Twenty years ago, I sat in Mr. Slattery’s eighth grade classroom at St. Hllary’s school in Fairlawn, Ohio. We were turned away from the blackboard, watching the TV on the A/V cart. It was to be a special day, as we were going to watch the launch of Challenger via a live NASA feed. Mr. Slattery was a huge fan of the space program, and was planning on having us follow along with Christa McAuliffe’s lesson plan throughout the mission.

We listened as the countdown proceeded, watched as the main engines gimbaled around, listened to the roar as the solid rocket boosters came to life. Smoke roiled out from the pad, with Challenger rising above it balanced on a pillar of fire.

Then 73 seconds into the flight, the unthinkable happened. A flash of light and an expanding ball of smoke as the two solid rocket boosters swung wide and then continued to climb. And pieces of the Challenger - ripped apart by the violence - were slowed from their upward flight by friction and began to rain down to the ocean, nearly 9 miles below.

I don’t remember much of what happened then - I do know at some point Mr. Slattery turned off the TV. Most of the class was sitting in shock. I sat there and kept replaying the last few seconds of the mission over and over again. Our teachers milled around - Mrs. Moore, the other 8th grade teacher came into our room in tears and was comforted by Mr. Slattery. Mrs. Barta and Mr. Riggi, the 7th grade teachers were in and out of the room.

Finally, things calmed down when Mr. Antonelli, our principal, made an announcement over the PA. Mr. Slattery then moved to the front of the class and spoke to us. He talked about the search for knowledge. About our need as humans to explore, extend, and grow. About courage in the face of adversity. He told us that in the coming weeks we would hear about Challenger time and time again, and that everything would be covered from the moment of liftoff, up to the final “oh, shit”. But that we needed to remember the crew not for how they died, but for how they lived and what they lived for.

Over 20 years later, those words still resonate with me.

Alex is nine today. Space travel is part of his world - he was Neil Armstrong for a project at school last year, and he and I have watched two shuttle launches on NASA TV together. We have visited NASA in Cleveland and in Florida, and we have watched a space probe launch from Cape Canaveral.

When at KSC, Alex and I viewed the Astronaut Memorial together - for me, it was a chance to pay my respects to a group of men and women who have inspired me and helped define who I am. I remember him being oddly silent when standing in front of the memorial with me - a strange contrast to the constant chatter that marked the trek up the walkway. We read the names together, and I picked him up and hugged him after he became upset when we talked about why those particular names were cut in the metal.

Alex and I have talked about the accidents that claimed Columbia, Challenger, and Apollo 1. We’ve talked about the Soviet Union tragedies of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11. Alex is a smart child, but he is also emotional, often very much so - so those discussions were, by necessity, very brief and very vague. Soon I need to talk to him about it in depth and without distractions, and answer his questions. This is what him and I did at Gettysburg last summer when we talked about the Civil War.

While doing research for this post, I found the following excerpt from the book “New Moon Rising” by Frank Sietzen, Jr. and Keith L. Cowing. The event described took place soon after the Columbia memorial was dedicated at Arlington Cemetary. I wanted to include it here to give another perspective on what exploration means to us.

On one cold dark Sunday afternoon not long after the dedication, a mother and her young son came to the astronaut’s graves. Her identity is unknown to the authors of this book—but her actions were witnessed by one of us. Speaking with a strong accent, she tried to describe to her child what these plaques meant, and who lay buried nearby. “They were heroes,” she tried to explain, who had voyaged into space aboard the space shuttles “to help the world learn new things about the universe,” about space, but had died in the effort.

But the little child didn’t understand what she was trying to convey. “Why, mom?”he asked repeatedly, “Why did they die?” She struggled again to make sense of it so he could grasp what it was they were seeing, in a way that would fix the moment in his memory.

But the words didn’t work. In the soft, gathering winter gloom the child just didn’t understand. Finally, after he asked the second or third time, “Why did they die, mom?” his mother gave up trying to explain it. But after a moment she looked down at her son. As the sky high above Arlington turned into sunset, she said softly, “For you.”

Ad Astra Per Aspera. The road to the stars is a hard one, but then again anything worth doing is hard.

For more information:

Myths about the Challenger Disaster:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11031097/

Evergreen State College Challenger Resources:
http://www.evergreen.edu/library/govdocs/hotopics/challenger.html

Official NASA Challenger Site:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/mission-51-l.html

Arlington Cemetery Challenger Memorial:
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/challengr.htm

Challenger Biographies:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Biographies/challenger.html

Apollo 1 Disaster:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollo204/

Columbia Disaster:
http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/

Sixteen Minutes From Home: A Tribute to Columbia:
http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/columbia/memvideo.htm

Astronauts Memorial Foundation:
http://www.amfcse.org/Default.htm

Ahhh, yes. Those exciting little heat-sealed, plastic packages that can only be opened via use of a small chainsaw or some other large, sharp, dangerous cutting implement.

For the longest time I thought it was just me who was having problems with these packages, but reading this blog entry over on But She’s A Girl and it’s associated comments proved to me that there are others out there who find it a bit….well, ridiculous as well.

The really tedious thing is that you need to remove at least three seams from the pack before you can safely get the goods out. However, I suspect that I’m not the only person who howls with rage, frustration and pain on nearing the second corner, and—maddened by blood loss—attempts to tear the two halves apart with their bare hands, thus catapulting the delicate gadget within across the room to smash against the opposite wall.
[Via BSAG]

Wordpress 2.0 was released around a month ago, and in that timespan I’ve been dreading going through the process of upgrading. Not that I didn’t want to - there are a number of reasons why I wanted to move up, the most important of which is that from where I was at version 1.5 I would frequently run into odd plugin issues.

But that is no more - as of around 30 minutes ago rants.psychoticpineapples.com is running the latest and greatest version from the hard-working, under-appreciated, and genius developers at Wordpress. All the difficulties that I was imaginging were no problem at all. The content came over fine, including all the links and graphics. The plugins that I use the most - Delicious Integrator, Spam Karma, Amazon Media Manager (not entirely integrated on the site, but in the works) - all worked fine. The theme I use - Equix - still looks the way it did earlier this morning, including the parts I painfully designed in Photoshop by myself (there was a warning on the page for Equix talking about a possible problem with the theme and archive pages, but I’m not seeing that).

This is all exactly what I was hoping - a nice, painless upgrade. And that’s what happened - I was able to backup my existing installation (well, OK, I very anally backed it up about 3 times on two different machines - but that’s more related to my OCD than anything else), follow the upgrade instructions, and then be back up and running. The complete downtime for the site was no more than 10 minutes. And some of that was me off making a pot of coffee. The perfect upgrade.

Thoughts on the upgrade? Well, as I mention above I’m only about 20 minutes into the new version, but the first thing I picked up on was the speed improvement. My pages are generating and loading faster than they were in the past. The other thought concerns the management console - the plugin configuration works across the board on all the installed plugins, they’ve cleaned up the interface a bit, and it just looks better.

Now for the big question - with this upgrade out of the way will I stop avoiding my weblog and post more often? One would hope so, but only time will tell….

Update: Ahhh, perhaps I raved too soon! I use the very excellent Ecto tool to post, manage, and generally keep some measure of control over my blog posts and the Wordpress 2.0 upgrade broke the ability to upload images to Wordpress from Ecto. This was discovered by trying to upload my little squirrel buddy at the top of the post to my server. However, there is a work-around that was able to employ which fixes the problem for now, and my guess is that this will be officially fixed in a maintenance release somewhere down the road.

Well, way back in this post way back in March I expressed my desire to unleash a burst of creativity this November as part of National Novel Writing Month. One month, one 50,000 word novel. Sounded pretty easy to me way back in March.

Well, it’s January. And my literary output, although much more impressive than it was a year ago, still does not include a novel. It would be easy to blame the lack of accomplishment on work, or on my grandfather’s illness, or on any number of excuses. In reality, the problem was more related to the story I was working with. I just reviewed the 5,000 words that I managed to write down the first few days of November, and the story drags. No need to discuss any further than that, just accept the fact that it was slow moving and boring. Trust me on this one.

Now, I know that in his book “No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days”, Chris Baty explains that this shouldn’t really matter. In fact, he goes on to note that this is a quite common experince and one should just push on past it. That’s where I fell down - I wasn’t able to let go of the fact that what I was writing wasn’t up to my (completely out-of-whack) standards. Although I didn’t for one minute think it on a conscious level, there seemed to be one part of my subconscious brain that fully expected me to sit down over the course of a few weeks and crank out a New York Times Bestseller.

The next step for me is to pick a month and have my own personal NaNoWriMo - leading candidates at this time are February and March, but it’s still up in the air. At the very least it will be humbling (again).

News Flash! Apparently meeting Mike Buckley is now a prize. I know quite a few co-workers and managers who would be astounded and stunned by this. Honestly, I’m still a bit amazed every time I walk into a book store and see his name on a shelf, or get a Google Alert with Mike’s name in it.

As you painfully know, I’ve been exhorting everyone to go out and buy copies of Mike Buckley’s excellent “The Sisters Grimm: The Fairy-Tale Detectives books. They’re targeted at older children and young adults (Alex loves them) - but both Beth and I enjoyed reading them as well. This either says something about the universal appeal of these books or our maturity level. Something for you to decide.

The latest Sisters Grimm excitement is the chance to win a trip to New York City to meet Mike Buckley (er, sorry - I believe he goes by the more Scribesque “Michael Buckley” these days). The contest is open to kids 14 and under, and involves writing a 1,000 word or less story either based on a fairy-tale or an original idea. This may be a bit advanced for Alex too, but there are a pair of smart sisters out on the west coast by the name of Ellyn and Claire who I’d like to see enter the contest. And that’s not only because they remind me of Daphne and Sabrina!

Surf over to The Sisters Grimm website for full details on the Scribe content. Head over to Amazon to buy yourself a copy of one or all of Mike’s books: The Fairy-Tale Detectives (Book #1), The Unusual Suspects (Book #2), or the latest installment, The Problem Child” (Book #3)