jay | A sunny time...

*bounce* today was great! Splendid! It's sunny and starkly beautiful, still cold, and we finished the third (and last) spacesuited human geological survey. My work is nearly done :-).

Well... the pump died this morning (we had had running water) but our cook Ginger boiled lots of water for me, and I used a "sun shower" -- a big bag with a nozzle on one end. It was heavenly... I was clean for the first time in 9 days. Yay!!!

This field season has been a good one... despite the poor weather. We've had much less media, less of a circus... fewer people and it has been low-key. There's been more of a community sense, the best since 1999. Despite the skirmishes with the Mars Society, Bob Zubrin in particular.

MS left their camp in a mess.... smoldering open cans of fecal material, still burning two days after they left... bits of trash and wire and plastic all around the FMARS hab... loose plastic sheeting under the hab, where winter winds will blow it out into the crater. Meanwhile MS is blasting us on MSNBC for a dispute over flying weather ceilings on the day they departed... sigh.

But, MS has left, as have the clouds and rain and snow. We finally got to see the valleys around Site 9 today, as well as "MIT Lake" (we couldn't call it Horse Lake because the water body namespace is limited to colleges and universities, per HMP policy). I tossed a washer with Victor to decide if MIT or Auburn would have the honor... it was grey on one side, painted blue on the other. Steve Braham (Imperial College) tossed it, I won ;-). We will name the nearby canyon "Horse Canyon" instead, which sounds vaguely Western...

And to cap off a lovely day, Lori talked FedEx down from US$15K to $US5K to ship our metric tonne of equipment back to NASA-Ames. (high-five). I'll be sorry to see her leave next month to take a teaching position.

And this evening I chatted with

patgreene, EW, and

geekchick until late... that, plus certain recent entries by

clairaide and

hopeforyou only serve to increase my um, frustration level.... (grin) but in a most pleasant fashion.

At 2:25am, it is bright enough outside to need sunglasses...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

elorie.livejournal.com

..I was interested in that at one point. Then I got to know them. I actually organized a table for them at DragonCon...with little help from the local group and NO support from the national level. It was an exercise in aggravation which I vowed never to repeat. Then I mentioned that I was interested in forming a group for Pagans who are interested in space exploration, and got told in no uncertain terms that they didn't need any of Those Kind of People around. They are, IMO, a bunch of mostly white middle-class guys with delusions of relevance.