I get most of my news from reading The New York Times in the morning. The rest I get on-line. Every so often something happens that makes me realize that I'm a little bit disconnected from the way most people who listen to radio or TV news in the morning get their news.

This hit a height of surrealness on September 11th, which I actually found out about from Mary Anne's journal.

Today, I went down to The Other Change of Hobbit, my local science fiction bookstore, and I was peacefully eye-ing a stack of used paperbacks when I heard somebody say, "So, did you hear about the space shuttle?"

"No," I said. "What happened to the space shuttle?"

And he told me.

Damn.

I really don't know quite what to say. I'm sad for the astronauts and their families. I'm scared about what this might mean for the future of the space program.

A space shuttle disaster feels strangely personal. When I was in junior high school in Orlando, FL, you could see the shuttle launches on a clear day. The Challenger launch in '86 was a big deal, because one of our teachers had been in the running for getting to go on that flight. I missed seeing the actual explosion by about 5 minutes because I was at band practice. But I remember coming out to the parking lot and seeing the pillar of smoke with the big bulge at the top and the smaller plume trailing off, and thinking, "That looks funny." And a bunch of us crowded around a teacher's car, and she turned on her car radio so we could hear the news...

Hearing this morning's news gave me a strange sense of deja vu.