Baseball with Socks in a Storm on Mars

 

Pip was reading an old rhyming book about a cat with a tall hat that entertained some Earth kids on a rainy day.

We were in a similar situation. A bad dust storm had rolled over Jezero Crater, and almost everyone was stuck inside their hab at Gordo Station. This was nothing like our usual storms.  It was way too easy to get lost in all that blowing dust.

Pip was chuckling as he scrolled through the colorful pages. "I need a hat like this," he said.

Out of pure boredom, I wadded up a pair of socks and threw them at him. But he used his robot senses to spot it and swat it back to the hamper.

"Homerun," I said.

He texted me a link. "You'll like this story. Hey, we should re-write it for a dust storm on Mars."

I scanned through it, and he was right. I liked it. And I had the perfect opening page: “The sun did not shine. It was too dark to play. So we sat in the hab all that cold, dark, Mars day.”

Then Pip chimed in: "I sat there with Ramone. We sat there, at home. And I said, 'Man, I wish we could go out and roam!'"

We were both laughing now. I added: "Too dark to go out and too cold to hunt rocks, so we sat in the hab and played baseball with socks."

It's not fun to be trapped inside for days, but it's a lot easier if you have a friend with a wacky imagination.

If you ever get stuck inside for days, tell me what you do for fun at

RamoneRocketeer -at- gmail -dot- com.