(September 29) Today is my Halfy Birthday. (I am six months past my official birthday) As I start writing this, I am at my Mom's farm in Round Hill. I got a chance to peek outside to see the stars, but the cloud cover has hidden most of them. I was still able to see Orion and a crescent moon. That is one of my biggest joys of overnighting at the farm. The light polution is at a minimum here and I can see so much more of the galaxy that I can at home in Calmar.
I want to take a detour from earth's elements and talk about time. What does it mean to me that six months has past since I turned fifty-six. I am six months away from fifty-seven... a birthday I'm not looking forward to. Fifty-seven was the age my sister had reached when she died last summer. I never imagined passing her... and that is likely to happen next year, although still over a year away.
What is a year? Technically a year is the time it takes for the earth to circumnavigate the sun. It is the journey of nine hundred and forty million kilometers every year. I personally don't feel that. It is the wonder of living on a ball in space that is big enough to give me the security of not feeling just how fast I am moving through space. Here's a little Google harvested factoid....
"Earth orbits around the Sun at a speed of about 67,000 miles per hour (107,000 km/hr or nearly 30 km/s). At the same time, Earth spins on its axis at about 1,000 miles per hour (460 m/s or 1,600 km/hr)."
I'm dizzy just thinking about that. Let me reiterate that I personally have no evidence for that data. I'm not the one with the calculator and the stopwatch timing the planet on it's journey through space. I find the possibility amazing, and that is good enough for me.
In one year I gain another number on my age identifier, and to earn that all I have to do is travel nine hundred and forty million kilometers at a speed of thirty kilometers per second.
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