Set Phasers to Stun

So I'm a child of Star Trek. Seen all the old, in-between and new episodes, all the movies, and yes, I know the opening monologue by heart, "Space... the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." Oooo, ooo, o-o-o-o-oooo. Warp speed outta the tv screen.

Convinced, yet? Scary isn't it? Anyways, if you don't already know this a lot of the metaphors of my life I get from either movies or songs. This morning as I was cleaning up and rehashing the week in my head, it hit me. Our life in the Goodman house could be compared with the Enterprise. The Captain, Dad, leads shore excursions to check out the flora and fauna of newly discovered lands while the Second, mom, stays on the ship and attempts to keep things on an even keel until the main man returns.

If you ever watched the show, you know that things never went as planned, sometimes it was something with the remaining crew, sometimes it was the welcome party. You never know around here either. Things went pretty good at home this time, so I'm thinking the Cap'n may not have had such a run of luck. Something else that got me thinking is the difficulties with getting the crew in sync. We're all traveling around in this big ship and we've all got our unique part to play, and both the Captain and the Second (Number 2 means something entirely different when you're raising kids) try their darnedest to keep every body alive and happy and on the ship.

Sometimes someone jettisons an escape pod and we have to stop everything and go on a search of the galaxy for the missing crew member, or someone's brains get invaded by a little earwig alien dude and we must extract, but the most difficult maneuver of all right now is negotiating the family dinner. Now, I'm not talking about dinner at the captain's table, that is happening most nights, its the offshore excursion with a foreign ambassador. If the ship is the locale for the feast, we're pretty good, all officers are in attendance, but not everybody can go offshore at all times. Ya follow? 

The Captain must have a hologram conference with Starfleet at the appointed time of the event, or Spock must take an unscheduled trip to Vulcan, or Scotty has to train new recruits. Uhura has an urgent message from the outer limits, Chekov can't get the thrusters to do their thang, Sulu lost the keys, Bones encounters an outbreak on board the ship, even the Ensign assigned to die this episode can't make it. How does one get every body coordinated? Its impossible to explain, even more impossible to pull off, so why sweat it. The landing party will be those that can leave the ship and that's that. Beam us down to the surface, Scotty.