I also miss Jolt gum.

This occurred to me just now as I started to pass out while reading about redistricting. The thought also strikes as I’m fending off attacks of narcolepsy at staff meetings by stabbing myself in the leg with my pen.

Jolt Cola came along in the 80s. Whoever made it knew there was a segment of the public that did not want “light” or “diet” cola drinks. We wanted what the label on all Jolt cola cans proudly proclaimed: “ALL THE SUGAR AND TWICE THE CAFFEINE!”

I’m not sure when the Jolt people brought out their gum, but it had caffeine too. The gum was good because you could keep it in the car for long trips when road fatigue threatened. The last time I was able to find some more than a year ago at K-Mart. If I had known it was going to become unavailable, I would have stockpiled.

Jolt cola seems to have vanished from the scene well before then. I can’t recall seeing any of the stuff anywhere for some years now. It’s too bad, it was perfect for afternoons like this.

(And don’t tell me about that 5-Hour energy drink stuff. I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work for me.)

He was kidding of course. We couldn’t afford to rent the boat that takes people out to something like that. But while pondering my relative poverty, I got to wondering if there’s a junk drawer on that ship.

Everyone has a junk drawer. It’s where all sorts of stuff winds up. In my place its where I stash tape, sissors, shears, screws that fell off things, once-used twist-ties, twine, some old M-80s I haven’t gotten around to detonating, Super Glue that I haven’t gotten around to using yet and, well, see for yourself:

I’ll bet Martha Stewart has a junk drawer like this, but it’s probably a whole lot more organized. In fact, it’s probably tastefully organized.

So, to paraphrase a certain credit card commercial, what’s in YOUR junk drawer?

At least that’s what I do. This is because when I go to restock the beer supply, I usually have to walk past the candy aisle. This causes me to buy a couple bags of candy because I have to feed my co-workers’ chocolate addictions. Otherwise they become cranky. Or at least that’s my justification.

But getting back to the passage of time. Thanks to the Hershey and Mars Candy companies, I am able to track the progression of the seasons with amazing accuracy, often “nailing” the date of an upcoming holiday to within a couple of weeks. Take that Stonehenge!

The Chocolate Year, of course, begins with Halloween. Although in Days of Yore (as they counted time in Yoreland) this used to only happen on Oct. 31. But thanks to advances in quantum physics, the Halloween season now runs from roughly Sept. 1 through Nov. 1 (or until the last leftover stuff goes out the door at half-price).

Halloween is immediately (or perhaps even sooner) followed by Christmas. Once upon a time there was a holiday known as “Thanksgiving” which was supposed to precede Christmas, but we know now it was an illusion because the Pilgrims were smoking crack. Anyway, the Christmas season lasts from about two seconds after daybreak on Nov. 1 to about 20 or 30 seconds after the stores re-open on Jan. 2, which signals the start of the Valentine’s Day chocolate orgy season.

This runs from January right up to mid-February, after which we enter the Easter chocolate season. As with Halloween, Easter is no longer chained to a single day in April but now stretches for weeks well before the actual event. It also signals the annual return of “Peeps,” which are mutant yellow things produced by an experiment in candy technology which went horribly wrong. Fortunately, they have short lives and disappear quickly after Easter Monday.

Finally, about one minute past Easter (give or take a few seconds) the Mother’s Day chocolates appear on the shelves. I have to wonder how many people actually buy chocolates for their mom or just use that as an excuse to pig out on Reese’s Pieces and Hershey’s Kisses? This demands a well-funded scientific study which I will be the first to volunteer to undertake.

And that about wraps up the Chocolate Year. Yes, yes, I’m aware there’s a few more months left on the calendar until next Halloween, but nothing that ranks as chocolate worthy. Candy scientists are working on rectifying this situation, but until that happy day my co-workers will just have to suffer. Pass the Sweet Tarts.

So here goes.

First off there’s the minature Zen garden being admired by punks, bendable wire figures and others…

Then there’s the Singing Christmas Dog right next to them…

And over on another desk is the orgami figure in the planter pot…

Then there’s the dragon on Jim Buchan’s monitor…

That enough for you?

“In the long term, the Main Institution is going to close. That’s the way they’re headed,” Port Executive Director Jim Kuntz summed up at a recent meeting of the penitentiary task force.

One of the oldest (if not the oldest) prison facilities in the state of Washington, the MI has been in the crosshairs of budget cutters for a while. It isn’t surprising. Despite diligent upkeep and upgrades, only so much can be done with a structure which has some parts dating back to territorial days. You don’t have to be a financial wizard to see it just makes sense to replace it with a modern, more cost-efficient building (or buildings).

So if that happens, what’s to become of the old “Concrete Mama”?

Well, here’s an idea. Make it (or at least part of it) into a B&B.

Surprisingly, this idea has gotten a positive response from more than a few people. Hundreds of tourists visit Alcatraz every year, don’t they? How many would be willing to shell out money to spend a night or two in the same digs as Al Capone and other (in)famous characters? And if they would be willing to do that there, why not here?

Think of it. Pitch it to visitors who want a really different place to stay on their vacation, something they can brag about when they get back home. “Inmates” who toughed out their “term in the pen” (complete with a bottle of Walla Walla premium wine over dinner in the old prison cafeteria) could leave with an official certificate certifying they “had earned their discharge” from the Pen.

(And, of course, offers to purchase official T-shirts with “I did time at Washington State Pen” as well as other memorabilia would be no-brainers.)

Of course there’s a ton of details to work out, not the least of which would be getting around how to have a B&B on prison grounds. But we’ve got a lot of bright boys and girls around here. So let’s get to work.

After 29 years and hundreds of flights (129 at last count) NASA is getting ready to pull the plug on the Space Transportation System, which is the official name for the space shuttle program.

“Sometime this year – right now it looks like September 30 – NASA plans to shut down the program,” Gugliotta writes. When that happens, the last three space surviving shuttles (Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour) will be donated by NASA “to whoever it feels can provide the best homes.”

For personal reasons, I wouldn’t mind getting hold of one of these babies. Unfortunately while the “donate” part is correct, it seems you have to come up with $42 million for shipping and handling ($6 million pays for the Boeing 747 that will piggyback the orbiter to an airport of choice). And, oh yeah, you have to provide a building to display your shuttle indoors and, oh yeah, only U.S. museums and educational institutions are eligible.

Well, darn. Probably just as well. Being 122 feet long, weighing 151,000 pounds and having 78-foot wingspans, one of those guys wouldn’t fit in my apartment anyway.

The personal part comes from watching the shuttle Columbia when it landed at Northrop Strip at White Sands Missile Range on March 30, 1982. It was the third space shuttle mission and the only one that ever landed at White Sands, which had been designated as a backup strip in case Edwards Air Force Base was unavailable.

That happened in 1982 after heavy rains flooded the primary strip at Edwards. When it was announced White Sands would be the landing strip, journalists and television crews from around the world converged on Las Cruces. I lucked into the assignment for my newspaper, the Farmington (N.M.) Daily Times because I was the only person on the news staff who was a reporter, a photographer and could also operate single incredibly clunky portable word processor/modem the newspaper owned at that time.

So off I went, zooming down almost the entire length of the Land of Enchantment to Las Cruces, checking into a hotel which didn’t have hot water (the proprietors couldn’t figure out how to keep the pilot light lit). Other adventures included being sandblasted by a dust storm the shuttle was supposed to land (but didn’t) and busting out the wing window of my Ford Fiesta after locking myself out of the car that same morning.

But, busted wing window and all, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

The morning of the landing was incredibly clear and I still have vivid memories of listening to the shuttle crew start their descent, then way sooner than you would think possible spotting the little, dark speck in the sky and watching it rapidly grow into a recognizable shape. Then came the twin sonic booms (one caused by the shock wave off the nose and the other from one off the tail) and finally the landing, a hold-your-breath moment because they didn’t drop the nose gear until the last second.

I remember being damn proud of being an American right then and watching the future land in the New Mexico desert. Those are the memories I like to keep of Columbia and the space program, not the ones from later years of the Challenger disaster and then, on a dark morning in February 2003, hearing the Columbia had also suffered a grim fate, breaking up in the sky over Texas 16 minutes from landing.

Well, time moves on. The space shuttles will be replaced, but it’s not clear exactly by what or when. But I’ve still got a few mementos from the White Sands gig, and here’s one:

“We have posted a new video to YouTube as of late last night. I actually uploaded it on Sunday but then YouTube was not happy with my music so yesterday I had to find music that they approved…..oh well. I hope you enjoy the video, it is my first attempt and I had fun. It runs about 8 minutes long. I am already working on a large video to run at the shows this year.”

If you want to check it out, just go over to YouTube and search for “Holton Secret Lab.” It should pop right up. Marcy’s blog is also fun to check out. You can link to it here.

I’ve made a couple of visits out to the Holton’s place and it’s always been a hoot. Here’s a couple living out where the deer probably outnumber the people with an awesome auto shop that turns out eye-popping hot rods, custom cars and restorations that look like they just rolled off the factory floor.

Right now Bill is working on a 1928 Dodge Coupe to which he’s added a V-12 Jaguar engine “that (was) just sitting in the corner.” According to Marcy’s blog, Bill fired it up the other night “and it was LOUD.” However, it seems the original carburetors are a bear to work with, which means that Bill is now “in the process of building a tunnel ram manifold so he can put a trustworthy American Edlebrock on it…What would the Brits say? Stay tuned.”

This is the sort of stuff we used to fantasize about back when we were motor-infatuated teens listing to Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys. In fact, now got the song “She’s Real Fine, My 409″ stuck in my head. Thanks a lot guys.

(You can link to the NPS Web site dealing with this issue here.)

The sites being looked at are Hanford Site (motto: “Sixty-five years old and still hot!”); Los Alamos, N.M.; Oak Ridge, Tenn. and Dayton, Ohio.

Having lived in New Mexico and in Washington state , I can understand the significance of Los Alamos (that’s where the brain trust led by Oppenheimer did the R&D) and Hanford (B Reactor and center for plutonium production). And although I’ve never visited Oak Ridge, I know that’s where the huge uranium processing facility was built to produce U-235 (that being one of the two fissionable materials needed for the bomb.)

But Dayton? What the heck happened in Dayton?

It was about then that a press release crossed my desk about a public meeting in Richland to take comments on this proposal. (I confess I failed to do a brief on it. It got buried by other work and the deadline passed.) But it did give me a number to call which put me in touch with a nice guy in the faceless NPS bureaucracy which let me ask, “Why Dayton?”

It turns out Dayton does have a connection to the Manhattan Project. “It’s where they manufactured the triggers,” he explained. It was where the “Dayton Project” was located (well, duh!) which was aimed at “the research and development of polonium refinement and industrial production of polonium for atomic bomb triggers.” (Source: Wikipedia)

But unlike Hanford, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, just about everything associated with the Manhattan Project in Dayton has pretty much vanished in the intervening years. So, again, why was Dayton singled out?

“Well, you know how Congress works,” my guy said with a laugh. Apparently, when the proposal was making its way through process, somebody saw a chance to earn points with the voters in Dayton by getting the city included on the list.

Well, to quote Elmer Fudd, “Oh, those wascally Waytonians!”