Can You Remember First Grade?

Can you remember going to first grade?  I am three quarters of a century old and I can remember some of it.  I can remember my teacher and how wonderful she was.  I started school in a three room old wooden building that held first, second, and third grades.  Fourth grade and up went to a newer, large brick building with inside toilets.

Yep, the first three years of my schooling was in that building.  There were no indoor toilets but had two "outhouses", one for the boys and one for the girls.  Since I then lived up north where the winters were cold with blustery winds and heavy snows, the trips to the outhouses were not always very comfortable.  I always questioned why the youngest kids had to deal with the weather and the walks to the "outhouses", but the fourth grade up through the seniors had nice heated inside bathrooms.

OK, so you see I do remember starting to school.  Now, maybe I should have never told you about this because now you are thinking that I must be very, very old.  Well let me tell you, I am young at heart (grin).  Oh yes, I also remember steam locomotives, home milk delivery, coal bins in the a closed off part of the basements along with special rooms off to the side of the basement for keeping food and home canned goods.  I actually enjoyed "the good old days" and have a lot more fond memories of those days.  For you younger folks, the good old days are not quite as far back in time as mine, but everyone has good old days, so tell me yours and have a great day, you hear?

Racks Full of Jars.

OK, I finally got it figured out!!  I need to get me a whole bunch of quart jars, lids, and a huge storage rack to store them in.  Now, I suppose that you would like to know what I am going to do with all those jars, what I am going to put in them, and when I am going to use their contents.  OK, I will tell you.

It has been quite hot here for some time and I figured that if I sat a whole bunch of those open jars outside, that they would get filled with all this hot air we have outside.  Then, I will put a lid on each of them and store then in the large rack.  Come winter time, I will take one at a time out of the rack, open the lid, and let all that hot air out to help heat my house.  Since I have forced air furnace that runs on electricity, my winter time electric bill will be cut at least in half.  Sounds like a good idea to me, what do you all think?  OK, now I heard you say that I am crazy!!  Even so, you all have a great day, you hear?

Spaced Out Facts.

I love astronomy and think that it is oh so interesting.  There is a humongous area of stuff in our universe and there is no reason why there can't be more universes.  I am not going to hurt my mind with trying to think about all the possibilities because there are enough facts to try to wrap my mind around.  Let me list a few of them:

What do you think would be the size of the largest star that has been discovered so far?  It is a red supergiant that is 1708 times larger than our sun.  Wow, that must be really hot and bright.

Not only is there stars much bigger than ours there are also galaxies much bigger, too.  The largest that we know of is IC 1101 which is 30 times the size of our Milky Way.

What are neutron stars?  They are the final stages after high mass stars explode and collapses.  They can rotate from 60 to 600 times a second.  Multiply those numbers by 60 to get RPM's.

According to information from the Hubble Space Telescope, it is estimated that there are 100 billion (100,000,000,000) galaxies in our universe and that number may be 500 billion galaxies.  Now tell me with all those galaxies and with all the star (solar) systems in those galaxies that there isn't some intelligent life out there somewhere.  If so, they would be just way too far away for any contact with us.  Even traveling at the speed of light it would take millions of years for a signal to reach us.  We may be alone in the universe or maybe not.  I doubt that I will ever know.  Space is just so very fast that we have a hard time comprehending those distances.  As for now, we better take good care of our Earth, we need it.  Now, have a great day, you hear?

Missions to Mars.

Believe it or not, there have been almost sixty missions to Mars, some were fly-bys, some were landers, and some were rovers.  Yep, we have been in that area quite a few times and here is a list of all of them and who sent them and if they were successful or not.  Just go to:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars

After you look at that link, pan down and on the same page it lists proposed missions.  I wonder what the inhabitants of Mars think about all of us snooping around their planet.

By the way, quite a few years ago I knew four men who were "The Men from Mars".  No, they were not little green men.  When someone thinks of creatures from the red planet why do they think they are green?  The guys I knew were from a small town in Western Pennsylvania named Mars, who had a gospel quartet.  The bass singer also delivered heating oil and that is how I met him.  We got along well together and we had a lot in common, like we had both sang in quartets and I used the oil he delivered to keep warm on those cold Pennsylvania winter days and nights.  By the way, I just loved snow and would use any excuse I could think of to get out in it.  I was that way from the time I learned to walk until I moved south.

Go outside tonight and look up, you may be surprised at what you see.  Use binoculars if you don't have a telescope.  Any point of light that doesn't get bigger when you look though binoculars or telescopes is a star.  Anything that gets bigger is a planet or comet or something a lot closer than stars.  Have a great day and if you look up tonight, don't get a stiff neck, you hear?

Attempted a Moon Shot

No, I wasn't trying to send a rocket to the moon, just shoot a picture or two of it.  It was a thin sliver and looked so neat that I ran in the house and got my camera.  Now, just so you don't get disappointed when you see the pictures, my camera is a small pocket type that actually fits into my shirt pocket.  It takes fair pictures but is not really good for celestial shots.

But I felt that this thin sliver of a moon should be photographed, so I gave it a shot (or two).  I zoomed in to the limits of my little camera and snapped two pictures.  When I looked at them, all I could see was a little spot of light in the middle of a dark screen.  On the computer I zoomed and I zoomed and I zoomed in on that little spot and finally got something that looked like a sliver of the moon.  Here are the two pictures that I took:

As you can see, I must have moved some on the second shot.  Oh well, someday I may get myself a really good camera, that is when my ship comes in.  Or, next time, I could take a picture through my big telescope, but then all you would see would be a crater or two with a pile of rocks in the middle of them.  Now, don't ask me where those piles of rocks came from, but have yourselves a great day, you hear?

Some Golf Balls for Barney.

Hay Barney, I don't play golf but I grow natural golf balls.  OK, I bet you don't believe me do you?  OK, I will prove it to you.  I took some pictures less than an hour ago, so I will post them here.

This first one looks like a lone golf ball in the high grass.  I bet that looks familiar to you Barney, right?

Oh!!  There is another one.  Did you hit more than one ball?

Oh my gosh!!!  That one had babies.  So, that is how golf balls come to be.  The little ones grow up to be big ones that you hit all over the place until they find a hole in the ground to hide in.  But I think they were cute, don't you agree???

Now, you all have a great day, you hear?

The Shape of the Solar System

Have you ever wondered why our solar system is very near a perfect disk instead of a blob of planets in willy-nilly positions?  Well, I have.  So I will try to give you a logical answer.  Our star, the Sun, formed out of dense cloud of gas and dust.  The stuff in that cloud kept bouncing off each other and sometimes a couple of those particles stuck together.  The more particles that it bumped into the more that stuck to it so it grew bigger and in doing so, its gravity started to increase and thus it attracted more and more particles until it got to be a very, very huge glob.  This glob then had developed that awesome force of gravity which then attracted more and more stuff.

It got so big that it imploded into a disk and became dense enough at the center to start a thermal nuclear explosion.  This, I believe, is what ignited that blob into a star, and this particular star became our sun.  The disk of dust around it had denser areas that coalesced which in time formed the planets.  Because the planets were formed from this disk, they are in the same plane or very near the same plane.

OK, you say that sounds logical, but why did it implode into disk instead of a smaller ball.  That is because way back when it all started, the big ball of gas and dust had so much gravitational pull that the ball squashed down to a disk.  Of course, I believe that it had divine guidance.   OK, that is the way I understand what happened.  If any of you have a different theory, please let us all know.  

Book Straps.

I just saw on the morning news a whole lot of back-packs for kids to carry their books, etc. in going to and from school.  I suppose that they carry lots of things in them too.  Back when I started to school, I used a book strap.  Remember them?

Mine was a little different, but you get the idea.  We didn't have or want back-packs.  That belt did the job and when not in use it could be rolled up and put in your pocket.  If something happened to the belt that held up your pants, you could always substitute your book strap for your pant's belt.  I am really thankful that I grew up in the late 1940's and early 1950's.  Now tell me, how many of you remember book straps?

Night Time Visitor.

Last night I woke up to an unexpected night time visitor.  It seemed that there flashes of light on the ceiling of the bed room.  All kinds of explanations raced through my head, but then after I got completely awake, I realized what it was.  No, it wasn't aliens, nor was it ghosts, it was just a lost lightning bug that somehow had entered our home.

The light that lightning bugs produce is a cold light.  It contains no infrared nor does it contain any ultraviolet.  There are a lot of insects and their larva that have bio-luminescence.  And yes, they even glow when they are in the larva stage.  Have you ever heard of glow worms?

Of course seeing that lightning bug reminded of my childhood days when my cousins and I would run around our grandparents' yard collecting them in a jar with holes punched in the lid.  After watching them for awhile light up the space around the jar, we would release them and let them continue to do what ever they were doing before we disturbed them.  Oh, the good old days!!!  Now, you all have a great day, you hear.

Did You Know???

We all know a lot of facts, but I am sure there are still a lot of facts that you don't know.  No, I ain't going tell you facts about space and the universe, although that is one of my favorite subjects.  These are just random facts that you may know or maybe you don't know.  I will list some and you can tell me just how many you knew.

***************  Questions:

1.   What is the name of the shape of Pringles potato chips?

2.    What was the first toy advertised on TV?

3.    How long after the invention of sliced bread was the TV invented?

4.    There are legal tender coins with heads of presidents, bison, etc., but was there ever one with the head of Superman?

5.    In what category is one of the smartest creatures of the world, mammal, bird, reptiles, or fish?

6.    What Latin word does "lbs." (the abbreviation of pounds) come from?

7.     What item does Walmart sell the most of?

8.     If someone made one dollar every second, how many years would it take to have more money than Bill Gates?

9.      In 1945 the first atomic bomb was created.  What was its nickname?
  
10.    How many days would it take to visit a new beach in Australia if you visited one each day?


***************  Answers:

1.    Hyperbolic Paraboloid.

2.    Mr. Potato Head.

3.    Only two years.

4.    Yep, Canada made one in 2015.

5.    Birds - Magpies are thought to be the smartest and the only non-mammal species that can recognize themselves in a mirror.

6.    The Latin word libra means pound in Latin.

7.     Bananas.

8.     2921 years.

9.     The Gadget.

10.    Over 27 years.

OK, that is enough for now.  How many did you get correct?  I sure didn't do very well on that test, in fact, I really flunked it.  By the way, I did a search on the internet for "strange facts", and the above is some of what I found.  Now that you have new information to assimilate, you all have a great day, you hear?

Our Anniversary

Today .was our wedding anniversary.  I believe it is our 54th.  Dang, it is hard to believe that we have been married that long.  Not only that but we were high school sweethearts.  So that means we have been together for a lot longer than 54 years.  You know, I would do it all over again.

I asked her where she wanted to go on our anniversary.  I was thinking of a good restaurant but to my surprise, she wanted to go to Hobby Lobby and Michaels.  So that is what we did and she bought yarn and other stuff.  Then we came home and spent a quiet day.

That was how we spent our anniversary.  Now you all have a great evening, you hear?