06/01/2025

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05/26/2025 to 06/01/2025

Memorial Day was another beautiful day. Andrew, Willow, and I, conducted the Keating family traditional Memorial Day Plunge. Tiffany supervised from the dock. The only rule is after you jump off the dock, you must be completely submerged underwater. The water felt like an ice water bath; we all made a quick exit! For dinner I grilled chicken on the grill. This time, I marinated the chicken in Stubb’s Spicy Barr-B-Q Sauce, we liked the spicy way better than the original. The holiday weekend went by so fast.

Photo by Tiffany Keating
On Tuesday the 27th, I watched the ninth test flight of Starship 35 & Booster 14-2. Raptor Pi 314 flew for the third time. Booster was intentionally crashed into the ocean. Ship's door malfunctioned, no deployment of dummy StarLinks, lost attitude control due to fuel leak and went into a roll. Not a great outcome. Sad to see the current state of Elon Musk, black eye, sad looking at a recent presentation he gave to employees…repeated same mantra of making life multiplanetary. The kid in me still wants to see Starship succeed. Raptor is still one of my favorite rocket engines along with the RS-25. Also disappointing to see Jerad Isaacson be removed from consideration for NASA Administrator. I feel like NASA is headed away from scientific research and development to just being integrated into Space Force, hopefully it all works out for the best.

Also on Tuesday, Andrew stated he deleted Snapchat and Facebook. Tiffany then also deleted her Snapchat account. So, on Wednesday the 28th, I deleted my Snapchat account in solidarity with Andrew and Tiffany. I have gotten no value from the app and found it to be unwanted noise. I also deleted my BlueSky account, never used it.

Thursday the 29th was Andrew’s last day of school!

On Friday, I discovered a snapshot of my website from 2000 using the Wayback Machine. My domain www.ikeating.com pointed to www.i.keating.net.

Saturday, May 31st, was Andrew’s seventeenth birthday! 🎁 We all got up early and Andrew opened his presents. 💻 One of his gifts was a 13-inch MacBook Air, M4 processor clock speed of 4.4 GHz, 10 core GPU, 16 GB Ram, 512 GB memory. Other that the 2016 iMac he had on his desk, this will be his first personal computer. Hopefully he gets several years of good use out of it. After celebrating, we then quickly got ready and headed off to Duluth for a day of adventure.

We stopped at the DeWitt-Seitz Marketplace located within Canal Park for lunch. Taste of Saigon is no more; it is now called Pholicious. Tiffany had Chicken Lemongrass with egg roll and fried rice, I had General Tso Chicken (the waitress stated the sauce was made with ginger and big rocks of sugar) with egg roll and fried rice, and Andrew had Pho Chay, Vermicelli noodles, vegetables, tofu, and fish sauce.

After we had lunch, we walked for a bit on the lake walk and then headed over to Zenith Bookstore. We then made our way to the Enger Tower and Japanese Peace Garden.

One the way to Enger Tower, Andrew and Tiffany mentioned they wanted to have some ice cream, did we get lucky! Twin Ports Express food truck was waiting for us in the parking lot with a wide selection of tasty ice cream treats. Andrew got Mint Chocolate Chip, Tiffany got Rum Black Cherry, and I got a Carmel Affogato which is two scoops of Vanilla ice cream, two shots of Espresso, and whatever flavor you want.

After enjoying our ice cream, we climbed up Enger Tower and enjoyed the view. We then walked around the Japanese Peace Garden. Andrew rang the bell which seemed to be the thing to do. The story behind the garden is interesting, I've included the link here which also talks about Duluth’s sister city Ohara Isumi, Japan.

After shopping for a bit at Duluth Miller Hill Mall, we drove home, and I picked up some to go orders from Rapids Brewery for dinner. Andrew had a chicken sandwich, Tiffany had nachos, and I had a smash burger. The food was delicious.

Sunday Kim came over and celebrated Andrew’s birthday. She played a couple of songs for him; one was Invention by Bach and the other she said was three songs put together but could remember by who. She also played a song for Andrew that she was working on about her and Buddha. I then spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready and started the work week off early.

End of blog. Thank you for reading!