Success Has Many Fathers … and Mothers, Teachers, and Mentors.

Posted in Education, Family, Leaders, mothers, NASA, Parenting, Parents, Relationships, Space, Technology by Shelley Sackier

My daughter sent me a cartoon today, the day after she and many others participated in the successful and somewhat unfathomable feat of landing a rover on Mars.

Countless people have reached out to congratulate me with phrases like—Proud Mom, Rockstar Applause, or #dreamcometruekudos. They are all lovely and wholly touching sentiments that are full of genuine warmth and well wishes. And I have received every single one of them with the same affection they have been delivered.

But I also understand now more than ever, and certainly see crystalized in the cartoon above, how each one of us is such a small part of the larger picture. Our accomplishments are a composition of all the people who have touched our lives in big ways and small.

And although there are no moments when her and her team have a red-carpet opportunity to say thank you to the countless individuals who helped land them where they are today, I have been lucky to hear myriad conversations where endless individuals unrelated to the team have been singled out with gratitude and admiration.

If we live with fortune on our side, we may traverse down a long path where we first begin in need of great assistance—and it is provided—then turn the bend where we become part of a team, helping to shoulder the load, and finally, march at the head of the herd, leading with confidence birthed from experience.

I think most of us would agree there are few people who claim they deserve solo credit and are entirely self-made, as we simply need to reflect for mere moments to discover that at some time, somewhere, someone opened a door for us—even if just a crack.

Perseverance, the Mars 2020 rover, and the red planet’s newest resident is an ideal example of how collective desires came together to create something extraordinary. It was first envisioned, then built by loving hands, meticulously developed for a far-reaching and incredibly ambitious purpose, and finally unleashed, propelled forward with trepidation, but ultimately with immeasurable fingerprints of hope attached to it. We wait with bated breath and watch from afar, occasionally offering support, but mostly crossing our fingers that Perseverance will do what she was always meant to.

It’s true, not every child is built by loving hands, or has the opportunities we know would be most profitable and rewarding for them, but the model is there. And reaching one’s potential is a much more arduous challenge, if not an impossible accomplishment, if one is faced with a solo journey.

As our planet swirls with the ebb and flow of prosperity and unrest, we are continuously reminded about the importance of the investment in our future. And our children are clearly our future. They need us to dream them into reality, to nurture them toward potential, and open the doors to their success.

Each one of us has something worthy of contributing to this planet’s collective children whether we are their earliest preschool mentors, the physics instructor who hinted you might not be capable of work in his classroom knowing it would be used as a motivating phrase to prove him wrong, or the person who gave them a summer job in a field they had no idea they’d soon develop an interest in. We are all teachers in some realm. Big and small, positive and negative, impactfully lasting or eventually forgettable.

And it is with these words that I am encouraged. Our roles in life may differ, as we may never be the individual who wins the contest, who is elected to the post, or who discovers the earthshattering cure, but we are part of the journey where others reach those heights. Every rung on the ladder makes the toilsome climb less cumbersome and more realizable.

Therefore, not only do I send a massive congratulations to all who made this spectacular and otherworldly feat a reality, but I cast a wide net of gratitude to all the people who helped to develop my child’s dreams and earthly purpose.

Thank you for your loving hands, as it is up to all of us to play our part, wherever we are on our individually calibrated path of life, to participate in the projects of building great things, or maybe more importantly, building great people.

~Shelley

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Don’t forget to check out what’s cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all gossiped about down in the pub. Or check out last month’s post and catch up.

28Jul2018

The Best Worst Day of my Life

Posted in College, emotions, Humor, Mountain life, Nature, Pets, Survival, Virginia, Weather by Shelley Sackier

You know how you can have like … the best day of your life, and then suddenly the whole world just beams down on you with sunshine and flowers for days and days to follow, and you just bask in that glow?

Yeah, neither do I.

Except for the first part.

My child has finally finished school. The official kind. At least for a little bit. Seventeen years of schlepping to class nearly every day. She’s graduated. She’s now a fully-fledged rocket scientist and has permission from all her teachers to hurl stuff up into space.

I wish I understood what it is that she’s going to be doing. I only know it has to do with the subjugation of Mars, triumphantly wrestling that planet into servitude for us Earthlings who are apparently fed up with this planet and are ready to conquer another one.

Or maybe she just wants to plant flowers and make it less orange. I don’t know.

The point is, is that graduation day was a day where I thought my whole heart would burst with joy. She raced down the aisle, and I sped toward her too. I have never hugged someone so tightly before. I cried. And laughed. And sobbed. And explained to all the thirteen thousand other people around us that my child just graduated from college, in case they were wondering.

Then I went home.

And I brought her cat with me. Just for the summer.

I love this wily, scrappy, reckless cat. Except for when she is wily, scrappy, and reckless.

When she’s sleeping, she’s awesome.

First thing that morning following graduation, I opened the front door to grab a flower pot on the front porch and this streak of jet black fur flew past me and disappeared. I panicked. Like really really panicked. I was in charge of the care of this cat who did not belong to me—the tiny little champion that supported my child’s exhausted soul all through school—and now it had entered the on-location shoot of a National Geographic special about mountaintop birds of prey where she was likely going to be the tasty treat of one vulture shared by seven of his closest friends.

Oh, dear God, where was she?

For two hours I searched outside. Under porches, bushes, behind barrels, and up trees. For two hours my head raced with what I was certain would be the result: my child would ditch her dream of meddling with Mars because her cat died. How could I be responsible for this?

I was defeated. I had to make the call—let her know what had happened and how hard I’d tried.

I opened the front door and suddenly that brazen black streak blasted past me once more—straight into the house and under the first couch she found.

My heart refused to stop hammering against my ribcage for at least a full hour, and my brain could not think of anything apart from “that was too close a call to ever repeat.”

Which is why paying a tax bill directly afterward was a really bad idea.

When one’s body and mind are busy recalibrating its official duties, math does not appear anywhere on the Top Ten Most Important Things list. It’s nowhere close. In fact, it’s so far away, Math doesn’t even know that a Top Ten Most Important Things list is a running concern. Math is out there busy chewing the fat with its neglected neighbors: grouting tile and soap sculpting.

Math did not think to show up and shout, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND DON’T PRESS THAT BUTTON! when I ended up mistakenly paying the IRS the equivalent of Lichtenstein’s GDP for 2017.

I’m pretty sure I heard the smack of a giant facepalm it made though once it heard what I accidentally did.

As it was Sunday, no accountant was going to come to my rescue. The accountant I’d hired to help me with my taxes was very good at math, and she made clear to me that she knew how to count hands on the clock. There were still twelve full hours of Sunday left, plus eight more after that before she was going to answer her phone.

But mine began ringing off the hook suddenly. My cell phone, my house phone, the radio, and my computer all simultaneously began belching out panic signals “Grab your children off their swing sets and flee to the root cellar!” A major storm was barreling down upon us.

Now normally I am quite capable of handling big booming, lightning filled thunderstorms up here on this big hill I perch upon, but this one was determined to be a record breaker—also a tree breaker, a window breaker, and a furniture taker. (That last one was close enough. Move on.)

One by one I saw the heavy iron patio furniture glide right off the deck and tumble across the lawn, the cushions becoming new nesting fodder for a local fox’s den or half of North America’s birds. The lightning strikes—spitting distance away—made my hair stand up on end and left the acrid whiff of soot and cinders. Likely it was the charred fragments of a few desperately needed synaptic connections still struggling for cognitive responsiveness housed within my head.

Hours later after clean up, the windows, doors, and roof leaks, the search and rescue for the outdoor furnishings, the weeping over losing every tomato, green bean, and budding cucumber, I told the hound we were taking a walk. We would breathe deeply, walk swiftly, and cry where no one could see or hear us. I mean me.

He agreed but refused to have more than two boxes of Kleenex strapped to his collar. He’s so fussy, as it hardly added to the five pound whisky keg he already had fastened to that spot.

We walked. It felt good. The rain having plunged the temperature down twenty full degrees. All that deep breathing was finally starting to bring my heart rate down to somewhere around “only mildly concerning.”

Until I heard the fearsome, high-pitched scream of an unholy banshee—or it could have been a baby fawn being stepped on.

And one would remember that very particular sound because believe it or not, I too, have stepped on a fawn.

They hide. Beneath the grasses. Because apparently for a few tedious hours after being born they struggle with actually walking. Damn them.

And the hound had come upon one in his sleuthy, ferretting way. He scared the bejeebies out of both of them simultaneously.

And upon hearing the baby banshee holler, her mother—freshly finished from birthing—came shrieking down the ridge from above us. Barreling her exhausted body like a freight train straight toward her baby’s clueless predators, this doe was sending the message that she had not spent the last umpteen hours pushing out this bag of gangling bones and four sharp hooves for nothing.

Deer are loud.

And fast, and big, and really scary when plowing straight for your head.

She lept from the side of the hill and landed on the driveway where, because of the rain, her hooves skittered right out from beneath her big bloated body, and she slid across the road just like all my heavy iron lawn chairs. Then she scrabbled her footing on the other side and raced back up to the top of the other ridge mirroring the first.

She was prepping for another go around.

I screamed for the hound. And the little banshee squealed. The doe barked or roared or boarked (it’s a weird sound). There was just so much noise.

The second pass from Bambi’s furious guardian was apparently enough to jar the hound out of his muddled state of mind as he hightailed it straight up the hill and out of sight.

Which still left one large angry doe careening down a mountainside with anger and physics on her side. I was the remaining target.

Dumbstruck, I had no plan of action. I had bear spray on my belt loop, but that was about as useful as telling a Mac truck at full speed that he’d better “hold up there, buddy, can’t you see I have some Q-tips in my back pocket?”

She hurtled past me, again leaping and splattering on the driveway to slide straight across it like an ice cube.

I closed my eyes and clicked my heels together three times real fast.

When I opened them, I realized three things:

If I made it home alive, I’d best cloak myself in bubble wrap for the rest of the day.
If I made it home alive, there should be no “rest of the day.” Go to bed.
If I made it home alive, realize that the universe does not like imbalance. For every high there is a low. And taxes. There are always taxes that somehow don’t count on the universe’s balance sheet.

I just really hope there won’t be taxes on Mars. Let’s not forget … I saved a cat that might be vital in allowing that to become a reality. Surely the universe will count that in my favor.

~Shelley

Don’t forget to check out what’s cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all gossiped about down in the pub. Or check out last month’s post and catch up.

29Jan2017

Knowing All the Angles

Posted in History, Humor, Leaders, NASA, Politics by Shelley Sackier

I’ve lost my favorite sock.

Well, maybe it’s more appropriate to say that I lost one of my two favorite socks, because, of course, socks come in pairs.

But this wreaks havoc with the wordsmithy part of my thought process—the one that wholly annoys almost all of my friends and family—the one where I cannot keep my lips clamped together when a person uses a word incorrectly.

Like the word priorities. There is no such word.

No. Such. Word.

Priorities is not something that can be pluraled. (Nor is pluraled a real word but I’m not gonna get off track).

You can have ONE priority. The rest of all your important matters fall in line somewhere beneath that top notch point of concern.

I know. It’s a really picky piece of trifling tittle. But it matters to me. Almost as much as my favorite sock.

So … I take in a big breath this morning whilst looking around my closet and bedroom for where the damn thing might have scampered off to and remind myself—as it is January, and one of my New Year’s resolutions was to see things from “another’s” perspective this year in order to help myself understand half of my fellow Americans—to put on those lenses and look.

It might not be a perfect example of what I was going for when I uttered my pledge on December 31^st, but I actually like the broad swath of application. I’m certain I will benefit from it in other areas of my life apart from the political.

Like when I look around my bedroom and spot a dying potted plant, a time-ravaged old rug, and an antiquated hamper.

(I said hamper, Rob.)

“These things have got to go,” I announced to the curtains, who were doing their utmost to appear as unshabby as possible. “Every time I leave this room, morning daylight reminds me that the Salvation Army is waiting for a truckload of items from me.” Daylight brings on crisp objectivity.

And then I swear I heard the curtains snicker, “Try the dump, cuz even the Salvation Army has standards.”

I gave the curtains a menacing glare, told them to stop putting on airs, and left.

Wearing mismatched socks.

Because only half of my feet needed to find themselves dispirited today.

The odd sock happened to be that of my son’s, and in keeping with my theme of stepping into someone else’s shoes, I found it utterly befitting of my 2017 goals.

Today, I was going to see things from someone else’s perch.

Everyone I interacted with today got the same question: Why did you do that? (Only without the snarky-like overtones this sentence could easily convey if only reading.)

Like the small consignment shop I was sizing up for my eventual spring cleaning offerings. I’d pointed to a Trump poster up on the wall behind the owner. He pointed to a wall behind me, where a series of antique firearms were on display. “Cuz guns,” he shrugged.

I thought about how different the world felt from when I was a kid growing up in Wisconsin, where nearly every one I knew owned at least one rifle and brought leftovers from the reason they had one in the first place to any BBQ where everybody was supposed to contribute.

I asked the question to a Croatian woman who was cutting my hair and describing her life as a refugee when she told me that many of her fellow countrymen-now-American friends had voted for Donald Trump. Why did they do that? (This one was said with a big dollop of surprise on my face, but still no snark.)

“Because,” the hairdresser said, “they saw the Clinton name as a reminder of horrific times in our country and they were choosing the lesser of two evils—although,” she continued, raising a sharp pair of scissors into the air, “I had to remind them that Mr. Trump seemed oddly familiar to our own past president, Slobodan Milošević, who had been arrested on suspicion of corruption, abuse of power, and embezzlement, and had fraudulently voted himself back into office for his second term.”

And finally, I’d asked the question to a psychologist friend of mine after I’d discovered that he, a lifelong Democrat, at the last minute switched his presidential vote. Why did YOU do that? (This time it was dripping with snark.)

He took in a big lungful of air and said, “So that I could better study narcissism. Purely for scientific research of grand magnitude.”

Then he raised a finger and said, “Don’t forget, good things can come about from this presidency too. Want to an increase NASA’s budget? Tell Trump the European Space Agency thinks they’ve got the First Foot on Mars position nailed. Want climate change to get some attention? Tell him China might be pulling into the lead problem solving position globally and are about to initiate geoengineering.”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

He snorted. “Narcissists like to be top dog.”

Okay, I thought after this long day of listening and not judging. I’m inching forward. Making a little movement. Increasing the scope of my perspective.

I decided to do something I’d not done in a long time and stretched out on the ancient, grizzled old rug. In no time flat I determined that from every angle and through any optic, this carpet still needed to go.

Then I pulled my feet up close to yank off today’s mismated socks. I tossed them toward the hamper and caught sight of the sock that had gone AWOL this morning.

Yup. Proof that seeing things from another perspective was going to serve me well this year.

I looked up at the curtains and told them I probably deserved a little praise for my advancement with my New Year’s resolutions thus far, but they responded with a Tell it to the hand kind of attitude.

It reminded me of my kids.

Maybe I could tell both of them so I’d get a pat on the back and a round of applause.

But then I thought of how they’d likely say they would have wished that my resolution was to back the hell off being such a grammar tyrant.

Okay. Point taken.

I’ll add it to my list of priorities.

~Shelley

For the time being, our blog is closed to comments, but if you enjoyed it, maybe pass it on to someone else. Email it, Facebook it, or print it out and make new wallpaper for the bathroom. If it moves you, show it some love and share. Cheers!

Don’t forget to check out what we’re cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all talked about down in the pub. Plus, you can see more of Robin Gott‘s humor (NOW FOR HIRE- so do go check out his gallery!)–all from the only pen carved from a human funny bone.

24Sep2016

Crashing and Burning; It Takes Practice

Posted in Education, experiments, Humor, NASA, Parenting, Space by Shelley Sackier

I think three of the most frightening and exciting words spoken together in the English language are: three, two, one.

And the space that comes right after it? The silence where we then announce the outcome? Talk about a pregnant pause. Talk about stress and hope and anticipation—and the new physical knowledge of the phrase gut twisting.

Sometimes you hear the word Liftoff!

Or Action! Or Go!

What nobody wants to hear is Three, two, one … uh oh.

But it happens. And it’s said. With a lot more regularity than many of us would believe—or admit to.

I think most of us regular folks can probably scare up a decent quote or two from marvelous, mind-blowing space moments, right? Things like:

“Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Or “That’s one small step for man …”

Or “Failure is not an option.”

Or is it?

The whole failure thing, I mean.

Winston Churchill said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” I think the old British Bulldog would have loved to take a peek inside one of the many locations dedicated to our American aeronautics and aerospace research to see his words in action.

I’m talking about NASA, folks.

Space has long been an interest of mine. And parenting. I’m super dedicated to the act and art of parenting. Also writing. I can’t imagine my life without writing.

But this is where I’ll stop with that whole list because any further and it’s going to sound like I’m generating some sort of online dating bio—and that is not where this essay is heading.

It’s mostly about space and parenting. The writing part is simply my way of communicating to your eyeballs the beautiful connection between the two.

And they are connected. Magically. And ordinarily.

Okay, so actually, my interests are space, and parenting, and writing … aaaand failure.

Although there is some bewitching halo that’s thrown over the beautiful bubble of someone’s great achievement, there is nothing sparkling or spellbinding about a person’s failure. When seen up close, it’s usually unsightly and has us cringing but unable to turn away. A lousy result is a big pile of rubble we tend to shove underneath the nearest sofa and not show our friends by outlining it on the floor with glitter.

Failure hurts. It’s distressing and insufferable. It is your demanding and troublesome Aunt Gladys showing up on your doorstep and expecting attention and accommodation forthwith.

You cannot turn her away. She is there. Staring you down with two leather satchels in her hands expecting a cushioned chair and a hot cup of tea immediately. The only thing one can do in a situation like this is …

Prepare for it.

NASA rehearses for surprise Aunt Gladys visits relentlessly and gravely. When every single penny of your budget is scrutinized, questioned, and arm-wrestled for and, more important, when human lives are a big wager in the game, you cannot afford a whoopsie poo from out of the blue.

Last month, I went to pick up my daughter from her summer internship with God—or rather, her god—at one of NASA’s facilities. She was building space rockets—well at least that’s what chose to believe because every time I asked what she was up to she rolled her eyes and reminded me about this little piece of paper she signed called a non-disclosure agreement.

This is a euphemism for the phrase, tell anyone what you’re up to and we’ll slice off your legs at the kneecaps.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t entirely that bad, but it was close. Maybe they’d only slice off her legs at the ankles, but she really wasn’t budging.

Anyway, I was given a glance at that amazing level of preparation NASA employs with its projects. Their walls were lined with pictures, graphics, renderings, and sketches of accomplishments and failures.

Yeah, you read that right. Failures.

I’m not saying it’s a gallery of shrapnel and explosions meant to terrorize and paralyze—it’s more like the “Mars Exploration Family Portrait.” There are a lot of pictures and footnotes that say, Stranded in Earth orbit, Crashed on surface, or Destroyed during launch.

How many of us would actually snap a selfie as we stand in front of an epic bungle and then nail it to the wall, poster-sized, right outside our office so that a couple dozen times a day we get to eyeball the lead balloon bombs that are our past?

I think not many of us.

But with each new person I met, read about, or simply saw beavering away in their government issued lung compressing cubicles that day, I began to wonder if maybe these people’s parents might have peppered their bedroom walls with exactly that kind of décor.

Not to be cruel. But to be … constructive.

Imagine this: right next to their American Mathematics Competition medal, their National Latin Exam Award certificate, and their Presidential Physical Fitness badge, there are two school exams—also pasted up on that wall. One is a Latin essay with whatever Latin words are the equivalent to this paper is atrocious scrawled across the top of it, and the other is a math exam with a big bold red F next to their name.

Next to that is a pink slip from Burger King with the explanatory words Malt machine too complicated for employee to master. This is just above a snapshot of a text reply to the request for a date revealing the response, Uh, Seriously? You’ve got to be joking.

Yep. Victories and defeats.

Achievements and downfalls.

Wins and washouts.

It is rocking horse manure rare to have one without the other. And yet as parents, we typically practice buffering our kids from these missteps and wrecks because …

Well … who wants to see our offspring suffer, or struggle, or return to us bleeding and holding out the handlebars of their new bicycle in one hand and three teeth in the other? Who routinely places their descendants in some Houdini hindrance and says, “Don’t forget to hold your breath,” just before their ears are submerged under water? Who leaps up from the bleachers and fist pumps the air, hollering, “I got it on tape!” to their kid who just did a major face plant onto the asphalt just as the one hundred meter dash shotgun went off and then explained to surrounding parents that the rest of the night was going to be spent watching that film a thousand times and taking notes?

It’s just not something we regularly do.

But NASA does.

And I vote NASA raises our kids from now on.

I know that sounds a bit extreme, and I’m not saying we just shove them all over their security gate in the middle of the night, dust our hands of the whole situation and then drive home.

No.

We can visit.

We’ll gauge their progress and applaud their efforts. We can wander the facilities hallways and see their scrubs and scratches, identifying the technical names for efforts that had to be scrapped because NASA has an abort procedure for everything: pad, launch, ascent, in-flight, and even the one everybody wishes they had in their car for an annoying passenger—ejection. Some plan for every phase of the course lest something goes wrong. And it will.

Our kids don’t have to stay there very long. Just until they get the hang of the new mindset, this unusual framework for their labors.

And that framework is: You will get it wrong. And then you get it right. Errors are normal. Mistakes are natural. Failure is fated. But what it doesn’t have to be is THE END.

In no short amount of time, they’ll be well rehearsed for life.

I know it can work. I heard the setup after I’d dropped my daughter off at the beginning of the summer. This was gist of the conversation:

Mentor: “Here’s what I want you to do. Make blank do blank.” *

Daughter: “Umm … That’s not very specific.”

Mentor: “Don’t I know it. That’s life. Now off you go.”

Results? Plenty. Loads of them. Usable ones? Not so many. Lots of failures. An endless amount. Embarrassing ones, time consuming and hugely frustrating ones.

Except one.

And really, truly, ultimately—that is the point. Don’t fall at the first hurdle.

Because what people often misunderstand is that right up until the moment of the wreck is not a colossal waste of time or effort. The result may be called failing, but the rest … is called learning.

There’s a lot to be said for scars and skinned knees. Our war wounds can be epic and extraordinary tales. They show we’ve done battle and that we made it through to the other side. They can prepare and instruct and inspire our kids to reach for the stars.

To fly to the moon. To land on Mars.

And maybe more important, to come back again.

~Shelley

*(sigh … nondisclosure agreement thingie)

Don’t forget to check out what we’re cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all talked about down in the pub. Plus, you can see more of Robin Gott‘s humor–all from the only pen carved from a human funny bone.

10Jan2015

The Brains Behind … Well, Just About Everything.

Posted in Astronomy, Business, Humor, Leaders, Science, Space by Shelley Sackier

Do you remember that old United States Army slogan? The one that barks out: We get more done before 9am than most people do all day.

Yeah, I’m not so sure what level of commercial success those folks found when using that little jingle to advertise club membership in America. To be honest, I think McDonald’s research proved a little more triumphant when broadcasting their opinion of: You deserve a break today.

Still, I bet most of us can probably think of one or two people who actually fit the bill for the timeline of military grade accomplishment. I’ve certainly met one.

Well, not exactly met, but saw interviewed.

Okay, not exactly viewed in person so much as watched on screen from a satellite feed.

Which was a little bit silly since the person was, in fact, interviewed in the next building over, not more than 100 yards away.

But I suppose that’s how someone like Elon Musk rolls, and it was quite fitting for the situation.

Now if you’re one of those folks who barely keeps up with the pace of how frequently your new president, prime minister, or monarch gets voted or crowned into office, then you might be more on par with my ability to track new faces thrust into the media spotlight.

No judgment.

So here’s the skinny on Mr. Musk: He is not a musician, a sports star, or a politician. He is not a reality TV character, an author, or a celebrity chef.

He is basically a giant brain supported by a couple of legs.

In truth, Elon Musk may very well be all of the things mentioned above, but his accomplishments in those categories have yet to make headline news. But I’m sure if we all give him a minute or two, they’ll start to show up. He truly has the biological computing power equal to ten people, and seems to have fit each of their lifetime achievement awards into forty some years.

A few of this man’s accomplishments include co-creating PayPal, working as CEO and head of product design at Tesla Motors, occupying the chairman’s office for SolarCity, and oh yeah, in his spare time, he launches rockets into the great cosmos with a little company called SpaceX.

The opportunity to hear Mr. Musk interviewed was brought to my attention by my daughter, when she announced he would be appearing on her campus as part of an aerospace symposium that would include some of the most current and historic superstars that have left their mark within the history of space exploration. Was I interested in throwing my name into the lottery with the hopes that we could get a couple of seats in the auditorium to see the Q & A?

Um, hell yeah.

Sadly, the lottery did not work in our favor, but the university kindly did not leave us standing in the lobby with our ears pressed against the theater doors. They set up a few more rooms where folks could watch big screens broadcast the interview for that ‘doesn’t it feel like you’re practically on stage with him?’ experience.

And truthfully, I think it was probably more revealing than sitting in the back of the auditorium just behind the woman with the hairdo that required its own zip code and the man who had set new physical records for height and breadth on his pediatric growth chart.

The first thing I noticed was our guest speaker’s eyes. They were showing signs of more than your typical wear and tear. I turned to my daughter. “Somebody needs a nap.”

After initially shushing me, she said, “The man doesn’t have time to sleep.”

“I hope he’s not refusing his body the biological need to use the toilet as well in favor of harnessing an asteroid. I’m pretty sure there are a bucketload to choose from.”

My daughter ignored me. The great god of science was speaking. And if you didn’t closely pay attention, you could very easily miss out on an off the cuff statement announcing his next biggest venture. Mr. Musk was like that. Little pomp and circumstance. Just a casual comment about how now one of his companies was planning to reuse their rockets instead of allowing them to crash into the sea, another company was going to create a subsonic air travel machine that would flip folks back and forth from Los Angeles to San Francisco faster than one could make a sandwich, and yet another that is working on a solar powered, suborbital, metagalactic spacecraft that will not only stop time, but reverse it in 30 minute increments.

Okay, that last one I made up, BUT I WOULD NOT BE SURPRISED!

Elon Musk is a man who doesn’t just gaze up at the stars in wonder. Chances are he’s a guy who recently looked up and decided he was growing weary of the same ole same ole constellations each season, and according to the latest space frenzy gossip, will likely whip up 700 new satellites to blanket the Earth and provide global internet access. It might be nice to see some new bling on Orion’s Belt, right?

I suppose for a fellah who finds ideas spilling out of his brain at such a clip, and who regularly works a 100 hour week, it’s not unexpected to see his name and face splashed across the news as many times in a day as I brush my teeth—and I am all about dental hygiene.

And it’s not a shocker to see how hard he’s working to get our butts onto Mars, to give us Earthlings a new pad to crash. Because one thing I recently discovered about the red planet is that its day has 37 minutes more than ours.

After learning this trivia tidbit, and having absorbed all that’s on this fellow’s ‘to do’ list in any given day, I’m guessing Mr. Musk is just hankering for one where he can get everything done and throw in a quick thirty minute kip to reboot.

~Shelley