You should be envious...

You should be envious ... as this is what I had for dessert today, at Jack's.  It's an orange-rosemary panna cotta, and it was brains-fall-out delicious.  I had the pina colada version of this last week and thought it was great – but this version is even better!

While we had lunch today (with our friend Michelle), we watched the webcast of the spectacular launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy.  The image of the two side cores landing side-by-side looked like something straight out of a science fiction story.  It occurred to me that the science fiction trope of a flying car has at last become reality, with Elon Musk's Tesla roadster now in Earth orbit (and soon to be solar orbit).  That's not quite how I imagined flying cars would turn out, but ... it will do.  It will do...

Bunch of Valentines...

Bunch of Valentines...  Generated by JSisyphus on my Sisyphus table...

Blacksmith Fork Canyon...

Blacksmith Fork Canyon ... is just a few minutes from our house, and yet it's one of our favorite wildlife watching venues.  We make the roughly 35 mile drive (it's a long canyon!) up and back two or three times every week.  Yesterday we did so again, late in the afternoon, and were treated to three great viewings of bald eagles (twice the same adult, perched about 100 yards from the road), and a long viewing of a small herd of deer (8 does and yearlings) browsing about 30 yards from the car.  One of the things we love about the Model X is that it's so quiet that animals aren't leery of it.  We parked there, car on, for ten minutes or so.  The deer looked up at us at first, then decided we weren't a threat and went on munching...

Now here's something I can root for!

Now here's something I can root for!  If you know me, then you know I have a profound lack of interest in sports (and therefore an equally profound ignorance of them).  But the excitement that sports fans unembarrassedly display is something I can identify with – it's just that my excitement springs from something other than sports.  In this case, it's today's scheduled launch of SpaceX's “Falcon Heavy”, with Elon Musk's Tesla roadster as the payload.

If you don't know about the Falcon Heavy, here's some background.  Don't miss the animation on that page!  Today's launch will be the Falcon Heavy's maiden flight, and Musk has been careful to set expectations low, saying there was a 50% chance the thing is going to blow up.  Whatever happens today, I'm sure SpaceX will eventually get Falcon Heavy working reliably.  When they do, it will be the world's largest (by payload to orbit) operational rocket.  The qualification is because the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program was larger, but of course it is no longer operational. 

More than simply being the biggest, it will (like it's smaller brother, the Falcon 9) be reusable.  I'm old enough to remember when NASA told Congress that orbital booster reusability was impossible, and that the closest anyone could ever get to that was the Space Shuttle approach.  For a tiny fraction of the Space Shuttle's development cost, private enterprise has done what NASA said was impossible – and as of today, with almost the same payload capacity that NASA was ever able to achieve.  The launch costs for SpaceX are absolutely dwarfed by NASA's costs – a single Space Shuttle launch (including amortized development costs) cost more than SpaceX has spent for their entire development program and all launches combined.  Yay, capitalism!

I will be watching in a couple hours...