Up, up, and argh!

A friend of mine lives in a condo complex near a big field where they occasionally host balloon festivals. Not the kind of balloon you tie to a kid's wrist, or the kind you bend into weird animal shapes, but the big hot-air kind that send you up in the sky in a little basket. 

I don't know that my friend has ever attended the festival, but he hasn't had to, since a couple of times the festival has attended him. Balloon landings in the street, in the backyard, in the development’s common areas -- and since these festivals start early in the morning on weekends, that can be quite a sight to wake up to.

When I was a kid I very much wanted to go for a ride in one of those balloons. Since my childhood I have learned a crucial fact about myself -- I am terrified of heights. I knew an ironworker who used to work on the antenna atop the Empire State Building, and just thinking of that makes me want to grab hold of something. If I'd gone to a festival with my folks as a kid with the plan to ride in a balloon gondola, I guarantee I would have chickened out.

🐔 young Fred

And, now that I know they often come back down in unplanned places, I don't think I am more likely to go up in one.

I guess my question to you is: Ever got up in a hot-air balloon? Was it scary, wonderful, both, neither? What's your balloon story?

Blow up.

Yesterday I stopped down at the supermarket for a few quick items -- you know, mousetraps, lye, gunpowder -- and noted that the customer service counter was appropriately festive for Cinco de Mayo. 

¡Hurra! 

Everything is a balloon now. You go down to the store, thinking, "I hope I can find a nice Get Well balloon for poor Sam, still suffering from infection from his cut-rate septoplasty. Gee, I wonder if they might have a square balloon?"

Nailed it.

I like balloons, sure. They're festive. They float. They're colorful. It can be a little sad when they get deflated and it's three weeks after the party but you just don't have the heart to bust the Mylar and call it a day. But really, what's not to like? Things that float are always fun.

Last year I followed with interest the Twitter feed of an orange balloon trapped on the ceiling of St. Albert the Great Parish in Calgary. It had lasted past Christmas and I wondered if wagering was going to break out among the followers -- I counted myself as one, even though I'm not on Twitter. Anticipating a fever pitch, I considered reactivating my PayPal account. But before I could get a pool together, the balloon lost its heavenly vantage and returned to earth.

The problem with balloons is, are they wasting helium? Most people aren't aware of the fact that we can't make helium. There's a whale of a lot of it in the universe... but what we have is what we have. And some folks are worried about it.

For years the U.S. strategic helium reserve was cited as a waste of taxpayer money, and following the Cold War, the program was finally killed. But helium does have a lot of uses besides our little floating containers of joy. As Forbes reported in 2017:

Since it's both non-reactive and inert, it can be used at high temperatures and in oxygen-rich environments without a risk of explosion. The speed of sound is almost three times greater in helium than in air, leading to acoustic applications. And at atmospheric pressure but at low temperatures, it liquefies but never solidifies, making it the ultimate coolant for particle accelerators, MRI machines, and superconductors.

And yet when this useful element makes it to the atmosphere, it gets kicked out into space.

I don't know what we can do to solve the upcoming helium crisis. And if I did, no one would listen to me. Even the dogs don't listen to me.

Oh, helium, most noble gas! Number two on the Periodic Table, number one in our hearts. You float our balloons, you float our hearts. What shall we do if you are gone?