disenchantment in general brought on by economic downturns.  Whatever it is, my children don’t need to be coaxed into understanding how important space exploration is.  They see it naturally, without any (intentional) proselytizing on my part at all.  We look into the beautiful black openness of the skies and see possibilities and hope.  Listening to that kind of negativism and lack of vision always just strengthens my resolve to want to be a part of those who get us out there into the stars.