beccastareyes

Well, yes, I have many thoughts. Some of which are full of colorful language. These thoughts in particular about his whole 'space program thing'.

So, for my non-American readers, the Republican Party is currently trying to decide who they want to run as the official Republican nominee for President in November. Most of my thoughts on the candidates involve 'gentlemen, your policies are 99% bigoted garbage that I think will be horrible for America, and you seem engaged in a contest to see who can be the worst human being'.

( But, Newt Gingrich, in an effort to distinguish himself from Mitt Romney*, decided he was going to be all 'Space is awesome, you guys!'.  )

You know, I should update this.

Sunday was the cooking day from Hell; I was making stuffed peppers, but forgot that when I made a delicious chicken-pot pie last week, it leaked all over the bottom of my oven. Until I noticed my apartment filling with smoke. And that my smoke detector doesn't work -- good when trying to clear out apartments filled with smoke, bad when you consider I might have started a fire. (Do not tell my mother this.)

(The stuffed pepper filling was pre-cooked and I don't mind raw/warm peppers, so I ate them half-done.)

There was also a worm in one of the peppers: I did notice this before doing anything beyond washing them, so I could throw it away. But yeah.

Monday was better, even if I had to clean my oven.

That and we had a research group meeting. Between Researcher who is with our group for paperwork purposes, but lives in Arizona and Other Professor who is on sabbatical in British Columbia (IIRC), we had a group meeting with five people and two iMacs with Skype. Next week, my adviser is gone to Massachusetts, so we suggested another iMac. Our goal is apparently to never have to meet in person again.

Today was cold and rainy so I worked from home. Someone asked my adviser 'hey, can we do X with Cassini' and since it involved the boresight*, Phil gave it to me since I know the data of (looking at the Sun through the boresight with VIMS) better than nearly anyone.

Unfortunately my answer is '... Maybe'. Which is an irritating answer, but I'm not sure if we can do better -- basically, I found I'd get a marginal detection if we averaged a lot of observations (80-some), and I don't know if averaging more data would help. I was able to get an answer as to how we'd have to do the observation if we wanted to do it, though.

And typing this out gave me another idea to try. Yay.

* Basically a hole in the spacecraft with a bunch of filters and mirrors in front of it so two of our spectrometers can be pointed at the Sun without breaking and/or melting things. Seriously the spacecraft software sends up all kinds of red flags and alerts if you even think about pointing the main camera near the sun, even if it's just on the way to something else.

Oh, whoops./ I should update. So, anyway, today I leave for Nebraska for a glorious two-week vacation...

... that isn't really, since I promised my adviser a paper draft. Oh, well. It's almost a vacation.

Anyway, Mom wants to know my plans for vacationing. Here's what I got so far...

Today (20 Dec.): Get on plane and take off at 5 PM; Land in Omaha at 10-ish. Jenn picks me up at airport and I go to her and Matt's place (in Omaha, still) and sleep.
Tomorrow (21 Dec.): Chill around Jenn's house while Jenn (and Matt?) and Mom are all at work. Wait until Mom or Jenn gets off of work to head to Lincoln.
22 Dec: Dinner with Mom and Ben
(Christmas Eve) 24 Dec: Family dinner, probably.
(Christmas Day) 25 Dec: Morning of opening presents. Jenn and Matt will be here, but will probably go to Matt's parents for the day, and maybe come back in the evening for soup and treats.
28 Dec: Dad and Marjorie leave for Florida, so sometime before that we have Christmas with Dad.
4 Jan: I go to Omaha, and then get on a plane back to Ithaca.

Dad wants me to spend the night, and I don't know what anyone's schedule looks like, but that's what I got.

So, as the Internet might know by now, Anne McCaffrey, she of the color-coded-by-sex dragons*, passed away.

It's weird because, well, somehow -- I don't know how -- when I was getting into book SFF fandom, I read her books because... well, I honestly don't know. She was listed as one of those authors that people read, especially high school girls who would like a sparkly telepathic dragon friend or to be a telepath who could toss ships around with her mind and don't notice some of the skeevy sexual politics.

Later, you did notice things like that, so maybe you sold your Pern books to the used bookstore to clear up space for other authors. And every time things came up, you kind of rolled your eyes, since half the time it would good (McCaffrey finally stopped fighting fanfic!) and half the time it would be... well, not so good (McCaffrey seems to define slash as 'non-canon explicit gay sex' when her series had canonical same-sex (male) couples who had on-screen sex, so she disallowed it)**.

But, everything I read -- good, bad or so-bad-its-terrible -- has shaped what I write and what I like (even if the shaping is 'I can do it better' or 'I don't like that'). Part of me can't think about animal companion fantasy without Pern and its dragons. Or, hell, a lot of my webcomic's universe probably owes itself to the Talent series. And hell, Acorna introduced me to conlanging, even if Ms. McCaffrey wasn't the co-author who worked on that.

Ms. McCaffrey was kind of the literary equivalent of the elderly aunt who embarrassed you at family gatherings, but who took you to the seashore every summer when you were young and told you stories you still remember.

* After all, the color-coded-by-alignment dragons were Gary Gygax's.
** You thought I was going to mention tent pegs, right?

Making my Thanksgiving and Christmas plans. Currently, for Thanksgiving, I'll be in the Boston area from Wednesday night until Sunday morning -- I haven't booked the bus tickets yet, but I'll get right on that.

For Christmas, I fly in to Omaha on the night of the 20th of December and out mid-morning on the 4th of January. Probably what will happen is that I spend the night of the 20th in my sister's place, then she drives me down after work on the 21st. Then either I go back to my sister's place on the 3rd and she takes a half-day off to get me to the airport, or Mom gives me a lift up to Omaha. (Mom really hates the Omaha airport, but having Jenn willing to act as shuttle helps her, since it really is cheaper to fly out of Omaha. Not to mention I only have to change planes once!)

So that's what's up.

A political thing that is relatively uncontroversial for your (American) election day. But, first! A story!

So, yesterday folks in my research group were talking about various things, as we do, and somehow the Cassini end of mission plans came up. If you're not familiar with what I actually do, Cassini is the mission I work on, that currently orbits Saturn and has for seven years. We plan on running it until 2017, since outer Solar System missions are pretty hardy, and it'll always be cheaper to use what you got than to build a new mission and wait til it gets out there. Plus, there are other giant planets to visit.

( Now, NASA has a thing about space missions near potentially habitable places cleaning up after themselves.  )

I'm trying to walk more, but taking a half-hour break in the mid afternoon for 'wander about campus' is making me tired. Or maybe I didn't sleep well last night.

Also learning there are vegetables I don't care for. Kale is kind of one -- it's not that bad with tomatoes and cheese on toast, but inevitably I don't use it until it's not good any more. Pumpkin may be another; I have some roasted pumpkin in my fridge and eating it with dinner is one of those 'swallow it quickly so it's done'. Which is a shame, since I like most veggies, so I shouldn't have to feel like they're medication.

In addition to at least half a cooked pumpkin, I also have an uncooked butternut squash. What to do with that...

I may have a lazy Halloween costume this year -- wear my fox T-shirt, fox sweatshirt and fox ears to work. I know, first Halloween on a weekday in a while, and I show up with animal ears and normal clothing. I've been too frazzled to work on costumes.

I have one job app (the NASA one) out and one that needs my adviser's sign off to go out. So far, things feel like they're all out of step -- jobs, the state of my dissertation, etc.

On the other hand, I still love the science I'm doing. I kind of wish I could do it forever.

Debating on getting a tumblr for art posts. I'm not really sure what tumblr is useful for besides as a picture/image macro delivery service. (You can share short bits of prose, but I'm not really sure if it is good for sharing my writing.)

Comment saying "MEME" and I will tell you the following:
1. Something random about you.
2. Which color you remind me of.
3. My first memory of you.
4. What random character I associate with you.
5. My favorite thing about you.
6. What fandom I associate with you.
7. Challenge you to post this on your journal.

It's worth noting that my answers to #7 will probably all be 'I don't see a need to give you orders'. ^_^