Uranus is in the wrong place

 Oh, the things Dan says.

"It's the Journey of Gnatty Dan." Debbie Hicks, Shannon Barnes, Harold Dravenstott, and I had begun at Medina Square, and promptly encountered clouds of gnats as we turned onto the Champion Creek Multipurpose Trail. They got in our eyes, noses, mouths, and everywhere else you can think of.

"Uranus is in the wrong place." The Helios Project was installed last year. Models of the sun, the planets, and non-planet Pluto are placed along the park trail and the size and relative distance of the objects are to scale. The distance between Jupiter and Saturn appears to be much greater than that from Saturn to Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. I mentioned that this didn't seem right; the distance between the planets keeps increasing with their distance from the sun. So Uranus should be placed much farther away. When I got home, I looked it up. I was right; to keep the scale correct, Uranus would be at the very end of the trail, and Neptune and Pluto would be farther still. There. I think I got through that without even one Uranus joke. 

"Debbie used to teach math, but now she's history." After many fine years as a teacher, Debbie is about to retire. I mentioned that her coworkers would soon be able to honestly say this. My running friends ask, "How long did it take you to come up with that one, Dan?" "Not long enough," I answer.