Rocket Church
I’ve been in Huntsville, Alabama for most of the past week.
I’ll write about the medical issue that brought me here later; suffice to say that things are significantly better right now, although there are still issues to resolve. If I can separate my emotions from my experiences adequately to offer some perspective, I’ll write more about this in some more detail. Right now I think I’m still too close to the emotional roller coaster to offer something of more than personal interest.
So instead I’ll point out that Huntsville, Alabama, is a… distinctive place. The landscape, and the rural areas, look a lot like rural Tennessee near where I used to live. They love their rockets here. As you drive down the interstate, you’ll have a hard time missing the gigantic Saturn V rocket standing upright on the grounds of Space Camp. Even the churches have steeples that look like rockets.
And I’ll also say that I have been in few places in recent memory that makes me feel skinny. I’m not as thin in real life as my gravatar might make you think. (Yeah, I know, you’re shocked.) But looking at some of the folks around here, particularly at the hospital, I feel like I’ve only got a few pounds to go. Although it seems that the military and engineer types are all in more or less good shape, there is another category of folks who seem to be very, very heavy and I don’t know exactly what they do or how they got that way. There seems to be an abundance of healthy food options here, and I’ve actually eaten as healthy here as I do at home, maybe even a little more so.
Today was a bit of an indulgence, though, as we got over a hurdle with the medical issues, so I can go home without guilt. Rather than fighting the crowds at the restaraunts, I made food tonight — my mother had some pasta sauce, so I made up some pasta, and we got some asparagus. Now, at home, The Wife and I usually sautee the asparagus in some garlic, olive oil, and coarse-ground black pepper. But my father wouldn’t hear of asparagus without hollandaise sauce. He claimed that there was hollandaise sauce available in a jar, but I wouldn’t hear of that. The result was some of the best hollandaise sauce I’ve ever made, and a father astonished at how many pots and pans I used to make spaghetti and asparagus.
Tomorrow I come home and Monday it’s back to my regularly-scheduled life.
