Still cleaning out the old essays.<\/p>\n
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –<\/p>\n
We recently had an event that spawned the arrival of Mylar helium balloons. Fortunately, our crowd is not of the Have a Hannah Montana Inflatable Item for Your Birthday crowd, so we get a couple cards and a gift for your normal gift bearing holidays, and I\u2019m man enough to forget the standard Wuv<\/em> holidays, so we don\u2019t deal with them on a regular basis.<\/p>\n Now cards are keepsakes, at least in our household or at least when they\u2019re in my reach. You can easily put them into boxes or binders to save them for some far away days in the future when you\u2019ve got nothing to do an empty house full of old people\u2019s furniture, wallpaper, and cats. Cards fit easily into these storage devices. Little letters, little notes, each of these you can unfold and review, running your fingers over the creased paper. But Mylar balloons are another story altogether.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve worked in the industry, tangentially, so I know how to deflate the balloons: you simply insert a straw into the neck of the balloon so that it opens the little valve and squeezing the helium out, or the helium and air mixture, or whatever mix exists after a couple of weeks in the wild. Sure, that\u2019s easy, and it makes sense enough if you\u2019re in the industry and you can reinflate unsold balloons the next time the season rolls around, hoping that your dated stars and designs will become retro enough to sell then.<\/p>\n But what do you do with a deflated mylar balloon in the household? I can\u2019t imagine hanging them flat on the wall like old LP covers. Certainly, you\u2019ll never reinflate them with helium, as you\u2019ll probably never bring home a tank full of that noble gas whose natural supply is waning. Just blowing them up won\u2019t recapture the magic uselessness of the original, and bagging up that carbon dioxide won\u2019t reduce your footprint a toe. <\/p>\n I guess the only responsible thing to do with a helium-filled balloon is to do what PEBA would recommend: returning it to the wild before it\u2019s too weak to travel to the helium balloon spawning grounds back east (that is, downwind). I only hope I\u2019m not too late, because all of the neighbors down the block will know the source of the newly liberated \u201cIt\u2019s a Boy!\u201d balloons that snag in their trees, and this very piece will shoot down my story of an accidental balloon-escaped-when-I-opened-the-door-and-I-tried-to-lure-it-back-in-with-balloon-treats story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Still cleaning out the old essays. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – We recently had an event that spawned the arrival of Mylar helium balloons. Fortunately, our crowd is not of the Have a Hannah Montana Inflatable Item for Your Birthday crowd, so we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11368"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11372,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11368\/revisions\/11372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}