n the pantheon of awesome images of explosions, this has got to rank pretty high. Astronauts floating high above earth in the International Space Station snapped this shot of Russia’s Sarychev Peak volcano in the Kuril Islands busting through the atmosphere on June 12 (click image for full-size).
As NASA scientists M. Justin Wilkinson writes, conditions had to be perfect to get this shot — there must be almost no wind for the plume to shoot so high into the atmosphere undisturbed.
The white stuff at the top of the ash cloud is probably condensing steam. And that halo of clouds surrounding the eruption is what happens when a powerful explosion rips into the atmosphere — the shock wave literally pushed the cloud cover out of the way.
An emergency call for firefighters to respond to a traffic crash ended in a cautionary tale for everyone who cooks food when the firefighters got a second call to put out a fire — back at their own station house in Waipahu.
HUNTINGTON BEACH – Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old with a rare form of cancer, was staying alive for one thing – a movie.
From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film.
After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.
The company flew an employee with a DVD of Up, which is only in theaters, to the Curtins’ Huntington Beach home on June 10 for a private viewing of the movie.
The animated movie begins with scenes showing the evolution of a relationship between a husband and wife. After losing his wife in old age, the now grumpy man deals with his loss by attaching thousands of balloons to his house, flying into the sky, and going on an adventure with a little boy.
Colby died about seven hours after seeing the film.
A friend recently started a blog. I have known she had many gifts, but I am just learning that one of them is as a writer. Even though the focus of the blog is about food & cooking, Crystal does a great job weaving stories around her "second love".
This morning she did a post about her late mother. I thought it was so well written that I wanted to pass it along.
If I live as long as my mother lived, I have about fourteen years left on this planet. Just fourteen years. What should I do with those fourteen years? What should I not put off? What do I want to accomplish? What if I only have slightly more than a decade to spend with the people I love? If you had 14 years to live, what would you be doing differently right now? Would you be living life differently? Would you be procrastinating less?
