Got 2012?

Once again, by way of sharing our adventures with our friends, we’ve published a calendar.

This one, interestingly enough, is for 2012.  Why, that’s next year!

You’ll probably need a calendar for that.  You might as well have this one.

Once again, I make no money from this.  I just make calendars out of the spirit of sharing the good things that happen to me.

This photo was taken on May 16, 2011, and features the final launch of Endeavor, STS-134. Since the launch was delayed the first time, we ended up having to travel to Florida twice.

It was worth it.

The previous night we’d flown late into Tampa, which meant a long, long drive to our hotel in Cocoa Beach.  We arrived around midnight to discover that our room was full of hundreds of “love bugs,” beetles (originally escaped from a military experimental facility, supposedly) now engaged in frenzied mating behavior.  A heartfelt cry to the desk clerk brought us the hotel’s security guard, who sucked up the beetles with a portable vacuum cleaner.

But of course there were plenty more bugs where they came from, and we spent a restless night until our alarms went off at 3am.  We staggered back into the car to get to the Kennedy Space Center by 4.

There followed several hours of hanging around, which fortunately included a spectacular sunrise (which is also in the calendar).

There is a photo of me taken after dawn which will never appear on a calendar if I have anything to say about it.  The kind interpretation is that I look like someone navigating on a couple hours’ sleep, but I think I look more like a sterno drinker who’s spent the last week sleeping in parks.

The launch of STS-134 opened my eyes, though.  And the camera’s eye as well.