Monterey! Beach! My little Aussie height skipped a beat when I first
saw the surfers shooting the tubes. A decent six foot swell and waves
that curved round the bay for at least two miles. Sand and sea and
stunted trees.
Every Aussie knows it: there's no angst attack like the
angst attack on an ocean shore. I haven't seen the like for over a
year.
Strolling around, I felt happily overwhelmed with memories of
the beach life. So many times I've let the warm salty wind play with
my face; I've admired the deformed and twisted trees struggling with
such crappy soil; and I've felt the cars in the beach carpark rust
away from the sea acid breeze.
And
after the ritual soul searching on the sand, I walked back to a
NASA workshop on autonomous and adaptive systems. A beautiful half
moon shone in the sunset sky but that was so passé. Ask anyone at
NASA: been there, done that. Nowadays its all "automatic fuel
production plants on Mars" or "biospheres that can be self-sustaining
for 540 days" or "autonomous agents zipping around the asteroid
belt".
I realized I was happy to be forty and spending (some) of my time
talking to rocket scientists who work on such cool stuff. May I
always live in such interesting times.