Composed Elements

No, I’m not talking about a baby Guile from Street Fighter.  I was sitting in my apartment yesterday afternoon watching Arrested Development when I heard a couple of loud booming sounds on my ceiling.  The only thing I could think of was that somebody dropped a couch or refrigerator on my roof.  But that idea didn’t make sense, so I edged over to the other side of the room just in case my ceiling would collapse.  Later when I met my friend downstairs, he told me he heard other people complaining about the boom as well.  Must’ve been a heavy couch.  Then I saw an article today about the Space shuttle Endeavour landing at the Edwards Air Force Base and causing a sonic boom over LA. 

I asked my coworker if he had heard the boom as well.

ME: Did you hear that sonic boom yesterday?
COWORKER: Yea I did. That was the shuttle landing.
ME: Did you know that ahead of time?
COWORKER: No, at first I thought someone fell off the roof so I went outside to check if anybody was hurt. Then I realized I heard two booms, so I figured it was a shuttle landing, because you get one boom from the front engine and the other from the back. Then I looked online and I was right.

I felt like a country bumpkin. Maybe it is common knowledge that shuttles make sonic boom boom sounds. It reminded me of the time my family first experienced an earthquake. We had just moved from Wisconsin where there weren’t any earthquakes and before that, my parents lived in other countries that didn’t have earthquakes either. When the ground started shaking, my whole family was utterly confused. My mom told us to run outside and grab onto a pole. So there we were, all six of us, each holding onto a pole, wondering why nobody else was outside doing the same.