“When life gives you melons, you might be dyslexic.”
Mount Vernon Christmas Jigsaw Puzzle be done! It almost did us in! The very top and very bottom were blood-pressure raisers! I declared several times that we had missing parts but alas, I was proven wrong again…everything fit…after almost two weeks of trying!
Did You Know? Jigsaw puzzles were originally created by painting a picture on a flat, rectangular piece of wood, and then cutting that picture into small pieces with a jigsaw, hence the name. John Spilsbury, a London cartographer and engraver, is credited with commercializing jigsaw puzzles around 1760.
Puzzle pieces can have “loops” and “sockets”, “knobs” and “holes”, “tabs” and “slots”, “keys” and “locks”, or any of several other alternative designations. Speaking as a fully-qualified jigsaw puzzle solver, I can say that the standard word is an outie.
After finishing it off, I headed for the market to get a few odds and ends…the necessities of life…berries, ice cream, tookie dough, etc. We fixed lunch at home…while Sue had left-overs from the Yucatan Grille, I whooped up a batch of bacon, eggs, and ham which gave me an excellent excuse to use the new grill cleaning kit! The grill is now in great condition.
We cleaned up and headed to see “money-bags”, our financial advisor. Marshall has been watching our money for almost twenty years and he steered us through the downturns with little problems! Good news, we are up 11% this year already…thank you Mr. Trump! We are doing OK so we do not have to practice eating baloney sandwiches yet! Marshall is the owner of Sagent Wealth Management and we are really happy within everything he is doing for us!
We drove along the beach from our home to Laguna Beach but took the freeway home. The sky was so clear we could see snow on the mountains 50 miles away!
Tonight is another full moon so I got the old camera out and set up the tripod and got a shot…not great but little wiggle.
Random Memories: For some reason, while taking the picture I thought of my Mom and Dad and I laying on our backs in the back yard in Culver City in late 1957 listening to the AM radio announcing when Sputnik was going to pass overhead. We watched for the new fangled “satellite” for almost a month just amazing that this thing was up in the sky and we could see it and it was man made. I heard it on my ham radio system…very exciting!
The satellite had a one-watt, 3.5 kg (7.7 lb) radio transmitting unit inside, developed by Vyacheslav I. Lappo from NII-885, the Moscow Electronics Research Institute, that worked on two frequencies, 20.005 and 40.002 MHz. Signals on the first frequency were transmitted in 0.3 sec pulses (under normal temperature and pressure conditions on-board), with pauses of the same duration filled by pulses on the second frequency.
We lived in exciting times…looking back I cannot imaging what Mom and Dad must have thought as then whey were my age, they didn’t even have electric in their homes. I remember watching Buster Crabb doing Flash Gordon so I knew satellite were possible.
Did You Know? Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite.[5] The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957, orbiting for three weeks before its batteries died, then silently for two more months before falling back into the atmosphere. It was a 58 cm (23 in) diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. Its radio signal was easily detectable even by radio amateurs, and the 65° inclination and duration of its orbit made its flight path cover virtually the entire inhabited Earth. This surprise success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, a part of the Cold War. The launch was the beginning of a new era of political, military, technological, and scientific developments.
We stopped by Old Ranch and talked to the special events director to see if we could get a deal on hosting the Topper’s Dance Club…looks like it is doable! We plan to talk to Craig, the president, tomorrow and get him to come and make arrangements should he deem it appropriate! Thank you Old Ranch for assisting us!
Arriving home, we called our grandson in New Hampshire and when he appeared on the video screen of the Echo Show, he was in shorts! Say what? New Hampshire and shorts! Well, it turned out he and Sarah are celebrating their anniversary and are in Barbados. When we called at 6:00 PM it was 83 degrees there…. far from the 22 degrees it was at his home. They will be there for a week!
We watched TV and crashed about 11:15 AM. Tomorrow we are off to a funeral in Whittier. Sad but we do want to pay our respects!
