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My Dad called me last night.  Seems he’s coming to see me as he’s driving around the country and wanted to warn me that he’d be here in about a week.

My sister and I are refering to this trip of his as his Farewell Tour.  Seems he had a stroke several months ago and is making sure he gets his ducks in a row before long. 

It got me to thinking this morning.  My dad and I haven’t seen eye-to-eye about a lot of things.  He’s not happy I didn’t follow him onto the Railroad, he’s concerned that I’m the last male in my line and I need to get on with it :)  But you know, I’m happy with my Life.  I’m very excited about working in the B-EEhive and the work we’re trying to accomplish, building the future we were promised as kids.  I’ve enjoyed my years in the classroom, shaping the adults of the future.  I’m very excited (still) about our potential TV show which may still get aired some day.  But that’s a project for the future…

I think we’re shaping the future here at BEE.  It may be in fits and starts but we’re working to build the future we saw in the Science Fiction we grew up on.  It’s hard work sometimes.  And sometimes it seems a bit fruitless :)  But what parent hasn’t stayed up late at night wondering how their kids were going to turn out and wondering if they did the right things?

So, while my Dad is here, I’ll take some time off work, we’ll go fishing in some of my favorite places out here and we’ll spend some time together–and I’ll show him that I turned out OK.  And then I’ll come back and I’ll worry about “my children” here…

Title Reference:   John Denver, Wild Montana Skies

[Same picture, just from further away.  We're the brightest dot in the right-hand band]

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

[...]

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

–Carl Sagan