Yep. I decided that with the petty thefts going on at the shop, I would monitor my studio. It’s not an expensive camera, but sufficient for my needs. It watches the entry and I can access it from my iPad. It works well enough for my purposes and notifies me when someone walks past my studio.

I was just reading an old Buzzfeed article asking how many years old you are without giving your age or birthdate. The answers were mostly from “youngsters”— the ones who grew up with remotes and color televisions. The oldest was “I’m riding in the back of the station wagon-years old” I can beat that. I’m “crouch under your desk and cover your head with your hands”-years old, also known as “duck-and-cover” air raid drills

Early Atomic Age— prepare for falling atom bombs AKA early Cold War Era. Eisenhower was President and Russia was Enemy Number One. We could be attacked at any time by the godless communists. Air raid sirens went off once a month. If you couldn’t get to shelter, you did the “duck-and-cover.” Yep. That’d save you from a real bomb.

Maybe with the current state of the country, we should start those drills again. Not that they’d do much good. Just ask the folks from Hiroshima and Nagasaki how well they did. The weapons we have now would literally blast us back to the stone age, not metaphorically, literally. There’s nowhere to hide. Maybe Greenland or maybe Antarctica.

With the luck of most of us, a nuke would strike Yellowstone and send us all not back to the Stone Age, but back to the Primordial swamp. Millions of years from now, the future inhabitants of Earth will be drilling for hydrocarbons in the areas formerly known as Chicago, Minneapolis, New York.

Geologists will speculate on the enormous pools of fatty hydrocarbons that were formerly Americans. Archeologists will be confused by the incredible amounts of crumbling plastic artifacts. Anthropologists and Paleontologists will be using carbonized and crushed shards of bones to assemble what earlier life looked like and will come up with creatures assembled from the fragments of humans and their pets.

They’ll mine the great rust beds that were girders of skyscrapers and wonder about the fragments of tarry ribbons winding about under the dirt. They’ll wonder why there are uncountable seams of copper that extend for thousands of miles but are scarcely thicker than a twig. And they’ll find the Twinkies of a bygone era- still in the plastic wrap, still with the creamy filling, and the soft yellow sponge cake.

What fun.