Model 28500

My wife and I are planning on having our master bathroom remodeled soon and so, we planned a rather strange family outing. We invited my expert fixer-upper brother-in-law to accompany us for dinner at Chipotle, followed by a cruise through potential bath fixtures at our local Lowe's. Our son and our daughter both decided to go with us, mostly I suppose, because my wife's brother is such fun company.

We'd finished the planned portion of the evening's festivities when my wife asked if anyone wanted to go to the Goodwill Industries store next door. Inwardly, I cringed a bit. I've never shopped at Goodwill before. But we were, outwardly at least, all amenable.

To my amazement, I found some treasures: a 1942-vintage hardbound version of Lloyd C. Douglas' The Robe for three bucks, a VHS edition of the Best Picture of 1966, A Man for All Seasons (for a buck), and a 1949-EP with eight Christmas songs by Bing Crosby, also a dollar.

But our most amazing acquisition may be this atomic clock, for six bucks.

My wife had been thinking about getting an atomic clock for awhile. Many of the teachers at the school where she works as the librarian have the clocks in their classrooms, allowing them to have the accurate time, something which school clocks, which are notorious for breaking down, can't provide.

When we got home, she stuck a battery in the clock and sure enough, it took off. But it wasn't showing the right time. "Maybe it takes awhile," she speculated. I looked the clock up on the web. The manual was there, pointing me to buttons for each of the major continental US time zones. The moment I hit it, the hands began whirring round and round until they stopped on the exact time as transmitted by satellite from the Atomic Clock of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, Time and Frequency Division in Boulder, Colorado.

I had what I suppose can be characterized as a hayseed moment, one that will seem goofy to future generations who may blow the cyberdust off of this blog in say, two or three minutes from now. Remembering a line from an old Paul Simon song, I said, "We live in an age of miracles and wonders!"

Hayseed-like or not, it really is amazing when one considers it: A satellite hundreds of miles above the earth picks up a signal from Colorado and then sends it back down to receivers in clocks in elementary school classrooms and libraries here in the Midwest, making it possible for students (and teachers) to take their lunches and recesses at precisely the right times.

Thousands of such applications have come about from the human exploration of space, whether through manned or unmanned vehicles.

It was on this date in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the surface of the Moon, one of many astounding achievements since we first moved out into space. I hope we keep going into space. An infinite number of miracles and wonders no doubt awaits us if we do.