Farmers in the Stone Age got the girls...

Farmers in the Stone Age got the girls...  Seventeen of them, on average!

Barn progress...

Barn progress...  I got the upstairs subpanel installed and tested yesterday.  Now it will be quite straightforward to wire up my office, some lights in the storage area, and the electric hoist for hauling heavy stuff up through the “hatch” in my woodshop. 

The tile guys showed up with the wrong tile (dang it!), and getting the right tile is going to add a week onto the project.  They did get the underlayment (a kind of concrete board) in place, doing a very nice job.  The guy in charge was particularly skilled at cutting perfectly straight edges in the concrete board with a small, hand-held, battery-powered saw that used a 3" diameter diamond blade.  If I tried that the result would be ... not good.  He made it look ridiculously easy, but in a conversation with his sidekick I discovered that though he (the sidekick) has been trying to do it for a year, he still can't make a straight line.  It reminds me of watching the masons at work, doing things that they made look easy, but when I tried it I got nowhere at all.

Today I'm mostly going to concentrate on getting lights up in Debbie's indoor agility arena, though I have a few other little things to do as well...

Solar corona...

Solar corona...  Taken as a composite of 29 images, during the recent solar eclipse, from Svalbard, Norway.  Click to embiggen.  Via APOD, of course...

“…he was just doing his job.”

“…he was just doing his job.”  Robert Hite, one of the last surviving crew on Doolittle's Raid on Tokyo in WWII has died of heart failure.

A few years ago, when another of the Doolittle Raid survivors had died, I was shocked to learn that many of my colleagues at work had never heard of the Doolittle Raid.  It's not as though it was ancient history – it happened in 1942, just ten years before I was born.  It was one of the most memorable stories to emerge from the American side of WWII, and was the subject of a wildly popular book and movie, both titled “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”.  How could any American not know about it?

Worse, those few colleagues of mine who did know the story were all immigrants.  Several Estonian colleagues knew about it in considerable detail, having been educated in primary school about this bit of American history – in the Soviet Union.  A colleague who hails from Australian knew about it, as did another who immigrated from Israel.  It seems that everybody except Americans knows about it!