Ticks.

Fastest Vacation in the West.

It would be tight.
We unloaded our luggage on Friday before dawn in a remote parking lot of the Manchester/Boston Regional airport, then broke into a trot to get to a counter in time to grab boarding passes before we stripped shoes and accessories and spread our legs for Homeland Security. We stuffed ourselves into a full plane and landed in Baltimore on time around 9 am.
So far, so good.

Without delay, we took off for Las Vegas before I could smoke a cigarette or get a second cup of coffee. Damn! It would be hours before I could get some nicotine coursing through my veins. Coffee, I got, but Southwest Airlines offered no more than a bag of peanuts or some factory cookies to consume during the flight--unless you wanted to get drunk, for which you could pay a high price and wouldn't care about food anyway. Luckily, I had stashed a leftover spicy Italian sub into my carry-on bag, complete with jalepeno peppers, so Gayle and I didn't go hungry.

We banged down on the runway in Las Vegas right on time, then, after I crouched in a corner of the airport to suck down two cigarettes in a row, we hopped a shuttle bus to the Red Rock Hotel and Resort. The Red Rock turned out to be a huge, comfortable fun palace full of good food, music and gambling, located at the western edge of Las Vegas. We could see the entire city from our 16th floor room, a beautiful sight surrounded by awesome mountains, day or night.

We dropped our bags in the room and enjoyed a sumptuous meal on the ground floor at the Grand Cafe, which is open 24/7, and the hotel casino turned out to be a relaxing luxury. I could actually cross my legs on a padded chair, play video poker and smoke a cigarette right out there in public--indoors!

Viva Las Vegas!

By the time we got back to the room, we were too tired to venture out to the Strip. Gayle prepped for bed, while I went down to bask in the joys of indoor smoking. I'm not a gambler, but I enjoyed beating the house for $15 as I lounged at the poker machine.

Finally, we collapsed in an exceptionally snug bed, equipped with a feathery, lightweight comforter.
I woke up early, as usual, believing that every new day is full of promise, especially when you're on vacation.
But a promise is a promise, and Gayle promised to attend a wedding at 5 pm, with me as her guest, and prepping for the day ahead seemed to be a primary female activity. She had a hair appointment at the hotel salon at 2:30 pm, and the first hotel shuttle to the Strip didn't depart until 11:00 am. No time for Gayle to go sightseeing. But she was very understanding, so I hopped the bus to the Strip.

I had a mission. My favorite co-worker of many years, Brenda, wanted a genuine Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt from Vegas, so I hopped off the shuttle and began walking South toward the Hard Rock. As I watched the clock and admired the sights, awesome buildings and famous names, I realized I'd never make it in time, so I commandeered a cab and made a quick round trip to the hard rock mecca and its nearby hotel full of rock'n'roll memorabilia.

Mission accomplished. The attendants at the hotel hailed me a cab, and I was back at the north end of the Strip just in time to catch the shuttle back to my hotel, where I showered, suited up and made myself as beautiful as Gayle--I say!!!

So we hopped a cab to the Sienna Golf Club for the wedding, where flower petals curled down the aisle:

Then, as the sun set, the moon watched over our wine and cheese-fest on the patio. 

At this point, I forgot I had a camera, but the reception was superb. After the bride and groom finished their dance, a very talented Michael Jackson impersonator burst onto the dance floor and wowed the crowd for a good 20 minutes, peppered by lots of screaming girls. He was apparently a friend of the groom, Lee, known as popular Vegas radio personality, "D.J.Hollywood," a good match for Gayle's friend, Ashley, whom you may spot on the cover of Bride magazine very shortly.

No time left but to taxi back to the Hotel and collapse.

Again, I woke up early, but we had to catch an early shuttle to the airport to catch another shuttle up to St. George, Utah for a barbecue with the Parker family--not related to the wedding--two hours of highway through desert scenery. I was still in shock from the sight of Las Vegas. What a godforsaken gravel pit it is--huge palaces built in the dirt, a sandbox with castles for adults to play in, rocks, dry dirt and pathetic, sparse vegetation struggling for life everywhere. The palm trees, buildings and mountains are beautiful and awesome, but everywhere in between is dirt! Rocks! I missed trees already.

The large Parker family were at the top of their game, the women beautiful and the men charming. Two of the women swelled with the promise of more Parkers, while Eva tossed the best-ever-tasted chicken kabobs on the barbecue, and the patriarch, Alan, carved fresh, heavenly melons from his farm in northern Utah.

Warmed and satiated, we hopped the shuttle back to Vegas at 7 pm. I was secretly scheming a way to sprint back to the Strip to see the Freemont Street Experience at night, a tour of the old Vegas I had briefly visited back in 1969, but the obstacles mounted. Gayle would be tired, and the shuttle driver announced that roadwork along our route may delay our arrival time in Vegas--then, after five minutes into the trip, the driver decided to go back into St. George to pick up two tardy passengers, despite my grousing.

Freemont Street was fading. The only way to make it would be to pay a small fortune in cab rides when we got back to the airport, so, that clinched it. We caught the next shuttle back to the hotel and dove into the soft bed.

We said goodbye to Vegas the very next day at 1:30 pm, touched down in Chicago to wait for our connection and arrived back in Manchester, NH  after midnight, loaded with luggage, only to stare at a few acres of parking lot trying to remember where we parked.

You could find me face down on my bed about an hour later, shoes and luggage scattered in the hallway; I would be glad to get back to work so I could get some rest.

I used one leftover vacation day to check with friends on the internet. I had recently become friends with my first cousin, Dianne, who lives in northern Utah, whom I haven't seen in over fifty years. The possibility of meeting her on this trip never occurred to me, since St. George, Utah is about a four hour drive from her home in northern Utah, and we had very little time, not to mention social appointments.

But, lo! It happens that, as Gayle and I were feeding at the Parkers, Dianne and her husband were visiting one of their favorite sites, Zion National Park, just outside of St. George, which looks something like this:

And this:

In fact, they drove into St. George for lunch on the day Gayle and I went to the barbecue, so that my long lost friend, Dianne, and I were probably only a mile apart for two hours.

Oops. That's what you get for not keeping in touch.

My bad.

Alice Appreciation.

I was a very serious adolescent in the mid-fifties, hostile to authority and not known for laughing, but The Honeymooners could reduce me to tears, mostly because Jackie Gleason as "Ralph Kramden" was a gifted actor and a consummate buffoon, carrying his stupid schemes to absurd heights. Art Carney as "Ed Norton" struck me as way too silly for my tastes--no character in real life could be that stupid and goofy, I thought. I didn't learn to appreciate "Norton" until many years later, when I started expecting a laugh as soon as he walked in a room.
Then, there was Audrey Meadows, better known as "Alice." She was my hero--my heroine--ranking higher than "Matt Dillon" on Gunsmoke or John Wayne at the movies.
Look at her--she was an island of intelligence in a sea of idiots:






And, she was not afraid. "Ralph" could stomp and shout and threaten her, but when the moment came, she would stick a pin in this blowhard and , reduce him to a deflated sack of jelly, to my infinite delight.
I took the characters seriously at the time, even though I laughed at the stupidity. When "Ralph" finally hugged "Alice" at the end of many episodes and blubbered, "Baby, you're the greatest," I thought, "Naw, he's too stupid to appreciate her."
It was me. I'm the one who appreciated her.
She was beautiful, Audrey Meadows.

Where Am I? The Ultimate Journey.

I love maps, all kinds of maps. Whenever I travel by car, I must have a road map because I always want to know where I am, relative to where I came from and where I'm going. Also, I want to know where on this map I get to eat.
Here's a map of the visible universe:



That little speck in the center, the Virgo Supercluster,  is where we are, and the universe looks like a sphere because we're in the middle of it and we can see only about 14.2 billion light years (ly) in any direction. No doubt, there's a lot more stuff out past the sphere, but we can't see it--it's black--which is just an indication of our nearsightedness. Maybe the light out there, traveling at 186 million miles per second, hasn't had enough time to reach us, and, besides, we're probably not in the middle of the universe at all.
Now, I'm not traveling far away, but I still want to know where I stand. The Virgo Supercluster is chock full of smaller clusters which are each chock full of galaxies--yes, whole galaxies, each full of stars and planets.
I don't know where they got the name "Virgo," but it's Latin for "virgin" and has nothing to do with the constellation Virgo, except that the stars which form Virgo are also inside the Virgo Supercluster, right here with us, and we can see them with the naked eye.


The constellation is supposed to be a virgin wearing a skirt, but even if you connect the dots, it may be difficult to locate in the night sky because it's no more than a stick figure, obscured by smaller stars all around, although this is nothing new. Virgins are always hard to spot, unless they're under the age of 16.
So, just for the fun of it, let's zoom in on the map--to the Virgo Supercluster:

.

Only the biggest clusters in the Virgo Supercluster get their own names instead of numbers, but, of course, being us, we gave ourselves a name, a name not very colorful or exciting. We're called the Local Group, which sounds like a bunch of loiterers on the porch outside a general store, tilting back on chairs, smoking tobacco, shooting the shit, and passing judgement on random strollers, all for good fun. Of course, the map places us dead center, and, if we zoom in on the Local Group, we get this map:



Naturally, our galaxy is in the center of the map. It's Home! The Milky Way! And, here's a pic of the Andromeda Galaxy, our neighbor, the most spectacular galaxy in the Local Group:



Finally--home sweet home--here's a rendering of our galaxy. The Milky Way!



The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, forming a relatively flat disc full of stars, planets, etc., all spiraling toward the center. Our Sun is located in the Orion arm of the spiral, pretty far out from the center. Here's a telescopic picture of the center of the Milky Way galaxy taken from the Orion arm (that would be HERE, that would be US):



And another pic, supersensitive to light in the night sky:



Is it awesome, or what? You can't see all the distant light with the naked eye, but, when you see that milky band across the night sky--billions of stars too far away to form the dots of light we call stars--you're looking at the dim light from all the stars in all the arms of our galaxy, seen from the the Orion arm of the Milky Way. You're actually looking along the flat plane of our disc-shaped galaxy, but the stars are too far away to look like specks--they just look like a milky trail across the sky (get it? "Milky Way").

The Sun and Earth are pretty far out from the center of the galaxy, thank God, because, at the center of the Milky Way sits an ominous black hole, a ball of matter so dense that it's super-gravity sucks all the nearby stars into itself, sucking so hard that even light can not escape. We can't see the black hole because it won't let light out, plus, it's surrounded by billions of little stars getting sucked into dark doom, making it look like a crowd of fireflies congregating around a bowl of honey.

But, don't worry, the super gravity won't get to us within the next few million years. You've got plenty of time to write your wills. Even your great-great grandchildren will live goofily along, mostly unaware of the colossal suction that is bound to turn our world into a compacted black speck, like a grain of sand in a dark desert, settled on the surface of a massive black ball.
Much, much later--in the end--when the whole galaxy is finally sucked into the black hole, the damned thing may even explode and start a whole new generation of stars, planets and a race or two of curious goof-offs like us.
But, I digress. Let's get back to maps.



Out here in the Orion arm of the Milky Way, we find--among billions--our favorite star, the Sun. We're so close to it that it warms us, makes our veggies grow, and gives us a great tan if we stretch out on a beach. It doesn't look much like a star to us, but it is one.
The planets rotating around the Sun are not often aligned as in this map, but it's a nice image to help us get our bearings--that's why I love maps, to get my bearings, to see where I stand, to get oriented. We're the third planet from the Sun, inside the asteroid belt and the orbits of a bunch of other planets.
Here's an actual photograph of our planet, Earth, taken by an astronaut on a mission to the Moon. It's the prettiest planet in our solar system, with the possible exception of Saturn.:



Now, we're getting somewhere. At the bottom of the photo, you can see the ice that covers Antarctica, and behind the white clouds in the upper left (northwest quadrant) you can see the continent of Africa, with Saudi Arabia just across the Red Sea. The Mediterranean Sea is just barely visible at the top left of the globe.
So, if you get on a sailboat in Africa and cross that blue ocean to the left (the Atlantic), tacking a little north around to the back of the globe, you would run smack into North America:


Thus to another map of North America:



And a highlight of my home, New Hampshire:



Wherein lies my hometown, Manchester, near the bottom of the state:


Which--on maps--shows roads and streets like this:



Thus, I can find my way to the huge Mall of New Hampshire, just off the intersection of Interstate 293 and South Willow St. (highlighted in purple).

Now, all I have to do is consult the map of the mall to get what I'm looking for:

Aha, I see a "You Are Here" arrow on the map. All I have to do is go straight, take a right, then a second right, then a left, and I'm there!

I order a supreme pizza with everything on it, and when I lift the lid to take a look--Wow! It looks remarkably like a map of the Universe. I swear the little speck of green pepper in the center resembles the Virgo Supercluster.
 


I feel like I'm Home. And I can eat the map!
I do love maps, especially when they're pizza..

Madison Rising.

If you love Washington and Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and Patrick Henry, not to mention Madison--i.e. America--plus great rock music, you should take a listen to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8C7i9kdEf8

Native Calendar.

If we named the months of the calendar after Native moons instead of Roman emperors, it would read as follows:

Wolf
Snow
Crow
Pink
Flower
Strawberry
Thunder
Red
Harvest
Beaver
and Cold.

What's Your Moon?

I was born in the time of the Flower Moon--many moons ago.

Last month (August 2012) we looked up at a "Blue Moon," now defined as a second Full Moon in a single month. One month is supposedly based on one cycle of a Full Moon--one Full Moon equals one month--but the measure is so rough that we get that extra Full Moon, the Blue Moon, every three years.



Ancient Europeans and--especially--Native Americans in Northern America typically came up with names for all the Full Moons of the year, names which most often matched. So, if you want to know your Birthday Moon, check the list. It's no doubt more meaningful than your astrological sign, because this would be the month when you first experienced the world and its weather, hot or cold, in diapers or snowsuit.

BIRTH MONTHS:

January: Wolf Moon--Named because people listened to far off hungry wolves howling against their winter fast.

February: Snow Moon--also known as the Hunger Moon because of the difficulty of hunting in winter snows.

March: Crow Moon--when thawing snows revealed worms for the loud crows to eat. Also known as the Snow Crust Moon, because the snow surfaces thawed during the day and refroze at night to form a crust. Also known as the Worm Moon and the Sap Moon, when sap started running in the trees--yum, maple syrup.

April: Pink Moon--when the earliest colorful flowers appeared. Also known as the Grass Moon, and the Fish Moon, when fish spawned in the rivers.

May: Flower Moon--when flowers became abundant. Also known as the Milk Moon (?).

June: Strawberry Moon--when the short-seasoned strawberries (and raspberries) ripened, no doubt a special treat to all concerned. Also known as the Rose Moon.

July: Thunder Moon---named after frequent storms. Also known as the Buck Moon, for when deer sprouted antlers and hunters could provide good food. Also, the Hay Moon.

August: Red Moon--named for the haze at moonrise in the Great Lakes region, which reddened the moon, aka, Sturgeon Moon and Grain Moon..

September: Hunter's Moon--because when snow fell early, the still active wildlife could be spotted easily against the white background. Also known as the Corn Moon.

WE ARE HUNTER-GATHERERS, AND THIS IS THE TIME OF YEAR WHEN THE HUNTERS OF OUR SPECIES START DEPENDING ON THE GATHERERS

October: Harvest Moon--marking a season of abundance in the fields. Crops are ripe and ready to eat, corn and grains are preserved and everyone celebrates--just like pumpkin pie. Also known as the Frosty Moon--and the Blood Moon, for the frantic last chance to find game on the hunting grounds.

November: Beaver Moon--no doubt a Northeast Native American moniker, because it was the best time to trap and wear beaver furs, as beavers ran around all month chewing trees in preparation for winter.

December: Cold Moon--yu'think? Also known as the Long Night Moon because darkness in December is very long each day.

We're in September, so, if you're looking for Spring, for the time of the Pink Moon--

YOU MUST WAIT SIX MOONS.