From my decision decades ago to teach myself how to bake and cook – with Julia Child’s help – so as to lighten McDonald’s load of my money, to my spare room’s many months’ supply of staples like toothpaste, shampoo, paper towels, dental floss, dish detergent, cleaning supplies, &c. – because I hate wasting time shopping for that sort of stuff weekly or even monthly – to my house being basically a big man cave, decorated throughout in a manner not unlike a museum gallery, with framed vintage film one-sheets, insert posters, and lobby cards; 20×16″ enlargements of the best Apollo program photos; poster size signed prints of the Rita Hayworth airbrush artwork of Philip Castle, who did the poster artwork for “Full Metal Jacket” and “A Clockwork Orange”; display cases of intricately-detailed Apollo spacecraft models; and my own photos, pencil life drawings, and WWII-style flight jacket pinup paintings, some of my life choices are serving me well these days.
None of it was planned for the current circumstances, but it all seems ideally suited, and believe me, I feel extraordinarily lucky.
I almost forgot that I now get to see much more often this item from Charlie Duke that’s been on the lunar surface – with tiny flecks of moon dust on it, visible in the inset – because it’s on the wall just to my right at the home PC.
Click for a larger version
That piece of netting likely came from the smallest and most easily unsnapped section toward the front of the Lunar Module – a souvenir that most if not all crews took home with them – which is visible behind Gene Cernan in this photo.
A side effect: Funnily enough, though these dishes and others that I’ve made in the last five or six weeks are all quite tasty and not exactly low-calorie, I’ve dropped several pounds eating only the things I’ve made and no fast food. Pretty telling, that.
Lalo!
Haven’t read from you in a while.. Are you still out there?
Wondering what you’ve been up to lately, it’s nice that here in Portsmouth, while the masks are still on for everyone, that it’s getting warmer and the restaurants are setting up their outdoor dining areas. How is it faring in your neck of the woods?
Yup, still here. Just not in much of a posting mood, but I may repost some of my stuff that’s been entertaining coworkers a bit in Teams. Good mask use and high vaccination rate here – hence Massachusetts now approaching Israel’s numbers. I started venturing out just three weeks ago, two weeks after my second Moderna. I was ultra-careful the last fourteen months, remembering all the while the five days I spent in the ICU over Christmas 1997. The worst flu of my life left me wide open to opportunistic double lobar pneumonia, which is what escorted me into an ambulance, and it took eight months to recover from all that. My tiny taste of what bad Covid must be like.
Yikes! Yeah, in light of that ordeal, I can see how one would stay outta sight. I’m glad you’re okay and just laying low.
Thankfully my own work is a solo affair so I’ve been able to manage w/o much of a disruption and TBH I’m not at all a social butterfly to begin with. Husband and I took the J&J jab coming up on two weeks ago, sore arm for a few days and that’s it!
I will be glad when all this is done, the only good thing is that it motivated us to finally get a small chest freezer as we found a really good meat market called Arthur’s, up in Rochester. They sell proper pork bellies, with the ‘money’ (as husband calls it) – the fat – still on, and it’s a great price. Between Arthur’s and then Karl’s in Peabody, we’ve finally got the meat angle covered. Am thinking some kebab on the grill as soon as I can whip all 320 sq. ft. of the back yard into shape..