Happy Sunday Everyone!

Today I would like to discuss "things that fly." Just another brain tickler. Though one would automatically think of airplanes and such, there's a lot more flying around in the "bigger picture", more so than the smaller.

This week I had the wonderful experience of watching sets of Canadian geese in formations coming in for a landing near a reservoir on a farm. It was amazing to watch them gradually make their way to landing. It reminded me of the same thing you see at airports. But I had never seen this before and it was truly a beautiful act of nature. But it's funny how you so often aren't in the right place at the right time to view such events.

So one then asks, what does fly? There's flying in the sense of getting ideas off the ground. You know, you've heard that old expression, "that's never going to fly" when someone discusses an issue with you and they think it has no possibility of becoming successful. Or how about flying in the sense of disaster. We've seen that as well.

One hundred years ago, little flew in the skies that the common man was aware of and yet today, there's lots of stuff up in the air. Like volcanoes, when they erupt. They send stuff flying up into the air and then what's in the air has to go around, what the volcanoes emitting. We constantly have space junk that flies down into the atmosphere. Some of it burns off and a few bits fly down upon the planet and land in some odd places. I've seen photos of little meteors that flew into peoples homes in England, or even the truck of a car. Talk about the unexpected!

But when looking at what flies during the course of an earthquake the topic is interesting. Sometimes its rocks flying off of cliffs, how about chimneys that take flight off of the side of a home and onto the ground? My ex-mother in law was holding a bag of potatoes when the Loma Prieta earthquake occurred and she said the motion of the quake literally grabbed the bag out of her hands and it flew across the room. Or one really fascinating case, which occurred in Parkfield was when a resident reported dishes flying from the cupboard, holding for a moment in mid-air and then crashing to the floor. That I would have loved to have seen for myself.

Last week there was an intelligence report issued which gave our local authorities thoughts that someone might want to fly a plane into the Golden Gate Bridge. So they prepared, but at the same time the users of the bridge got an unexpected bonus. No bridge toll. I guess they wanted the traffic to be in a free flowing pattern and not backed up.

Just think, a hundred years from today when advancements are made beyond our wildest dreams, could you imagine that moments before an earthquake occurred and they could be predicted in that time period, they would send some type of aircraft and beam up the citizens in the locations of potential disasters and save them from flying debris. An interesting thought, huh?

And so it goes,

Petra, always flying in the face of convention.