Back in Texas
While we got back to Texas in the first week of February it has taken a bit to catch up so here are a few odds and ends of the last few weeks or so. It was a really uneventful trip back from the Casa Grande area and by the time we hit the Midland area we were greeted with this spectacular sunset that took my breath away.
I said this was a bunch of odds and ends eh. More spectacular in the technological sense was the pipe organ below housed in the Organ Stop Pizza (www.organstoppizza.com) restaurant in Mesa Arizona. This Wurlitzer theater organ was built into this structure with 6,000 pipes and the console was handmade on the rotating platform with real gold leaf ... not your normal pizza joint. This is the world's largest and most impressive pipe organ with its own wind generating building! There are continuous shows all evening as you eat a great and reasonably priced pizza ... wow.
On a more somber note I took my friend Morgan down to the Titan II Missile museum in Green Valley Arizona, about 20 miles south of Tucson. There were 18 nuclear missile sites around Tucson and this one has been preserved as a museum. I served as a nuclear missile launch officer from 1975 to 1978 and I sat in the chair and at that console where Morgan is sitting some 40 years earlier. The only difference was that when I was sitting in that seat I could send a nine megaton warhead headed toward the old Soviet Union in less than 60 seconds ... brought back some memories. I endured more than 152 of the 24 hour alert periods in this facility and others around Tucson and it was a pretty stressful time of life for myself and our country!
On a much lighter note we saw this metal roadrunner sculpture at the scenic overlook as you approach Las Cruces from the west. We have only seen two live roadrunners in all our time in the southwest ... one in Van Horn at the KOA and then one in our backyard in San Antonio.
We are back in the Dallas area now and are finishing up the laundry room side of the Great Wall in our daughter's house ... first plumbing and wiring, then dry wall and plaster and paint ... bunch of work and the next blog will explain the conclusion of the effort.
