Tag mars phoenix

For years I have been bugging Ali about trying out for Wheel of Fortune.  She is great at the game, I have watched her time and again solving puzzles easily, most times faster than the contestants on the show.  She never shared my enthusiasm for going on the show.  Well now there is no excuse for her not to try.  They are going to be doing try outs for the show 12 miles away from our house on Sunday!  I will drag her there if I have to. She is worried that she could choke with the additional pressure.  I have confidence that she will do just fine and if she doesn’t who cares, at least she gave it a shot.  I’m excited to see how it goes.

With all my interest in Mars lately, I was excited to find out that there is another Mars lander scheduled to touch down at th end of May, named Phoenix. Phoenix is going to be landing close to the Martian North Pole.  It isn’t a rover like Spirit and Opportunity, rather a stationary robot.  The area that it is landing in supposedly has a high probability of having frozen water just under the surface.  It’s going to use it’s robotic arm to dig down and analyze what’s underneath.  While perusing the site I also saw a cool image of what the Earth and moon looks like from Mars.  Seeing all of these images make me wish somewhat that I followed one my initial childhood career choices of being involved in some sort of space related career.  It just blows my mind that we are able to do these things.  When I look at the images of far off objects in space taken by the Hubble telescope it puts in perspective just how small our little tiny planet is in the grand scheme of things.  There is so much out there beyond what we know.  There surely is life out there, to deny the probability of it is ludicrous in my opinion. 

I thought my pole installation last night was going to get washed out again.  When I got home there was a steady rain coming down.  I kept monitoring the conditions out the window and when I saw it slowed to a drizzle I headed out the door around 7.  In the span of about an hour I knocked out 9 posts, leaving only 8 more to go until all posts are in the ground.  After work tonight I should be able to easily get those done.  I’m excited by the prospect of retiring my post hole digger.

While I was waiting for the rain to slow and after I was done outside I finished up watching Rocky Balboa for a second time.  I love that damn movie.  Yes I have reviewed the movie before.  Watching it a second time drove home how much I liked it.  Yes there are still the flaws like having a pudgy Mason Dixon (Antonio Tarver) being the “bad” guy.  He is neck and neck with Tommy Gunn (Tommy Morrison) as the worst boxer Rocky faced. Mason Dixon was definitely the worst at fake boxing.  There are plenty of over the top sappy moments where the film tries too hard to lay parallels of Rocky’s life to a real world situation. And then there is the borderline creepy relationship they depict with Rocky and the little girl that called him a “Creepo” in the original film. I am able to overlook all of that.  The film is just filled with so many powerful moments and classic Rocky one-liners.  Let me list a few of my favorites:

After Pauly comes in and makes a scene, Rocky tells him to settle down because people were there trying to have a nice meal.  Pauly says “Rock, having a bunch of Mexicans make Italian food ain’t that special…”

The speech Rocky gives his son after his son tries to talk Rocky out of fighting again because it makes the son look bad. Rocky tells his kid that somewhere along the line the kid stopped taking responsibility for his situation and instead resorted t blaming others (Rocky) for his life.  Rocky tells him cowards point fingers at others.  He tells his kid that life is about taking the setbacks that are dealt to you and moving forward, always moving forward. He leaves his kid speechless on the street.

Pauly says something to Rocky about time catching to all of us.  Rocky offers “yea, especially if you are standing still”

As Rocky is talking to the boxing licensing board after they initially deny his application to fight again.  “the older I get the more I have to leave behind…”

Towards the end of the fight when Rocky gets rocked and is down on one knee, his life of setbacks flash by his eyes and his simple self command of “Get up!”

There are many other moments in the film that I just love. In some ways it is my favorite Rocky movie of all of them.  Maybe my age has something to do with it.      

I had another weird dream last night.  I was staying at some hotel where I ordered room service.  But for some reason this room service charged by the hour.  By the time I was ready to check out the next day the bill was over $1300.  I remember arguing bitterly with the hotel clerk as we went over the itemized bill. 

I just upgraded the blog to WP 2.5, just in case you were interested.  From a user perspective you may not notice any difference but from an admin/editing stand point I see a bunch of changes.  I may mess with the themes a bit to see some of the features I have not used up to this point due to my affinity for my current one that flashes up random images as the header.