A while back, I hinted that you might have seen the last photograph of a turtle for 2020. Forgive me. Can’t help myself. Especially if I see one of the cold-blooded critters on the 10th day of December. Just did not seem right. Then again, not much of anything about 2020 has seemed right. Right?An actual image of the International Space Station...as seen from your writer’s front yard...really...This friendly, but sometimes skittish kitty, really needs to have a forever home...

Some musings from a warm day in December...

Please read this...

PART 1

At the time this was started, my laptop informed me that it was 3:19 PM...then 3:20 PM...time flies, I suppose...

Whatever the time happened to be, I happened to be sitting outside...on the stoop of the porch which wraps around the front of our house...

...oops...excuse me just a moment...the yellow cat which showed up at our house a month or two ago just came to pay me a visit...he nuzzled up against my right arm...guess he wants some attention...

...the yellow cat is a friendly, but skittish critter...we figure he belongs to somebody...

...by the way, if you would like a friendly yellow cat, with kind of a funky looking right ear, just let me know...

...let’s see...where was I?

...oh, yes...it’s 3:27 PM now...and I’m sitting out on our front stoop...

...that’s because it’s 67 degrees outside...on the 10th day of December in the Year of Our Lord 2020...

...furthermore, the website for the National Weather Service office in Paducah tells me that the humidity at this moment in time (now 3:29 PM...need to type faster) is 32 percent, the wind is out of the south at 13 miles per hour, the barometer reads 29.93, the dew point is 36 degrees (Farenheit, 2 degrees in whatever the C stands for) and visibility is 10 miles...

..well, except for where I’m sitting at the moment (3:31 PM)...visibility from my vantage point on the front stoop pretty much goes to across the street...there are houses and trees in the way...

...the yellow cat is sitting out in the front yard now, about 10 feet away...for whatever that is worth...like I said, if you would like a friendly cat...

...the idea of sitting out on the front stoop to compose this masterpiece came to mind while I was sitting inside at the “home office”...

... “This is pretty dumb,” I thought about being indoors on such a nice, warm day in December. Such thoughts come to me naturally, without much effort. Just ask The Other Half.

I had been outside earlier in the day. On Thursday mornings, my journalistic “beat” takes me to the Union County Courthouse...and then, more often than not, to the Lincoln Memorial Picnic Grounds in Jonesboro.

While taking a stroll around the pond at the picnic grounds, I actually saw two turtles...perched (or whatever turtles do) on a branch in the water. Yup. Two turtles. In the sunshine. On the 10th day December. Just did not seem right...

Well, there you have it. The first column I’ve started...and almost finished...while sitting on the front stoop...it’s 3:43 PM...

PART II

...later...that same day...just didn’t keep track of the exact time...was busy watching the sky...

...thanks to our good friend Noah, the weather guy on WPSD, I learned that those of us still down here on Planet Earth would be able to watch the International Space Station as it sailed over our heads last Thursday evening...

...I have a long-standing interest in things that are spacy...dates back to when I was a kid...and astronauts were the “Right Stuff.” I even wrote a letter to one of the original American astronauts...and received a response...which, I can probably say...based on being jaded by the passing of the years...was most likely by a public relations person...maybe not...

...anyway, the letter from the astronaut vanished into the dust bin of family history...don’t really know what happened to it...

...fast forward to when I was a “big kid,” early in the pursuit of a career at The Paragraph Factory...

...NASA was planning to have a Journalist in Space program...in which a journalist would have the opportunity to be a passenger on a space shuttle flight...

...I applied...received a nice certificate from NASA...which is in a closet upstairs...

...nowadays, my experience with things out in space includes watching meteor showers (there was one this week)...looking for a comet in the night sky of summer during a pandemic (never did see the comet...still experiencing the pandemic)...and watching the International Space Station zip across the night sky on a mild December evening...

...and, The Other Half and yours truly actually did see the space station...a white dot of light which appeared in the sky...off to the northwest...and quickly headed to the southeast... 

...we watched from our front yard...a few steps from that front stoop I mentioned earlier...the yellow cat was nowhere to be seen...

 

 

The Gazette-Democrat

112 Lafayette St.
Anna, Illinois 62906
Office Number: (618) 833-2158
Email: news@annanews.com

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