Sun 29 Jan 2006 @20:08
Happy New Year! Today we celebrated the beginning of the lunar year in China, also known as the Spring Festival. This is year 4703 on the Chinese Calendar and it is a Year of the Fire Dog. You can read about what this year might have in store for you at sites like this one.
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger. The flight had a teacher on board and I was teaching in Central Forida so it is one of those moments that I will always remember. The kids I teach in high school now were all born after that…. A few years ago, the subject came up at work. We compared where we were in our lives in 1986. I was teaching high school. One coworker was a junior in high school. The other coworker was in second grade. [sigh]
We just ended the year of the Monkey, a mischievous animal. Friday morning on my way to work, I thought I heard the radio say, “How do you know an outie is an outie?” Well, if you have to ask…. Oh wait, it’s an Audi commercial. Never mind.
Always leave ‘em laughing!
Technorati tags: blog~personal~otoh~sydca~Year of the Fire Dog
January 30th, 2006 at 11:14
oh yeah, I remember…I was in 4th grade! GAWD…
January 30th, 2006 at 16:56
I was in sixth grade and I remember our principal coming in to tell us. Doesn’t seem like 20 years ago already.
January 30th, 2006 at 17:57
My ninth grade class was on a field trip to see it go up. Floridians got really “into” the teacher-connection, and tons of schoolchildren gathered across the Banana River to see the shuttle go up. I will never forget Mrs. Andreone weeping hysterically; most of us didn’t know how to react, except with disbelief. Dana Summers drew an exceptionally sensitive cartoon in that week’s Sentinel, with John Gillespie Magee’s poem as the caption. . .”O I have touched the surly bonds of earth. . .” as paraphrased by Reagan. Hard to believe it’s been twenty years. . .
January 31st, 2006 at 00:07
I was an undergrad intern at the Medical College of Virginia at the time. It was a Tuesday and it had started snowing. I thought about leaving early so I could avoid the hassle of winter weather travel, but they had a party for one of the doctors because his sister, Judith Resnick, was on board and I stuck around for that.
Everyone cheered when the plumes of exhaust billowed out from beneath the launch pad, but at T+73 seconds, the room grew eerily quiet. No one knew what had happened, just that something had gone wrong.
The ride home was worse than I thought it would be.