Dear Kid,

Forty-four years ago (give or take a few hours), Grandma and Grandpa woke us up “in the middle of the night” (not really, but I was a little kid) to watch the first man walk on the moon. One small step and all that. It was a very cool piece of history to witness. And somehow we did it with a black and white TV and no Twitter.

One of the headlines yesterday was Evidence found that an ocean once existed on Mars. My first thought was that the beach towels and flip flops the rover found must have given it away. My second thought was “How do you lose all evidence of an actual ocean? It’s not like we’re talking about a puddle…” My third thought (yup, when I think, I often think in threes) was to check out the article—right up until I saw that the link was to a TV & Movies tab and I moved on to Mashable where I found the Complete Guide to Twitter Abbreviations.

It’s actually a pretty good compilation.  If you’re not going to read the list you should at least know that TIL stands for Today I Learned.

Best part of the article:

TIL: Kummerspeck is the perfect word. German for weight gain from stress eating. Literally translates to grief bacon (via @jacoblogansmith)

I may have this embroidered on a pillow.

In other news, at Pi’s request we recently watched Let Them Wear Towels (one of the 9 for IX documentaries on ESPN). This documentary is about the first women who covered major league sports from the men’s locker rooms. It’s running frequently—I think you’ll like it.

The thing I found most interesting was the women saying that really no one – male sportswriters included – WANTS to be in the locker room after a game. Locker rooms are stinky, sweaty, stinky, raucous, stinky, humid, loud, stinky places. It’s where the story is so they had to be there to do their jobs. But want? Not so much.

I bring this up because the HS football lift-a-thon was this week. Talk about a loud, sweaty (but surprisingly not stinky), testosterone-filled environment.

Plus Pi.

Her shoulder still isn’t 100% so she wasn’t able to do everything but she participated in the squat part and maxed at 190 pounds. Compared to the rest of the team, that’s not much, but then again, most of the guys are 6 times as big as she is. (Kudos to the 2 guys who squatted 475! Yikes!) I was really impressed that her teammates took her weight seriously and spotted her as carefully as if she was lifting at their max levels. The picture doesn’t really show that, but trust me. Her goal is to be able to squat 200 by the end of the summer. Stay tuned.

Happy Saturday. Text your sister.

Love, Mom