Forgot to mention that yesterday, while we were waiting the 3.5 hours for the car to be fixed, after the shopping trip to IKEA, after the hour-long walk around College Park, we had chips & queso & salsa & booze at Moe’s Southwestern Grill. The queso was pretty good, as were the chips, although maybe the queso was a bit bland. The salsas, however, were all way too smoky for my tastes. And we made the mistake of dumping the hottest salsa into the queso to try to spice it up a bit. But Dawn had a big ass cup of wine and I had a Pacifico. That helped the day quite a bit.

The main thing though was the music on the soundsystem at Moe’s. I don’t know if was special to Moe’s or just some satellite station or what, but it was pretty damn swinging. First there was a woman (probably Doris Day) singing Dream a Little Dream of Me. Then Frank Sinatra doing My Blue Heaven. Then Ella Fitzgerald singing something. Then Buddy Holly Rock Around with Ollie Vee. Then INXS doing New Sensation. Other songs, most likely, before during and after. But those are what I remember.

It all worked together, really well, as eclectic mixes go. It was pretty cool.

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Originally uploaded by ebohls

It was only after I posted the item below about Ed Mitchell that I remembered: I’ve got a picture of him up in my workshop. Actually, as you can see, there are three pictures, one each of the Apollo 14 crew. Signed pictures, no less, although I’m pretty sure that they were signed by the automatic pen machine rather than the crewmembers themselves. But still. Signed.

So it’s funny how I’m patting myself on the back in the blog post for remembering the astronauts’ names, when I didn’t even remember that I had these pictures. What a strangely selective thing is memory.

The pictures themselves, if you’re curious, were a gift from Mom. She’s got that knack, the gift-giving knack. Just coming up with cool stuff like this, or the electronic protractor last year, or the Brookstone desk set gadget on my desk at work this very moment. I wish I had that knack.

The other thing that I remembered, this with respect to forgetting Gene Cernan’s name, was that only last Saturday, less than a week ago, I held in my very hands a copy of Cernan’s memoirs, Last Man on the Moon. Packed it up along with many other books, and donated them to a local used bookstore, true. But I actually touched his book only days ago, and then I forgot his name.

In my defense I can only say that I clearly was having trouble between Irwin and Kerwin, and then Cernan. Jim Irwin, of course, LMP on Apollo 15. And Joe Kerwin, who was on one of the Skylab missions, I surely no longer remember which. But I do remember that he was a capcom on Apollo 13. He was calling and calling up to them during Earth re-entry, getting no respose. Everybody was getting worried. Finally Jack Swigert’s voice came crackling through. “Okay, Joe,” he said.