A few steps apart
Someone had already snagged my favorite seat in the library, so I had to scout around for another with as many virtues.  I like: a window; elbow room; solitude; quiet.
As I wandered, I was also scanning the bookshelves, as one does –Â and I spotted a friend!
Fire Logic and Earth Logic by fellow Genrette Laurie J. Marks
Which naturally meant that all I had to do was turn around, and shuffle to the left a bit, and:
Tucked in between Kirst and Kirwan
Hm.  I’m going to have to give them some copies of The Language of Power.   But that would mean talking to someone!  And I rather love my anonymity here. Maybe I’ll mail them instead of handing them over in person.Â
Today’s random quote:
Were I to make the simple statement that I climbed to an altitude of thirty-three thousand feet, that statement in and of itself would mean nothing because I have often gone higher than that. But when I add that I did this in 1937 in a fabric-covered biplane without heating, without pressurization, and without an oxygen mask, the elements of an accomplishment are added.  I nearly froze; the pipestem between my teeth through which I tried to get an oxygen supply from a tank and connecting tube was inadequate for the purpose, and I became so disoriented through lack of oxygen that it took over an hour to get my bearings and make a landing.  The difference between the pressure my body was accustomed to on the ground and the atmospheric pressure at 33,000 feet was such that a blood vessel in my sinus ruptured.
— The Stars at Noon by Jacqueline Cochran, Little, Brown and Company, 1954.
Chuck Yeager: "Jackie and I had one experience that can never be duplicated. I as the first man to pass the sonic barrier and Jackie as the first woman to do so each took a Sabre-jet, climbed to nearly fifty thousand feet of altitude and put the two planes, almost wing tip to wing tip, into a full-power vertical dive past the barrier, as a sort of supersonic duet"
And so to work…
