So this evening I took a nap with the Kitten and Ben played on the computer and watched TV. He recorded a show called Cats: In the Womb because he thought I would like it. I thought I would too, so we decided to watch it. The Kitten was fascinated by it.
I don't watch a whole lot of TV, but it's definitely been on before, and I've never seen her react like this to it. She watched the whole show with us!
She especially liked hearing the narrator say her name and talk about house cats. She wasn't as interested in the lions and would stop watching at each commercial.
She also liked hearing the mother cat purring and meeping. (It's a lot easier to see her perking up when the mother cat purrs on the original video; unfortunately, it lost some quality when I uploaded it.)
My cat is the funniest thing I have ever seen. Endless hours of amusement.
Good local government - schools, libraries, police, roads, recycling*!
The grocery stores carry gnocchi and prosciutto and avocados and nutella and stromboli
Lots of good restaurants, Italian and sushi and Indian and Thai and Chinese and pizza
Close enough to a city so that I can go to museums and theater when I want
Nice spas
Has people who don't call me "y'all" or "sweetheart" when they don't know me. Or "ma'am."
Cost of living is not too high
*Apparently Houstonians don't recycle because they are so "independent." Yeah, that's bright, wasting resources which are becoming scarcer is very independent, good job guys.
Oh yeah, and someplace I can get paid to live. That's the hard part, unfortunately. I love working in the space program, and I think it is the most important thing we as a culture should do for our future, but I am really getting tired of Houston. I don't want to buy a house here. I don't want to live here.
I've kind of kicked around the idea of getting a Ph.D and working for a university, doing research and teaching, and I think it could be cool. I'd have a lot more options on where to live that way. I'd probably focus on Astrophysics, cause that's what interests me most.
I just don't know if I would be as happy doing something that I liked in a place that I liked, if I'm not working on something I feel is as important to the entire human race as exploring and colonizing space. The space program gives us a direction as a society, something to work towards, something amazing that no one has ever even come close to doing in the thousands of years we've existed as a species. I feel that the work I do now, small a part of the program as it is, will someday enable people to live wherever they want, give people options about what planet to live on if we continue to trash this one and make it uninhabitable.
I kind of think of it like building Magellan's boat, I may never get to travel as far the craft I work on but someday people will cross the distance without thinking twice about it, and their lives will be better and richer and they will be more free than I can imagine now.
Maybe I can do research that is needed for space exploration, and help indirectly with it.
