Was this my mother? I willed it to be her. I was wishing so hard it had to be! The woman, who I couldn't identify yet, parked her car facing east, whi...ch put the car between us from where I was parked across the road. She was getting some groceries from the rear seat. I had to wait a few more minutes for her to come clearly into view. It was my Mom. I jumped out, not even shutting the car door and dodged across the street. She heard me come up behind her before she reached the deck leading into. “Okay, gentlemen, I believe some practice is in order here.”Kenny stepped in. “Exactly, but not quite yet. Notice two things, people. I haven’t removed the lady’s panties. Why?”Jackson volunteered. “Um, is it because it’s kind of a special thing?”Kenny nodded, impressed with the boy’s astuteness. “Exactly. I wanted to do a couple of things here. Even though she’s essentially naked, I wanted to symbolically preserve a bit of her modesty, and I also wanted to wait for her to catch up. That is,. . ," said Cromartie, clearly loathe to cut short his fulsome praise of his captain's maneuvers. "The rest, I'm afraid, is the bad news. We're still six hours short." What does that mean?" Heisinger pressed. "That we'll have to endure six hours' worth of the nova's radiation? Can we stand it?" Well, actually yes, we could," the mate told her. "The ship itself offers some shielding, and the first wave will be mostly gamma rays, we'd all have a pretty sharply increased risk of cancer somewhere. I was looking at the anemometer on top of the forward mast and saw that it was beginning to spin fairly fast. You could feel the cooler breeze picking up from the cooler water we were moving into.We were only a couple of miles out when I heard the electric motors begin to lift the sail. I went back inside to find the salon filling up with people watching our departure. Kids were coming topside, still rubbing their eyes while getting plastic glasses of juice.Steve said he needed to use the head.