Ole chum and Miss Clara have arrived home with Larry (the dog) safe and sound...

The surgery was done yesterday with two stents installed in dear sweet ninety-one year old Miss Clara. Next week additional surgery will be done too. Dear ole buddy was just happy to be home with her Mom and her dear canine pal, Larry. Dear ole chum was also thrilled to see the shuttle Enterprise going overhead in NYC while they were there to see it arriving at its new home on the Hudson. How jaded us Floridians became shortly after the beginning of the program with taking all those flights for granted and then on January 28th 1986, the day after my Father's 79th birthday, our wake-up call, when the Challenger exploded shortly after take-off, things changed…We never ever took those majestic birds flights for granted ever again. We lived on the east coast of Florida from August of 1986 until January of 1995 and we were only one house from A1A the Ocean Shore Blvd. We were literarily less than six hundred feet from the Atlantic Ocean there. And when any shuttle took off all we had to do was walk up to the corner of our street Ocean Terrace and Ocean Shore Blvd and we got a great birds-eye view at all those take-offs of the shuttle missions… Here in south west Florida our view was considerably not as clear, due to our angle, but the supersonic noise could give you a big surprise if you didn’t realize what it was, not to mention the big lightening type glow that we could see when the ship would take off… Then Columbia on February 1, 2003 on re-entry, disintegrated, and more devastation… and then we Americans became concerned about the program. I sure hope that isn’t the reason it stopped, I truly believe it was a sign of the downturn in the economy, like so much else. But private enterprise has taken over and some will have the time and money to do whatever they want with the way they want the program for men and women to travel into space once more… and where to, an era has ended, but many of these majestic ships have roosted in fine locations all of these United States. Copy and paste to see for yourself their future or already landed retirement locations: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/13/uk-space-shuttles-idUSLNE73C02H20110413 Tangents, I seem to go off on them regularly, but that is the way stream of consciousness works the best, my writing style and sadly my thinking and talking way too! Moving on… Tonight, and today we were back into our normal weather temperatures of high eighties, dare I say though, for a good part of this week the weather was downright cool if not cold on some mornings, a few in the fifties and I think one even in the forties, Geez if it wasn’t for us warming into the seventies we would have thought, Gosh I have no idea, oh yeah that we were up north again! I hate to tell you this but, in my heart I do know that you will understand if I quit early tonight due to my right shoulder causing me quite a bit of pain right now and so, let me just say for you to have a very happy good night and ask you to kindly count all or your blessings and share all your overages and we will too! And next time please be here or be square, ya hear?