All eyes on the skies

Yesterday we received a call from a college friend of our daughter's, a young woman from California who happened to be visiting Seattle and wanted to see where Ali had grown up.  Ali is up in the San Juan Islands for the summer, but we invited her friend to hop on the ferry and come on over.  She arrived with a beautiful armload of flowers (I do SO love flowers!) and we found each other with ease, so I put her in the car, gave her a mini-tour of the island and took her home to feed her some leftover stir-fry and ice cream.

We sat on the deck talking for a long while, hearing of her adventures since graduation and watching the sky fill with sunset's rainbow of color, then took the dog for a walk and came back in to watch the Rover, Curiosity, land on Mars. 

It was a moving and exhilarating experience, I have to say; we all had tears in our eyes as we watched the roomful of scientists get the news that their creation had landed safely. And -- as Maureen mentions in her comment -- for those of us who watched that first moon landing, almost exactly 43 years ago, it brought back wonderful memories of all those men at their computers in the space center in Houston...

And then, this morning, I was greeted by one of the most colorful sunrises I've ever had the good fortune to enjoy.  Between this morning's sunrise, last night's sunset, and the previous night's moonrise, we've been treated to some spectacular displays of celestial glory. It seems somehow fitting that all eyes are being drawn upward just as Curiosity begins her explorations...