atomic cloud

As I was sitting at the dining room table this morning (5:30am) having my coffee and toast (raisin toast), I was looking at pictures on my lap top. I came across this picture of an atomic bomb test in the Nevada desert. The picture looks like the usual mushroom cloud from an A-bomb blast. Then I noticed something that I really hadn’t noticed before. There looks to be a small tornado coming down out of the cloud just to the left of the cloud. If you have trouble seeing it, I have circled it in red in the picture below. By the way, if you click on the pictures you will get a magnified view. And if you click on the magnified picture you will get an even larger picture. It is amazing sometimes at the detail you can see when you do this. I do it all of the time with the pictures that Seaside includes in the blogs.

Curiously there are wispy filaments of perhaps a second twister trying to form between the darker one and the stem of the mushroom cloud.

This test must have been one of the ones where they used soldiers. I have circled them in yellow. Now known as Atomic Soldiers. I have circled them in yellow. They sure look awfully close to the detonation to me. I would be concerned about the fallout getting onto the soldiers. There is a movie called Nightbreaker which is an excellent movie about the soldiers being used in the atomic bomb tests. It stars Charlie Sheen and Lea Thompson. I highly recommend it. By the way, the atomic veterans of those tests have an association called the National Association of Atomic Veterans and is abbreviated to NAAV. They have a good website also, if you happen to be interested in hearing their stories. An excellent book is called Atomic Soldiers which details the experience of individual soldiers in these atomic tests. As for the tests in the South Pacific, Radio Bikini is a great documentary on the atomic testing there. All of these books and movies should be available at your library.

What are those vertical white lines (circled in blue) to the right of the mushroom cloud? They are rockets fired at the time of the blast so that the power of the shock wave can be measured by the amount of distortion of the trails of smoke left by the rockets. They can get an idea of the power of the bomb from this. Much like Enrico Fermi who dropped small pieces of paper when at the Trinity bomb test (world’s first atomic explosion) in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. He estimated the power of that first bomb by how far the pieces of paper were blown by the shock wave and his estimates were pretty good.

But enough of the atomic history lesson. As close as I can come to a mushroom cloud is this beautifully shaped mushroom that is growing in the front yard.

I am not sure whether it is a mushroom or a toadstool. I can never figure out which is which. To be on the safe side I never eat anything unless it comes from the grocery store. To me it looks like the hamburger bun at McDonald’s.

It is amazing how quickly these appear after a good hard rain.

I was really surprised by the soil in this picture. It has finally sunk into my mind just how sandy the soil is here. No wonder we have difficulty growing things here.

And today is a day at the movies where I leave reality and lose myself in the fantasy world of the movie screen. As I watch the movie, I become enraptured by it to where I am no longer in my seat but up there in the scene fighting monsters and bad guys and saving the world and humankind once again. Then the movie ends, the lights come up and I am back in the real world of a movie theater with popcorn on the floor and empty drink cups in the holders in the arm rests. Time to leave and enter the heat of the afternoon sun in the parking lot. But as Arnold Schwarzenegger would say “I’ll be back”, I will return next Tuesday to once again save the planet. Films on the big screen of movie theaters are great because I can just lose myself in them. We are going to see the movie Predators. It is time to go so have a nice day and I promise not to give away the ending of the movie in my next blog. Lew

Love Birds

Mary completed this painting yesterday. It is called Love Birds. The birds are so colorful that they must be from the Amazon jungle of South America. It just seems like all of the colorful birds are from Central or South America. Talking about Central America and South America brings to mind a discussion that a supervisor once had with me. He started off saying that there was North America, Central America, and South America. Why is it he asked that only North American called Americans? When you say I am an American, it means from the United States. Why wouldn’t a Central American also be called American? But instead they are referred to as Latin’s. It was a good point and I didn’t have an answer for him. He seemed annoyed by it. I guess that I would be annoyed also if I were from Central America and considered Latin instead of American. I was quietly annoyed with myself for not knowing the answer to a simple question like that. Now days when I am stumped by something I just ask Villager who usually comes up with an answer. After all, I wrestled with a question of a bush with yellow flowers that my mother absolutely loved but I had no idea the name of it and Villager came up with the answer which was Forsythia for which I am grateful. So have a great day whether you be North American, Central American, or South American because we are all Americans and all members of humankind. (Humankind includes both mankind and womankind. After all, we must be politically correct). Have fun today because it is the weekend. Lew

Baltimore Oriole

This is Mary's latest painting called Baltimore Oriole. It is very colorful. She works very hard on her paintings and puts in many hours on them. She has started once again on a reverse-glass painting which is a style of painting that is extremely difficult to do.

Supper was flounder which is a very ,mild fish. We also had macaroni salad made with Rotini which is a spiral shaped pasta. She used the Rotini that has spirals in three different colors. It is served cold and so is a good side dish on these hot and steamy summer days.

Today while working outside and listening to my MP3 player. One of the selections was Desiderata with nice calm peaceful background music. I really like the words of Desiderata and I use to have it hanging up in my study in Miami. They are good words to live by. They had a very popular planetarium show in the planetarium at the science museum in Miami. The name of it was Child of the Universe and ended with the music and a reading of the words of Desiderata. It was awe inspiring and made for a great finale to the planetarium show.

This domed shaped building is the planetarium which I visited very frequently to see the planetarium shows. I use to do volunteer work at the museum by helping to man the telescopes on the roof of the science museum giving demonstrations to visitors to the science museum. I did it both during daylight hours (sun viewing) and during the night when we usually had the telescope on the planets. By the way we had hydrogen-alpha filters for viewing the sun plus a mask over the end of the telescope to restrict the amount of light entering the telescope. There were usually several of us from the astronomy club doing this. I enjoyed it. Have a pleasant day. Lew

gazebo vs sun shade

This is sometimes referred to as a gazebo. But I think the alternate name of sun shade may be more appropriate. When I hear the word gazebo, I think of a small structure with a lot of lattice work on it. But it said gazebo on the box but I think that may be just some fanciful wording. I am just not sure what the actual name is for something like this. I am hoping that Villager might know and "clue" me in. We got it from a high end thrift store for only $10. This store had lots of used items that were really nice and most of them had a high price tag on them. It was almost more like an antique store or a store with collectibles. My definition of collectibles are low priced antiques from that are usually not more than forty years old. But this gazebo will work well for Mary who likes to sit outside and read. The sun doesn’t seem to bother her as much as it does me. The heat just seems to sap the energy right out of me. This sun shelter (gazebo) will keep the sun off of her with its shade while she is reading. We also plan on having barbeques out here with the barbeque sitting on the table in the foreground with the blue cover. But the barbeques will have to wait for cooler weather. But it should all work out really good for cooking when the weather cooperates a little bit more by cooling some. What about hurricanes, you ask? Yeah, we will have to take it down if a hurricane comes, even if it only comes near. Fortunately it disassembles fairly quickly. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to get it apart. But for the price of $10, we just couldn’t refuse it.

You can see how thick the grass is in the picture of the gazebo. Well, it got cut today by Mary riding around both the front yard and back yard on her new ride-it mower.

She really zips around the yard with that mower: stopping, shifting gears to put it into reverse to back up, and then shifting gears again to go forward. She says that she drives it in low gear but she goes pretty fast with it. She really makes some super tight turns with the mower as well. She really likes the ride-it mower because it is easy to handle. Today she got a little bit too close to the bougainvillea bush and got stuck real hard by it on her hand. This bush is notorious for the length of its thorns and sharpness. Wherever you are, have a nice day and enjoy the days of summer. If you live in Florida, have a nice refreshing glass of lemonade. But if you live in Long Island, go to the nearest Nathan’s hot dog shop and have “across the board” which means one of everything: one mustard dog, one chili dog, one kraut dog, one cheese dog and so on. And if you live in Logan, then just got to the food court at the mall and walk past all of the eateries partaking of a free sample from each food vendor and you will be filled up for free. Enjoy life. Lew

blueberries

When Mary and I went grocery shopping on Monday, she got some blueberries. They were quite inexpensive. It must be the peak of the blueberry season and thus the blueberries are plentiful. I know that usually they are expensive. I saw on the label that they are produced in Winter Haven, Florida.

They were really plump and sweet.

They were good to just eat plain by the handful but they wouldn't last very long doing that. So we decided to put them on our cereal in the morning.

Now doesn't that look like a nice wholesome breakfast? We usually have cereal on weekday mornings and reserve the week-ends for the big breakfasts. On Saturday's it is usually eggs and a meat and on Sundays it is usually pancakes or waffles. The strawberries are good on the cereal because they are fully ripe and sweet. When blueberries are not quite ripe they can be a little firm and really sour like a sour cherry. Where I grew up in New York, I found an apple orchard that had six sour cherry trees along the side of the orchard. It was common for farmers to plant a few fruit trees other than apple along the sides of their fields for their own personal consumption. Sour cherries are used for cherry pies because of their firmness and tartness which is probably why they add sugar to a cherry pie to cut the sourness and tart. I tried a number of times to eat those sour cherries right off of the trees but I just couldn't stand the sourness of them. I was like the Biblical locust plagues when it came to me feasting on the fruit trees in the summer. But the sour cherry trees were safe from me. So were the crab apple trees nest to the abandoned greenhouses. Those crab apples were just so hard. I don't know how long this pint of blueberries will last but we will keep putting them on our cereal until the last blueberry is gone.

Did you happen to notice the Star Trek glass in the picture?

This glass has a picture of Mr. Spock on it. It was a gift from my daughter. She got me the complete set of four. After breakfast I was washing the breakfast dishes. I volunteered to do the breakfast dishes on week-days because Mary has to clean the rabbit cage and prepare a variety of foods for the rabbit. This is rather time consuming so I thought that I would try and help her out a bit. We both hop onto the computer after breakfast to check our emails. Mary does the dishes the rest of the time. I was trying to get the soapy sponge all the way down to the bottom of the star trek glass to thoroughly clean it. The sponge just didn't want to go all the way down so I just pushed harder when all of a sudden the glass broke giving me a nasty cut on my right hand. So take a long look at the glass because you won't be seeing it again since it broke and I had to discard it. I have to admit that the glass is quite thin and so I won't be trying to force the sponge down a star trek glass (remember my daughter got me four of them). I will use a special sponge glass washer with a handle from now on. From what I understand from Seaside that there are U-Pick-It blueberry farms in central Florida with absolutely huge blueberry bushes growing. Are there any U-Pick-It blueberry farms in Long Island? I haven't visited any of the farms here in central Florida yet. However, I did visit a U-Pick-It strawberry field south of Miami once. The strawberry plants were very close to the ground making the picking of the strawberries a back-breaking job. I have been very appreciative of strawberries ever since. Plus I have a great deal of respect for the field workers who pick the strawberries for a living. I am not sure what these field workers get paid but when it comes to picking strawberries I am confident that they are way underpaid because of the back-breaking difficulty of the work. In my opinion strawberry jam is way underpriced and is a great buy. Whenever I eat strawberry jam I feel much like Edward G. Robinson did in the movie Soylent Green. There is a scene where he relishes and savors the taste of some strawberry jam on a spoon. Edward G. Robinson was so good in the movie. He is a versatile actor and I think that I liked him best as Dathan, the chief Hebrew overseer in the movie The Ten Commandments. Now I know that he played a scoundrel in the movie but what a scoundrel his character was. Each time I watch the movie The Ten Commandments (and I have seen it many times), I always look forward to his scenes. I think that he is my favorite character in the movie. If you go to The Ten Commandments (movie) site on Wikepedia, there is only one photograph of an actor from the movie The Tenj Commandments. The rest are drawings of the other actors. And who is that one special actor? The only actor with his photograph? You guessed it; Edward G. Robinson as Dathan. Check out the site and see for yourself. And then check the movie out of your local library DVD section and watch the movie paying particular attention to the performance of Edward G. Robinson. Will I be going to a blueberry field anytime soon? I think not. It is just too hot here in Central Florida. But those of you in cool, cool Logan, Utah enjoy the cool outdoors. Have a nice day. Lew

tenny weeny

As I was walking in the front yard, a small but intense color caught my eye. I stopped and looked and saw that it was a teeny tiny flower.

How many times had I walked by it and didn’t notice this little flower. Of course I went and got my camera. I laid a ruler on the ground so that others could appreciate just how small it was.

The camera with its close-up mode lets me see the flower as if I were a little ant standing on the ground next to it.

What wonders the little ant must see each day that we humans miss entirely. I know that the flower is blurry due to the magnification but just look at the intensity of the color. And yet it is so small and easily missed. Have a nice day and keep an eye out for the beauty that surrounds us each day but is oft missed. Lew

raccoons

This is Mary’s latest painting which she calls simply Raccoons. She paints in oil and puts a lot of fine detail in her paintings. The monarch butterfly in the lower left corner is a nice touch. The hours that she puts into each painting is mind boggling. I just wouldn’t have the patience for it. To me raccoons always look like bandits because of the black mask across the eyes. And they are bandits in a way when on their nocturnal forays they decide to raid your garbage can looking for something to eat. They seem to adapt to living around people so well. I look forward to her next painting which is the colorful Baltimore Oriole. Have a nice day wherever you may be. Lew