To: Nellie Kislyak and Lana Kislyak
Hello, ladies! Or should I say, "Hello, Students?"
I understand you two are thriving at your new school and that you are embracing with zest your new status as scholars. I miss our sessions -- probably more than you do -- but I'm pleased to hear reports from your grandmother that you are enthusiastically becoming scholars. The hardest and most important work you will ever do will be thinking, and I wish you well. Have you won your $10 bet we made at our last session?
On Saturday I leave for my next great adventure -- a road trip to Yellowstone, America's first national park, followed by a few days at beautiful Coeur d'Alene Lake. While I'm traveling, I'll be posting photos and short reports on this blog. ("Blog" = Web log, a log being a diary of actions.) I have produced several blogs over the years about my travels and shared them with about 100 people I know. This time it's different. The blog is being written exclusively for my two favorite scholars, and I hope you will find the articles interesting.
My first stop will be in Richland, Washington. I will be staying with Mary Fraser the cousin of my deceased wife, Betty. Mary is a widow. Her husband died a few years ago of a nervous system disease made famous by a baseball player who had that disease. His name was Lou Gehrig, and he was known as the "Iron Horse."
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| Mary and I at the Columbia River with a riverboat in the background. |
The disease is called "Lou Gehrig's Disease" in remembrance of him, but its scientific name is Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Scientists do not know what causes this disease. If you Google "ALS and famous people", you may learn that another very famous person also had this disease. I mention this because I hope you will become curious about some of the topics I cover and will Google those subjects to learn more about them.
One subject you may be interested in is the "Manhattan Project." This was America's program to build atomic weapons. Mary' home in Richland is very close to Hanford, the community which collected the plutonium that was used in the world's first atomic bomb. That bomb was detonated at Los Alamos, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, 10 days before I was born. The Hanford facility that developed this was top secret. Ironically, my father-in-law, Lee Goodell, knew some of the individuals involved. He was a pacifist during the war and was required to do community service for national forests. During that time his classmates visited him, so he knew they were involved in something, but they couldn't tell him they were making the biggest bomb in all creation. Hanford also developed the plutonium which went into the bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, ending World War II. You can read more about this with a little help from Google.
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| Left: Hanford plutonium building. Right: Trinity -- the first atomic bomb explosion. |
This is as much as I'm going to say for now. I hope you enjoy the blog which was created just for you two, and I hope you will be curious and want to know more.
Until later,
Robert
P.S. I have written and rewritten this post several times. I have tried to make sure I capitalized the right words, used good punctuation and had no misspellings. Read my blogs carefully to make sure there are no mistakes in grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. I will pay you $1 for each mistake you find. If there's a mistake and you don't find it before the next posting, you miss your chance.
