Category: Blog

Waterfall and Crackers!

June 5, 2021

Today we drove two hours south to Pennsylvania. Our first stop was Raymondskill Falls, a few minutes south of the town of Milford (which itself is about 10 minutes across the border).

Although we arrived early, it was already popular and one of the two car parks was full. We found a spot in the second and started the brief walk through the woods to the falls. The trail was labeled with this scary sign:

Luckily no bears were to be seen 🙂

Mysteriously (considering the full car parks) the path and falls were almost devoid of people and we had the viewing platforms to ourselves. It’s a beautiful waterfall, and has several stages that drops about 40 meters in total.

Here’s a panorama that attempts to show the two distinct main falls, but there are more both above the right one and below the left.

It was lovely, and absolutely worth the visit.

That said, our true reason for the drive was more fireworks! They’re legal year-round in Pennsylvania and there were three stores very close to the border. We visited all of them.

As with previous visits, we were dazzled by the selection. All the stores sell fireworks to professionals as well, so you could buy all sorts of items including launching platforms and even equipment to control remote launching systems. You could even get the required licenses in one shop! (Of course we couldn’t do this, since the laws in our state are different.)

Fireworks can be extremely expensive, especially for items you quite literally set on fire. The most expensive single-fuse item I saw today was this:

It’s an amazing firework (search on YouTube to see one being let off) but $375 gets you a firework that lasts for 41 seconds after you light the fuse 🙂

The priciest item I saw was this:

It’s a box of 120 mortars that requires a launching system (and license) to fire off. Basically it’s a near-professional show in a box! For only $700 🙂

The shops were very busy, and we saw people filling shopping carts with all sorts of items, and I’m sure they were spending hundreds or even thousands. Two young guys behind us in line had five 180-shot launchers in their cart, as well as loads of other stuff, and were talking about going back first thing tomorrow morning to buy a 660-shot launcher that had sold out today!

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On the other hand, items like those above are incredibly cheap. That ‘Saturn rocket’ with 100 shots is under $10, and those 144 bottle rockets were only $5! I bought none of these, since I don’t like firing off noisy, high-flying rockets.

The most unusual items we saw were the first officially licensed fireworks:

I’m sure The King would be proud!

While we avoided anything with ”high flying’ or ‘loud report’ in the description we still managed to spend about $200 today on a large variety of different items (including the ‘Dark Soul’ shown earlier).

July 4 will be fun this year 🙂

The Sky Is Falling

May 14, 2021

Back in July 1979, I feared that I might die because of Skylab falling on me.

Skylab was the first ‘space station’, built and operated by the USA for 10 months from mid 1973 until early 1974. When the final crew departed they put Skylab into a higher orbit with the intention of leaving it in space until 1983 when the (in development) Space Shuttles could service it. Ultimately nature had other ideas and by 1979 it was clear Skylab would fall to Earth.

NASA’s calculations suggested it would land in the eastern Indian Ocean somewhere. But they didn’t know precisely where or when, and in Australia we were very aware there was a chance it would land smack on us! I can still recall schoolyard doomsayers predicting it could land on someone’s house, and to 7-year old me this was (very briefly) the new big scare to replace King Kong snatching me out of a window one night.

On July 11, 1979, during its 34,981st orbit, NASA made a last minute adjustment to prevent Skylab from falling on the USA. Later that night it entered the atmosphere and while most of it burned up as it fell some parts eventually rained down on remote areas of the western Australian outback.

It didn’t fall on our house, or anyone’s house for that matter. At best it may have given a kangaroo a bit of a start.

The madness quickly transitioned from ‘Skylab will fall on you!’ to ‘If you find Skylab pieces you’ll be a millionaire!’ and treasure hunters of all stripes descended on the outback to find what remained of the space station.

Some were successful, finding many pieces including some very large ones. Much of it is on display now in a museum in the town of Esperance, but some made its way into private collections. While the USA claimed that Skylab was still its property, it never made any attempt to claim debris. Quite the opposite actually: president Carter apologized to Australia and NASA gave memorial plaques to those that found the first pieces of debris!

In the end Skylab was a successful mission, the falling to earth didn’t hurt anyone, and everyone emerged smiling. The world moved on.

There have been many more cases of spacecraft raining down in the years since, and every time it happens (as recently as last week) the media reminds us once again that they might land on our houses! Let’s hope, like Skylab, that when our space trash does fall back to Earth it’s careful enough to land far away from any of us 🙂

Vaccinated

April 22, 2021

We went for our second shot of covid vaccine today. Our city is using a downtown stadium as one of several vaccination sites and it was where we went today.

There were about 2000 people getting their second shots in the morning, and then the afternoon was for others getting their first shot. Lines were long but fast moving, so our wait wasn’t excessive.

One of the reasons for the long lines (which snakes up and down stairs and spanned two levels) was social distancing, and they had cute entertainment-themed signs to remind us where to stand.

It was quite a sight to see the floor of the arena (that we’d been to before for wrestling shows) converted to a vaccination clinic. Even the led signs up on the seats had vaccination messages on them!

And then, very quickly, we got our second jabs and joined the crowd of ‘fully vaccinated’ (yes I know technically it takes 10 more days…)

A quick wait just in case of side effects and we were good to go.

Speaking of side effects some people get them and some don’t, and they’re more common after the second shot. I read the rate is about 55%, so statistically one of us will wake up feeling crook tomorrow (since the side effects are more common the next day)!

Albany has done a good job with vaccinations, and we are above the national and state rates. But as with most parts of America supply has now exceeded demand and theres still many that haven’t yet become vaccinated. Some just need a gentle push toward a clinic, but there’s a non-trivial amount of Americans that say they’ll never get the vaccine (and even still deny covid) which will seriously hamper this country’s ability to overcome covid.

Let’s hope they understand this and go and get a shot soon. It’s easy, it’s free, it’s fast and it’s safe. And it’s what we all need to do to move on from this pandemic.

Robot Claw