October 1999

Okay, there are two new pictures here with stories behind each.  The story behind the first picture is that it was taken, Saturday, 2 October 1999.  I was in the backyard with two colleagues cooking steaks.  Bill Murray, a new professor at Cal Poly, saw a contrail in the sky right at dusk and commented on what a nice sight it was, with dusk enveloping us and this nice, bright streak of light being written out on the sky.  We kept on talking and out of the corner of my eye I saw what seemed like a very nice contrail forming.  Then I turned and saw it all and just had a fit.   We were yelling so much that Wendy and another woman in the house thought that Benjamin had beeen hurt.  But what this was was a Minuteman missile being fired off from Vandenberg AFB about 35 miles south of us.  In the picture, which only shows a small part of the missile track, something happened where the clouds end.  Did it leave the atmosphere?  Why would this happen all of a sudden?  The missile can be seen still firing in the lower right hand corner of the photo.  Boy, was it a spectacular sight!

Boy is our boy a train nut!  Here's proof.  This coming weekend 9-10 October we are visiting Marna Williams, Ed O'Hara, and their daughter Avery O'Hara in Palo Alto.   We are going to a barbeque where they have a bunch of half size steam locomotives that were built for an exhibition in San Franciso around the turn of the century.  So he'll be in hawg heaven there.

We'll keep updating this every couple of weeks, so come back. Any comments are questions, email us:  fowen@calpoly.edu, disch@surfari.net