Ceiling Lizard Is Watching You...

I love living in the sub-tropics.

Last night I turned on the bathroom light and noticed a strange shadow. The light is a three-panel fluorescent fixture built into a drop ceiling over the sink. (Very 80s.) The shadow was about four inches long with a tail and four legs. Somehow, one of the ubiquitous mini lizards that inhabit the place had gotten itself up into the light space. (Actually, it must have come down into the fixture from the attic/crawl space, but I can't figure out how it did that, either.) These lizards are adorable. They live in the lanai room, which is half open to the world, and in the front entryway as well as all through the garden. Their main occupations are puffing out their throat sacs (which are surprisingly large and delicate for the size of the animals--transparent with a visibly red vein system), and doing herky-jerky little lizard push-ups with their front legs.

I didn't want to make a lot of noise at that hour, so I left him there overnight. This morning he was still there so I started poking at the panels covering the lights with stick end of a plunger. I pushed up one panel until it got hung up on the frame and then started bopping the one the lizard was on until he couldn't stand it any longer and jumped. It took several tries but eventually he fell through the crack and landed in a wicker soap basket on the toilet tank. From there he leapt onto a nice big round natural sponge on the side of the tub. I was able to pick up the sponge and walk out of the bathroom before he panicked. Then he ran up my arm.

He froze halfway up. I felt little lizard feet on my skin and immediately regressed to eight years old. "Cool!" I thought. "I wonder if I can keep him?"

Adult me said, "No," so I carried him on my arm very slowly to the front door where he saw daylight and jumped for it. I did notice before he left that his tail was already bobbed from some previous misadventure.

Mom, meanwhile, never noticed the lizard or his shadow, neither did she hear me banging away at the light fixture. I had to tell her about it twice and then she allowed as something like that had happened twenty years ago, too, and Dad took care of it.

I Want To Believe

I "saw" the Space Shuttle launch last week. I didn't go up to Cape Canaveral this time, and just as well since the launch was delayed again, but the launch was still visible--158 miles away (as the crow flies)!!! It took less than five minutes. A tower of thick white smoke, a vertical cylindrical cumulus cloud, shot up into the breaking dawn with a point of intense yellow-white light atop it. The light seemed to come back down again, an optical illusion, as the shuttle curved off to the northeast away from where my brother and I were standing on the front lawn. We "saw" the booster rockets fall away in a flash of light that stayed behind and below the main show.

It was all very depressing.

Why?

Because by the end of this year, the shuttles will be retired and the nation that put men on the moon will no longer have any manned launch capacity at all. We will ride into low earth orbit as passengers on Russian ships. Because we won't be able to do it ourselves. We're too busy holding Tea Parties and celebrating Confederate History months, objecting to evolution, embracing anti-scientific non-rationalism and gutting our own economy while lashing out militarily around the world.

This is what a civilization in decline looks like.

I really want to believe the president when he says we will go to Mars and an asteroid. Maybe we will. Maybe we can do it in spite of not having the cutting edge technology, and the launch capability and the trained teams, both ground and orbital. Just because his predecessors promised the Moon and Mars and the rest while cutting NASA's capabilities doesn't mean his flat NASA budget portends the same.

Maybe private companies will take over the lunar program. Just because the railroad companies required federal land grants before they built transcontinental lines, just because the airlines required federal airmail subsidies before they would fly coast-to-coast, just becasue no one but the federal government would or could build the interstate highways and national air traffic control systems, doesn't mean private companies won't jump to fly to the space station and the moon without any immediate visible payoff for them.

I want to believe. Really, I do. In the long run, private enterprize in space is the way to go. In the long run. I'm just not sure we have that kind of time, anymore.

Snowbird Migration Patterns

Saw an article in the News Press the other day. Yes, the paper here is still pretty good. All the old people around here, set in their ways as they are, keep supporting it. The only bad part is they still support the horrendous legacy comics, especially on Sunday. Anyway...

The article got me to thinking if there were any other places where such a large per centage of the population regularly up and moved away for such long periods. People who vacation for a couple of weeks (at the beach, in the mountains, skiing, wherever) aren't going to accumulate enough stuff to donate. The people who come here come from all over so the places they come from don't experience that same concentration of migrants. Here, this is a big enough deal that the Post Office handles the collection.

If you've heard of anything like this elsewhere, please let me know.

The Return of the GIPS*

Must be a Christian holiday coming up, the *Giant Inflatable Pagan Symbols are back. This time there's a seven foot tall pink inflatable rabbit with faux wicker basket at the head of a neighbor's driveway and a clutch of two foot long pastel eggs further down the street. Not nearly the menagerie from last time around, but then Easter is not nearly as commercialized as Christmas. Still, I don't get the logic of promoting symbols of the Old Religion's spring festival in Christian observances. It makes much more sense to celebrate a real Seder for the Last Supper. If it's "for the kids," I don't think infantilizing religion is a good idea, although it does explain the appalling lack of theological understanding expressed by many adherents (especially the more politically active ones).

I did buy a half dozen Cadbury Creme Eggs to share around.