My First Contact With Roots

And until I got online today, it had totally slipped my mind today is also First Contact Day! Yes, that's my inner nerd breaking out -- First Contact refers to humankind's first official encounter with extraterrestrials forty-seven years from today. (And in Star Trek where that is from -- the date is made official by the eighth Star Trek film, titled ironically enough for this post Star Trek: First Contact -- the number forty-seven itself also gets quite the treatment in many of the series in blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments, but that I'll let you research.) Yesterday April 4 was Square Root Day, and until I looked online this morning I though I was the only person who remembered it. 4/4/16 (April 4, 2016), the fourth of nine this century. Heh.


The next Square Root Day is in nine years, May 5, 2025 (5/5/25) and that's when our son Jeffrey will be within spitting distance of graduating high school! Our daughter Sarah will already have done so the year before, just a bit older than Ember Miller who narrates the story of Kristen Simmons' novel Article 5 (ISBN 9780765329615) where the United States' Bill of Rights is subsumed after a great war that's left major cities deserted by the Moral Statutes. It's marketed as a dystopia which recommended it to me ... unfortunately, what seems to be a teenage version of The Handmaid's Tale where ONE HAPPY COUNTRY -- ONE HAPPY FAMILY seems to be the mantra on which the powerful want to rebuild society has fits and spurts and starts, more than I can condone in a text.


The P. Craig Russell Library of Opera Adaptations: Vol. 3: Adaptions of Pelleas & Melisande, Salome, Ein Heldentraum, Cavalleria Rusticana. ISBN 1561633887 Ok, the title I got off Amazon because I wasn't sure how much to list. I finally finished it this weekend (getting through the snooze-fest that was Pelleas & Melisande was half the battle), and I STILL don't get Cavalleria Rusticana that Martha was a singer in during her university years. Ein Heldentraum seems essentially a poem done to music, and Salome is a marvelous twist on the story of the dancer asking for John's head on a platter! And P. Craig Russell? He's a long-honored comic book illustrator whose degree is in painting and in this work -- and I assume the other volumes as well -- he really gets the chance to shine!


So as of this weekend, Martha's team that bowled in Fargo is in fourth place for state bowling. Whether they keep that position or get knocked from it we'll find out in three weeks and see if there's any prize money or product endorsements that come their way. This weekend I had Sarah and Jeffrey at home with me except for the few hours Sarah got invited to her friend Kerrigan's birthday pizza and pool party at the Grand International. Meanwhile, Jeffrey and I got to bond playing a few rounds of Gauntlet at Original Comics and Collectibles and picked up a few of each. Then we hung out at home, then I picked Sarah up (she DID ask to stay a little longer, and after that we did dinner at Taco John's instead of going to sit down formally where it likely would have been full due to prom night!


Sunday at church while the kids were in Sunday school, I was one of the people helping assemble layettes, packages of child clothes and cleaning supplies for shipment overseas and the person in charge referred to me and another person who'd already done this and got started on our own. The other person she called out her name, but on my name she blanked. I filled it with "whatshisname" and later I told Sue don't worry about it -- I've got a face people recognize right away, but not my name. Sunday afternoon: fried chicken for lunch, some tablet tapping, drawing with sidewalk chalk how much the kids miss Mommy (who got home just after we did from another errand at about 6 pm -- she had to let us in!), bubble blowing, and just settling in and settling down.


Just before the Vulcans landed,


David