flakiness

I've been mostly offline lately... just dispatched my team off Devon Island to Resolute with their equipment. And the satellite link has been flaky at times. And my laptop, likewise... I wish I could claim something adventurous (polar bear attack? fell in the mud at Trinity drillsite?) but I merely spilled most of a cup of coffee across the keyboard this morning and have been drying and cleaning it since... So I may suddenly go silent, but it doesn't mean anything more than a repair bill.

There are still webcams up, at the project site: http://www.marsonearth.com .

bleh...

My pants are getting a bit looser, even with all of dawnd's chocolate at hand, and more evening consumption of alcohol (port, Scotch, vodka) than I'm used to in most months, at home. The food here... scrapes, compared to past years.

The HMP weight-loss plan continues... there's bad food here (I had peanut butter again tonight for dinner, had plain spaghetti last night with no sauce (mushrooms)). Bleh. The cook is a guy who does weekend hunting lodges for smaller, all-male, all-carnivore groups. He lacks experience with diversity, either in menus or in customer needs. He can't bake. Frozen bread. No pancakes or biscuits, even... breakfast is always bacon and eggs. Lunch is always canned soup and make-own sandwiches with the same three ingredients laid out. Dinner is usually something canned (stew, chili with beans, spaghetti sauce) with a salad. Day after day. Sometimes the Inuit kitchen assistants will make a dessert... one made my birthday cake. But the cook is clearly far out of his league. And the Franklin expedition perished on Devon Island in the 1840s after lead poisoning due to excessive consumption of canned food...

This annoys me in part because I sent Pascal the names of at least two cooking candidates this spring (including sarahh), either of whom I'm confident would have done far better. Grr.

not for faint kidneys...

"So, um, do you just do it in the great outdoors?" said the reporter from the New York Times, clenching his knees slightly while pointing to the soil just outside of base camp. "No, we have a facility to capture and then transport everything," I said, "look over there at the 55-gallon drum with the funnel on top -- and the box to stand on next to it, out there in the open."

He didn't say anything. Looked at it again. Then an undergraduate geologist, his escort from the Mars Society hab a mile away, offered to take him back there for relief...

DAME wrap-up

Photo collection on my project's season is now up:
http://www.marsonearth.com/multimedia/07.26.05.hmp.rs.photo.report.html

I wrote up the field results today and sent them in to HQS and JPL today for tomorrow's annual review (KM will present).

And in less than a month, I'll be en route to Madrid for 5 weeks on a different drilling project...