Crowd Control To Major Tom

I hear there is something big happening across the pond. While getting lost in details of the royal wedding is a good form of escape for most, there is something much more exciting and distinctly American happening right in my backyard.

David Burnett, via Time Magazine

The second to last shuttle launch is happening tomorrow. Titusville is expecting crowds in upwards of 750,000 people...a lot for a town where rush hour means getting stuck behind an old lady driving to Wal-Mart. Okay, so it's a little busier than that. Three old ladies and a minivan, maybe.

I can't help but imagine what it was like in this area's heyday, when astronauts were viewed as rock stars. With a little assistance from the Northern Brevard Historical Society's Flickr page and the NASA Commons, I'm back 42 years in a pair of cat eye sunglasses, it's hot as hell in my weather-innapropriate clothing, and the hairspray keeping my hair set has allowed the Apollo 11 crew to have easier access out of the Earth's atmosphere.

Doesn't Lady Bird look so hip? I could easily see her model in an Etsy listing.

Here's to the Endeavour launch tomorrow, and to sneaking out of Titusville early so I can avoid the post-launch traffic nightmare and watch it take off from a distance with my husband.

a bushel and a peck.

The namesake for this blog comes from my Grandma - who was not Doris Day, but she did sing this all the time to me when I was a little girl. To be completely honest, I had no idea it was a real song until I heard it in the movie "Julie & Julia". For a solid twenty years, I thought it was one of those songs that all grandmas had stashed in their Grandma Inventory, filed beside nursery rhymes and Christmas cookie recipes.

Listening to it now brings back all of those happy memories, of summers and holidays spent with my grandparents.