This book is dedicated to Phineas, who renews my energy whenever I see him.
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The Gomans prepped for Christmas as fall turned to winter on Newland. Snow piled up and the usual sunshine that blankets Colorado after a storm was slow in coming. It seemed like the whole neighborhood was digging out, and they were none too happy about it. Except for the Goman’s house. The driveway was clean as a whistle and the sidewalks were clear. There was even a clean path from the
driveway up to the front door, so the video camera in the doorbell could easily capture anyone driving through their garage door. As the family sat down to eat dinner, Mom said “Honey thanks so much for shoveling.” Dad responded, “I really meant to, I’m so impressed you got it done, and you did such a great job, too.” They looked at each other in surprise. “I wasn’t joking,” Mom said. “I thought you shoveled the
snow.” “I wasn’t either,” said dad “I figured it had to be you.” They both looked back and forth at each other and said in unison: “Then who could have shoveled all that snow? It’s the biggest snowstorm in 4 years! That snow is piled up 4 feet high in some places. Who in the world could have shoveled us out?” No one noticed Phineas smiling silently to himself. Ever since he had started making his own energy drink
he never ran out of get-up-and-go.
Phineas was the ultimate junior scientist. He was always drawing spaceships, and monsters, and all sorts of gadgets that did the most startling thing. But he never ventured into chemistry. That is until right after Thanksgiving. Mom and Dad had just hosted a huge dinner, and everyone ate
their fill and even more. The next day there was a common theme: lay around the house and sleep off all that extra food. Phineas tried to get his brothers to play with him, then his sisters, then Mom, then finally Dad. All were just too worn out. So, he thought to himself “enough of that! I’m going to come up with something to pep me up.” He read and he googled, and he watched Animal Planet and he
looked high and low trying to figure out what was the answer to achieving better energy. Then his friend called and asked if he was up for going to the zoo. “Why not?” he thought. “Everyone here is just lazing around like a bunch of old dogs by the fireplace.”
So off he went to the zoo and, as usual, he turned it into a learning experience. Looking at the pigs and
dogs and elephants just laying around, he thought that was not the way he wanted to be. Then he saw the monkey cage. The monkeys were running around full speed, jumping from tree to tree and throwing things at each other trying to get games started. Phineas thought that was how he wanted to be. Then he saw the bird cage. Birds were swooping and soaring and
pecking and strutting, not a one of them was still on a perch. “That’s for me” – he thought. Then he strolled to the aquarium and saw the giant sharks. Sharks were always a favorite of his because he loved to brush his teeth and floss and the sharks always had such clean and white teeth. But in addition to their teeth, he noticed something else. The sharks never
slowed down. They were always on patrol, diving and flapping and biting and rising – there was no rest in them. He got so deep in thought he forgot he was still walking. As luck would have it, he walked right into a man and they both slipped on some ice and fell to the pavement.
Lucky for Phineas his victim was a good-natured chap. Even luckier was the fact he turned out to be the head
zookeeper. They dusted themselves off and each apologized for being so careless. It looked like that would be the end of their encounter, when Phineas said, at the spur of the moment “Sir what do you feed the monkeys, birds, and sharks? They never seem to stop moving!” The zookeeper scratched his double chin, as he had enjoyed second helpings at
Thanksgiving Dinner himself. He thought for a second and said “You know sonny, you’re right. But there’s no secret to what we feed them. The Monkeys get peanuts, they eat the shells. They get bananas, then they throw the peels at little boys, the birds eat sunflower seeds, but they pick those shells off. And the sharks eat little fish and they swallow them
whole.” Right them and there, Phineas determined to see if he could be more like those energetic animals.
Mom was a little surprised when Phineas asked if she had any peanuts in the shell, bananas, sunflower seeds, and whole fish. On the other hand, she was the best mom a guy like Phineas could ask for, because she knew sometimes she had to just let him be Phineas and do things a little
differently than other kids his age. She went by the pet store, the grocer, and the garbage dump and got her inquisitive boy what he requested.
The next thing you know, Phineas poured it all into a bucket and was grinding it all up in a blender. The resulting mix stunk to high heaven, but he sort of figured that would happen. After it was ground up into a
thick pulpy juice, he poured it into a glass. He held his nose and closed his eyes, and took a long swig. Somehow he managed to keep it down. The results were both immediate and spectacular. Even though it was late at night, he ran outside and shoveled his walk. Then he came back in, washed all the laundry, folded and ironed it, prepared all the family’s Christmas cards, and cleaned the entire toy
room. He hardly slept that night, but he did not miss the shut eye. The next day at school he had so much energy he climbed the ropes all the way to the ceiling 12 times without stopping. He asked his mom to keep finding him the odds and ends he needed for his strange concoction, and she managed to always deliver.
Dad wished he had his son’s energy. Not that he was lagging energy wise, but the
work was just piling up. Come to think of it, his company was famous for finding the best guys and loading them up with work, and it looked like that’s where he was now. But how long could this go on? The government made a big announcement that they wanted to have people on Jupiter by 2021, and they asked Dad’s company to take the lead. The pressure was intense, no one could see how they could come up with
such a spectacular machine in such a short amount of time. So, the leader of the whole company stood up in front of a huge auditorium on a video feed and pleaded with all his employees.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have got to deliver somehow, some way. Throw deep, think outside the box, and, and look up and down for any idea, we must come up with an answer. The
truth is out there folks, and we have to find it.” Dad was so excited that he discussed it at the dinner table that night. “it was like he was looking right at me when he begged us to come up with something. But what can we do? We’ve tried solar, nuclear, chemical, and compressed noble gases and nothing is panning out." Phineas had been eating dinner inside a box, and when he
scooted back his chair, he fell out. “well Phineas, I see you’re officially thinking outside the box, like the big boss asked us to do. Might you have any ideas?”
No doubt Phineas was on the spot, but a strange feeling came over him like this was his time to speak. “Dad, it seems to me that the only solution you have not even considered is totally organic.” He spat out
“We have so many examples in nature of animals with boundless energy. Do you think we have really looked at any of our options there?” Dad admitted they had not, and thought his son was a little bit nuts. But later that night as he was combing his mustache he thought “Why don’t we turn Phineas loose on this?” The next morning at breakfast, Dad noticed Phineas was drinking
something that smelled awful, and as he gagged, he said “Phineas could you draw your ideas up on paper and see if we have something worth looking at?”
This was a battle cry Phineas was waiting for. Dad was shocked when he came home that evening to find 300 pages of engineering design sheets, and a working prototype. That night after supper they snuck out to the nature area behind the
house and shot it off. To their total amazement, the craft, powered only on unshelled peanuts, bananas, sunflower seeds and whole fish, made it to the moon and back to its launch spot in two hours. To prove it really made it to the Moon, Phineas programmed the craft to take a picture of the American flag in the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon as it soared past. They were all
shocked when they saw the picture, proving the craft had indeed worked. Dad thought he might have something, so he bundled up the plans and the prototype and showed it to the bosses at work. “This is amazing!” shouted the NASA engineer as he reviewed it. “Let me show this to the Germans, they have been trying to do this for years.” “Ach Du Lieber” exclaimed the German lead engineer after she studied the design
package ”This is Vunderbar!“ Everyone agreed this was worth a shot, but they would have to get on it right away to make the tight deadline, as the schedule showed they should already be in live orbital testing.
So, the best minds in the industry all joined together to build the ultimate spaceship, one that would carry a human to Jupiter and back in a little over a
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This book is dedicated to Phineas, who renews my energy whenever I see him.
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The Gomans prepped for Christmas as fall turned to winter on Newland. Snow piled up and the usual sunshine that blankets Colorado after a storm was slow in coming. It seemed like the whole neighborhood was digging out, and they were none too happy about it. Except for the Goman’s house. The driveway was clean as a whistle and the sidewalks were clear. There was even a clean path from the
driveway up to the front door, so the video camera in the doorbell could easily capture anyone driving through their garage door. As the family sat down to eat dinner, Mom said “Honey thanks so much for shoveling.” Dad responded, “I really meant to, I’m so impressed you got it done, and you did such a great job, too.” They looked at each other in surprise. “I wasn’t joking,” Mom said. “I thought you shoveled the
snow.” “I wasn’t either,” said dad “I figured it had to be you.” They both looked back and forth at each other and said in unison: “Then who could have shoveled all that snow? It’s the biggest snowstorm in 4 years! That snow is piled up 4 feet high in some places. Who in the world could have shoveled us out?” No one noticed Phineas smiling silently to himself. Ever since he had started making his own energy drink
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