What I did on my late Winter vacation, day 7

My nephew was coming over for a few hours this morning and my mom set the TV to Nickelodeon before he arrived. While waiting I wound up watching two episodes of Wonder Pets, which is the cutest damn show I've ever seen. And hysterically funny.

After he came over he did a bit of running around and decided he wanted to see the cats. Nicky came out to play with him, but Babusz and Joey decided to hide. He wanted especially to play with Babusz, so he got a flashlight and began crawling under the furniture to find her. And he did! She then surprised us by sitting contentedly on his lap while he pet her.

He pulled out some toy cars to play. One of them was a sort of Moon Buggy. "Why did they need cars on the Moon?" he said.

"I'll show you!" I said, and pulled out a VHS from a collection of NASA videos I picked up at Sam's Club years ago. It was one that featured a picture of a Moon buggy on the box. It was the story of Apollo 17 - the last time humans walked on the Moon. That was in 1972. Thirty-five years ago.

He watched, fascinated, and asked why they were collecting rocks, and why they were so excited about orange dirt. He watched the astronauts bounce around, and fall over, and get covered with dust. He saw the lunar module launch from the surface of the moon, leaving its base behind - an amazing sight which I saw for the first time in the video for "Pump Up the Volume" decades ago.

Afterwards we played with Tinkertoys. We made a rocket, and then he made a car - or was it a truck? - and a Sun, which he suggested could also be used as a bowling ball. I made a kickass tractor-trailer.

Then it was time for him to go home.

I did some writing, finally. A four-page backstory to a story that might not be much longer than that. It was extremely dark and depressing and pessimistic. Let's just hope we never get to the point where prosthetics become advanced enough to allow quadruple-amputees to return to the battlefield.

Midway through it I got a call...and that's all I want to say about that. For now.