Artemis II

What a historic moment!  Once again we were here to see a rocket launch, and what a momentous occasion this was.  The Artemis II had a successful launch this evening under perfect weather conditions, taking a crew of four astronauts upwards to the heavens on a very special mission.  This space craft will be taking these astronauts around the earth a few orbits, and then head off to circle the moon.  We haven't done this in fifty years.  The technology is more advanced now, and certainly more roomy compared to the  Apollo mission crafts.  But step one was a big one as it seemed the whole nation was watching and counting down with Mission Control.  It's just a really cool, positive thing.  We were watching and talking with friends as we did so, and all of us were getting surprisingly pretty emotional in a good way.  So much pride in our nation and our abilities and achievements as a people.  

Along those lines, today I stared a new virtual marathon, this one based on the great Space Race to the moon in the 1960's.  There's a cool badge earned at the end, and all kinds of videos, postcards and areas to explore along the way.  The virtual map with the launch of a mission to the destination and finally returning home - it's all really awesome.  I plugged in one of my favorite series on the subject, episode one of "From Earth to the Moon," and got walking a little "moon walk."  It'll be a great time following this path and watching all these great themed movies and videos.

So today is also April 1st, or April Fool's Day.  I started off the day at the office where we saw roughly 250 tiny little ducks all over our desks.  This was Ansley's thing of course, as she loves ducks.  Anyway, here are just a few of them - I had to take pictures to send home to Mom.

At home tonight, Maddie was making her own dang quesadillas, all set up with her headphones, a stool, and a spatula!

Not bad!  And meanwhile, Mom and I were heading down to Braselton's campus - they're taking up the carpet and redoing some of the hallways there.  

 We were there to drop off a few things, then get some items for Easter, and then get home quickly - there was another game tonight as the Braves defeated the A's, winning the series overall two games to one.  We saw just enough of that on BravesVision before picking up where we left off on our Spiderthon, watching the next Spider-man movie, "Homecoming."  Another classic!  It was late when we were finished with that, but we still made time to read from this new Discworld book, "Thud!"  After that, prayers... and some much-needed rest (the blood pressure is a little wonky this week!).