Fun With Uranus.
Source: Wikipedia
It’s Uranus Day! On March 13th, 1781 the astronomer William Herschel announced that he’d discovered the previously unknown planet that would be named Uranus. Uranus had been seen before, even by ancient astronomers, but everyone thought it was just a faint star until Herschel turned his telescope toward it and took a good, clear look at Uranus. The addition of Uranus helped expand the solar system and people have been intrigued and puzzled by Uranus ever since. It’s not the biggest planet in the solar system or even the farthest but, as the third largest of the gas giants, Uranus is still pretty big, full of hydrogen and helium. There are twenty-seven known moons orbiting it and there are even rings around Uranus, although they’re faint and set at an odd angle. And scientists are learning new things about Uranus all the time, including very recently discovering a new moon, bringing its total to twenty-nine.
It takes Uranus eighty-four Earth years to orbit the sun, and yet a day on Uranus is just a little over seventeen hours. Uranus spins really fast!
That’s all about the planet Uranus. I’d now like to focus on the town of Uranus, along the historic Route 66. More of a tourist attraction than a small town it’s really home to a lot of fun attractions. The world’s biggest belt buckle is there–it’s more than ten feet tall and would probably fit a pair of pants just big enough to hold all of Uranus. There’s a whole weird collection of attractions including the fudge factory and the Sideshow Museum. It just seems like a fun and interesting place that makes Uranus worth a look. So far I haven’t visited there but I hope to one of these days. I did contact the tourist center there and asked if they were doing anything special on March 13th. They nicely replied, “We meant to but got busy and didn’t have time to schedule anything. Maybe next year.”
I was glad for the answer and also took the reminder that, being of a certain age, I really need to schedule a colonoscopy.
Source: Our Changing Lives
So I’m marking another elliptical spin around the sun, another year in the rearview mirror. This isn’t a milestone year so it’ll be a quiet affair: dinner, maybe a few drinks, a quick jaunt to Sri Lanka and back. When we’re young every birthday is a major event. Turning one is worthy of celebration, even if most of us don’t remember it, at two we’ve doubled our age, at three we’ve tripled it. At four, five, and six we really start to explore the world on our own, make friends, try on and discard personas. Ten marks the beginning of the double digits but the next big step isn’t until thirteen, considered in many cultures to be the age of adulthood, although its onset usually starts earlier. At sixteen, in the US, you can drive a car, at eighteen you can vote, and at twenty-one you can legally drink. Then the way stations only come once every ten years: thirty is when you say you’ve got the whole adulting thing figured out, even though you haven’t and never will, and at forty you’re “over the hill”. The 
Almost nine years ago, on September 23rd, 2014, to be precise–well, I can’t be really precise but I think it was about 12:13PM that it was finally over–I finished chemotherapy. This is the date I mark as the end of my fight with cancer. The doctors will say it wasn’t really over until the following December when I had a major surgery. There were no signs of cancer at that point but the doctors said, “To be safe we’re gonna nuke it from orbit.” And there were still no signs the following spring, but I had a small surgery anyway to be completely safe.
There was an unexpected passenger in the car. I know a thing or two about spiders and even I was surprised to see the large orb web spun over the passenger seat, not to mention the large Aranea cavatica in the middle of the web, and if you know anything about spiders you know that’s the same species that was the hero of a famous children’s book. Some people think the pig is the hero of the book but let’s be clear: there’s a reason it’s called Charlotte’s Web and not Wilbur’s Mudhole.
April 2022-Things got off to a rocky start when someone said, “Hey, remember pet rocks?” This sent everyone off into a research project that uncovered, among other things, the fact that there was an official “Pet Rock” invented by an advertising executive and sold in a cardboard box with ventilation holes in 1975. Most staff old enough to remember the fad thought pet rocks were just rocks that people found and gave to each other as a joke in the mid-‘70’s. The fad was briefly revived by the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. A discussion of whether or not pet rocks should have googly eyes attached quickly degenerated into everyone sticking googly eyes on everything.
