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This past weekend held no particularly good or bad events but rather mundane chores. Saturday, I took my Soul in to have its oil changed, and following that, I visited my local Kaiser facility for joy with needles.

First a maintenance blood draw, to ensure that my arthritis medications still were not destroying my kidneys or liver. This was followed by dual vaccinations: COVID and flu. I ended up with two needles stuck into my right arm and one in my left.

By late evening, I was feeling the effects of the vaccinations, with the muscles around the flu shot quite sore. I slept very poorly that evening. I am one of those persons that toss and turn in their sleep, and every time I turned onto my left the pain woke me up. In addition to that, for about half the night I seemed to be freezing, and the rest of it until morning I sweated in my bedding.

With that poor sleep and with the vaccinations seemingly activating my arthritis, we skipped our customary Sunday trip to the zoo, and I just tried to do as little as possible until finally in late afternoon when the muscles began to stop hurting.

Then came, quite literally, Sunday’s bright point. We had finished dinner, and as I reclined in my easy chair, my sweetie-wife came into the room announcing you could see a launch out the window.

Indeed, a rocket’s contrail, bright and silvery, was growing up toward the south in the darkening twilight sky. The head looked to be moving slowly as it climbed, but that was an illusion of perspective and distance. Because our home had already passed into night with the sun to the west below the curvature of the Earth but the contrail was in full sunlight due to its altitude, the whole thing glowed with what looked like an inner light.

Occasional flashes of brighter white light appeared in the contrail some distance behind the rocket climbing towards orbit. I was puzzled for a moment; was this a first stage breaking up? Then it hit me. This was a SpaceX Falcon Nine launch. Those white flashes inside the contrail came from the booster firing its engines for its return flight. Of course, the landing itself would be below the horizon and invisible from San Diego, but it was quite a thrill to see what we did manage to witness.