Private Mars Rocket II

My Rotary club's annual fundraiser, A Taste of Route 66, is tonight at 6 PM. (You can still buy tickets and attend or donate / purchase items online at the link.)

Setup for the event starts in little more than an hour. I'm helping at the event, and I've finished everything I can do in advance for that event. On the day job front, I deliberately kept my calendar clean, so there's not much I need to do. Basically, right now I'm just hanging out.

As mentioned, I flew to Honduras for the long weekend. The purpose of my visit was to meet fellow Rotarians in support of a project to build a school in a rural area of Quimistan, a municipality in the Santa Barbara Department. (Here's a link to my Facebook photo album of the trip.)

First off, in Honduras, a municipality is more like a US county than a city. It covers both what we would consider a town as well as the surrounding rural areas. Quimistan (link to Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia - the English entry is a stub) is the second-largest municipality and reportedly has a population of just under 30,000. There's a lot of empty land, most of it mountainous and only suitable for goats. It's a mere 50 miles or so from San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, but those miles are over a two-lane road shared with every barely-mobile beat-up jalopy imaginable. It's a slow drive.

Still, we left San Pedro Sula early on a Sunday morning, and so had no traffic to speak of. The school we're replacing is up in a rural part of Quimistan. Due to rains, the road was impassible. Based on an experience I had later that day, when a Honduran says a road is impassible, they are not kidding. In any event, a group of people from the local community walked to where vehicles could be gotten and were carpooled into town.

Everybody met at a fairly nice roofed-over sports facility. No walls, but not needed in that climate. We chatted for a bit, then had a ceremony where we signed an agreement to build the school. It was a big deal for all involved.

After a nice home-cooked lunch (we ate in air conditioning, even!) then, at the mayor's request, we went to visit another school which we were promised was accessible. The mayor wants that school to be the next on the list.

We drove on the main road in the direction of San Pedro Sula for a while, then turned off the paved road onto a crappy dirt track. After a few miles of that, we stopped and transferred into the personal four-wheel-drive vehicles of the Honduran Rotarians. Then we pressed on, hitting roads that I would haven't attempted to drive on under any circumstance.

After another few miles of that, the road ended at a town called Urraco Camalote. Literally at the end of the road was a school. Well, a shack with faded delusions of grandeur that they called a school. It was dark, damp, falling apart and had a pile of junk about 4 feet high in one corner. Oh, and it had one teacher and only went to 6th grade.

We chatted with the locals (I noted no men of working age were present), took some pictures and piled back into the trucks.

I've seen poverty before. This was real poverty. It was a stark reminder of how lucky I have been, and how much of that luck was due to an accident of birth.

On Saturday, I had a dinner party. It was one I had sold in a Rotary auction as a fundraising item. One of my fellow Rotarians, Joan Wayman, brought the dessert and I cooked the ribeyes. The event went over well.

On Sunday, I did a bit of writing and then watched this week's episode of The Orville. The show is still trying to find itself. I like a lot of Seth McFarlane's worldbuilding in this series. So far, humans don't have transporters and there are two enemy races, one of which is so much more powerful that the Planetary Union is willing to write off a ship's captain and XO rather than attempt a rescue. I also find a lot of the crew interactions more entertaining then typical. There's a "we're real people" feel to them, if a bit less military-like then one would expect from a fleet. Lastly, the ending of this episode really saved it.

Having said that, I still struggled with much of the plot. The green Lieutenant was too green, the ex-married couple fell back into the old ways too easily and were too passive. In short, this episode again felt more like a live-action cartoon than a live show.

Over the weekend, I reviewed my European travel plans. After checking with the travel people that any flight out of Hamburg after 2 PM on the day the cruise ship arrives should be safe, I found a 5 PM Lufthansa flight to Lithuania. I still don't get to Lithuania until nearly midnight, but that's better than my previous arrival time of 4:30 Sunday afternoon. Since I have to fly into Kaunas, as Vilnius airport will be closed, I went ahead and booked myself for 2 nights in Kaunas. That gives me 2 days to do other explorations.

My next stop is the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture for some research. Hopefully I can get some clue as to where the old Gerrib stomping grounds are. Right now I'm flying to Finland on Wednesday, although if I get some useful information I may make that Thursday instead. The preliminary business meeting at Worldcon will have to do without me. Frankly, other than being a minor member of the Best Series committee, I really don't have any business for the Business Meeting.

Also over the weekend, on Sunday my Rotary club volunteered for the Darien Dash, our annual 5K and 10K run. The weather forecast said mostly cloudy, so I left my hat in the car, then the skies turned blue for a good two hours, so I'm red-faced today. Oh well.

I've written before of flying cars. Over at File 770, they have a nice little roundup of various current attempts to crack the problem. It's beginning to look like the mechanical problems are solvable. The issues of turbulence and traffic are lagging behind.

In other news, my Rotary club's annual fundraiser is tomorrow. You can go here to participate from anywhere in the world.

Last night, the Rotary Club of Darien held a Volunteer Appreciation Night at Miskatonic Brewing in Darien IL. The Darien club's signature project is "Food for Kids" which is a program to provide supplemental nutrition to 195 grade school children in Darien and Burr Ridge.

In this program, the club buys kid-friendly food (such as individual cereal boxes) in bulk. The club, working with area volunteers, break down the bulk items into one child, one weekend packets, which are discreetly distributed to needy children by the school. The Darien club wanted to recognize volunteers who went above and beyond to assist.

The following volunteers were recognized:

(Not able to attend) Nick Schanker

(L to R) Maryann Kerrins, Tom Kerrins, Rotary club coordinator Joan Wayman



(L to R) Megan Dooley, Beth Dooley, Joan Wayman



The club also announced that Megan Dooley, an incoming freshman at Hinsdale South HS, will be attending Rotary Youth Leadership Activity.

I mentioned on Friday that I was planning to be out of pocket. I was, because I was taking a ride in a Beechcraft Bonanza (the S-35 model, built in 1963) owned by a Rotarian friend of mine. At our charity auction in March, he sold a "$100 hamburger" event. For those not clicking through, "$100 hamburger" is aviation slang for flying to a nearby airport, having lunch, and flying back.

Our flight was from Brookeridge, a fly-in community in Darien. My pilot had a hanger in the backyard of his house where he kept the plane, and an alley / taxiway to the runway. The weather was warm, with spotty low clouds, which yielded a bumpy ride. We went right over Midway Airport (at ATC's direction), flew a loop around downtown, then west of Midway he gave me the controls. I did a pair of turns and a few minutes of straight and level stick time, then our pilot landed at Pilot Pete's, a restaurant at Schaumburg Airport.

After lunch, we took back off and headed south, buzzing my house before landing. It was an interesting way to spend a couple of hours.

I seem to have fixed one of my rants from yesterday, namely activating my Bank of America credit card. It merely took another 15 minutes of insipid hold music. We'll see if I fixed rant #2 about Walgreens.

In other news, John Scalzi is on fire about the current Presidential primaries. I voted in the Democratic primary here, as we had a contested Senate race. Although I'm not in Cook County, I note with some pleasure that Anita Alvarez, the incumbent State's Attorney, will be out of a job come November.

Lastly, we're getting fast and furious in trying to book people for my club's annual fundraiser, A Taste of Route 66. Interested parties can bid without attending, including such items as making Yours Truly cook for them or becoming a character in one of my books. Bid early, bid often.

As mentioned previously, my Rotary club is gearing up for our annual fundraising event, to be held April 5th. Right now we're trying to line up big-ticket items, mostly experiential. Tours, vacations, dinners - the kind of stuff you can't buy at Wal-Mart.

At any fundraising event, their are three groups of people. One group consists of "true believers" who are invested in the cause and need little excuse to give. A second group consists of friends - people who are friends of true believers. They need some excuse to give. The third group is people who are there for the food.

That sounds harsh, and maybe it is, but what I mean are people who are attending because their company wants to support the cause (or be seen supporting it). This can also include people just looking for something to do that night, or really anybody not invested in the cause or the organizers. To get these people to spend money (or at least more money than a raffle ticket) you need stuff they can't buy at Wal-Mart.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Yesterday was a busy day. I started out by handing out dictionaries to 3rd graders as part of the Darien Rotary Club's literacy project. Then I actually had a Rotary meeting, at which I was the guest speaker, presenting on the Rotary Foundation. After a bit of day jobbery, I went to the gym and had a writer's workshop.

The writer's workshop was good, and my revised-for-the-upteenth-time Chapter 1 of One of our Spaceships is Missing received general acclaim and mild tweaking. Go me! We, the writers, also decided to go with a twice-a-month schedule. I'm a bit concerned about actually getting stuff ready on that tight a schedule, but we'll see.

After that, I got to drive home from St. Charles in the fog - a fog that hadn't lifted when I drove in to work today. Now, Daye Jobbe calleth.