Shoshe - On another world

Today's to-do list:

Get stat info for Tetl
Check MIPL pairs
Measure Peace, etc.

(Tetl and Peace are rocks on Mars. MIPL is the Multimission Image Processing Lab, and is pronounced "mipple".)

Shoshe - thief!

Someone -- or more likely, something -- stole our butternut pumpkin! This year's pumpkin crop consisted of one small orange-and-green Halloween-ish pumpkin, one large-ish but funny-shaped Halloween pumpkin, and one little butternut. But when we went to harvest yesterday, there was no sign of the butternut! No deer-chewed bits, no stem, no sign of it down the hill :(

Shoshe - Sugarshack!

We made maple syrup from our very own maple tree! We started with about 20 gallons of sap, and ended up with a bit over half a gallon of syrup (about 2 litres) -- we were hoping for "more than a few tablespoons", so we, or rather our tree, did really well. It's generally between a 20:1 and a 80:1 sap:syrup ratio, depending on the sap's sugar content. It's late in the year to be making syrup, but we decided that it's much more pleasant to boil sap in your turkey fryer on the patio in August than it is in March.

Shoshe - Berries-R-Us

We finally finished planting our berry patch. We've got six red Heritage Raspberries, six Anne Fall Golden Raspberries (though we think 2 of them died while waiting to be planted) and six Arapaho Blackberries. And last week we discovered that we have feral black raspberries along the creek!

Shoshe - Guardian of the Compost

We have a Compost Snake. He (or she) likes to curl up on the top of the compost, under the brown paper bag that we left at the top of the bin. We also have a Front Step Snake, which seems to live under our front step and may or may not be the same snake.

Shoshe - one free tag

I got some free LaserFest luggage tags at a geophysics conference in December, which I promptly attached to my suitcases. A few weeks later, one of my (Aussie) friends saw the tag and asked me about it. It turns out that she's a presenter on Triple J, and because of the free luggage tag, she did an episode about the 50th anniversary of the laser! She asked to interview me, but a friend of mine works on Mars Science Lab's rock-shooting laser instrument, so I turned her over to him.

Shoshe - lost

For the past few weeks, I've been looking at tons of images of one of my field sites, Cumberland Ridge, which encompasses three neighboring outcrops in the Columbia Hills (in Gusev Crater on Mars). I'm trying to correlate the locations of the outcrops by identifying the same rocks from several viewpoints. I know these outcrops and the small rocks around them REALLY well*. Now I'm looking at some images from a nearby site, and I don't know any of the rocks. It feels like I'm lost -- Tennessee Valley is just to the side like it should be, but I'm in this sea of rocks and I don't recognize any of them. It's really weird. Kind of...alien.


*By name, actually. Cadge is my favorite, but Buoy has really grown on me. It's easy to identify from just about any angle.

Shoshe - I'd tap that

On Monday we started collecting sap from the first of our maple trees. We've got about 4 liters already, and that's just from a few days and that one tree! Three trees and 4-6 weeks to go. We'll probably make the first batch of syrup in a few weeks.

Shoshe -- toasty warm

We have decided that the most appropriate temperature scale to use is absolute. It is currently a toasty 255K outside. That's warm even by Martian standards*!

*But not in summer, when it can get up to 50 degrees warmer. Goddamn it's cold out.

Shoshe - nice neighbours

We accidentally left the car's boot wide open for about 20 hours the other day. Luckily, that was about the only 20 hours in the past week and a half that it didn't snow. The battery died (NRMA-equivalent took care of that), but everything in the car was still there! That includes the muesli bars -- we figure the local critters couldn't smell them because it was too cold for scents to waft.

Shoshe and Bez - Bourgeois scum

We bought a house on Wednesday! 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, 3/4 acre. Come and visit!

Shoshe - They grow up so fast

I caught our two young passionfruit plants trying to break into our liquor cabinet last night. One had a tendril all the way around the handle. The other had slipped a tendril between the door and the frame, and had a surprising hold on the inside of the cabinet. Our older passionfruit plant (the twins' progenitor) is grabbing onto the ceiling.

Shoshe - Preservation

Two nights ago we made tomato paste from tomatoes that we grew in our garden plot. Tonight I made elderberry cordial (from elderberries we bought at the farmers' market) and pickles from the Boston Pickling Cucumbers that we grew, using my great-grandfather's recipe.

Shoshe - Long bugger of a day

It started out the night before, when we had no hot water.

We still had no hot water in the morning. Talked to the rental office; 3 buildings were affected. I knew I was going to miss my normal once-an-hour bus, so I walked the 10 minutes to the every-15-minutes bus.

Apparently my annual buspass had expired, even though I swear I'd renewed it months ago. The busdriver was a bitch, and I didn't have $1.50 in change, so I got off the bus and went to the bank across the road where a very nice teller gave me change for a dollar.

Ended up catching the next once-an-hour bus. Got to campus 45min later than I'd wanted to and went to the new bubble tea place that's right by my office. Put the bubble tea in the office fridge because my day was full of classes and I wouldn't have time to slurp tapioca until 4:30pm.

Rushed to class 1; had a short break; was late to class 2 because it turns out it wasn't in the room that I thought it was in, and I had to wait for the elevator because it had the nearest course poster saying where my class meets. Left class early to TA.

TAing was okay. There was a fair bit of banter between the prof and me in the "space news" section -- we kept forgetting about one after another of the several spacecraft that have had problems over the past few days. We currently have no decent weather forecasting on Mars, for the first time in a few years. And it's dangerous duststorm season.

Some of my students from last year came to visit me just after class, which rocked :)

Went back to the office with about 1/2 hr before the postgrad soc meeting. Needed to talk to my advisor, who was trying to meet with many people before they left for the day. Got my bubble tea out of the fridge. The tapioca pearls had somewhat congealed, so I shook the sealed cup a bit. Failed holding-onto-cup-while-shaking-it and dropped sugary bubble tea all over the corridor and my advisor's carpet.

I was really looking forward to that tea.

Shoshe - S2K

Today is Spirit's 2000th sol* on Mars! She's old enough to go to kindy.

We're having a birthday party, and Spirit's playing in the sand (current project: examining and drilling into a soil target named Polyphemus Eye).


* A sol is a martian day, and is roughly 24 hours 39.5 minutes.

Shoshe - Amateur Robot Astronomy

Spirit has more power than she's had in about 2 Mars years, so the engineers have requested that we do more nighttime observations to use up power (when we don't use up enough power, we shunt it by waking up in the middle of the night and turning on our heaters for an hour or two). I thought it would be nifty to take a picture of Earth, and it turns out that Earth and Venus are in conjunction in the martian sky! They're about 1.5 degrees apart tonight, and will be close to each other a bit after sunset for the next several nights. I've spent the past few days working closely with the Pancam operators and an awesome researcher who's been studying twilight at Gusev. On 21 June at 19:07:28 UTC (19:40:05 local time), Spirit will start taking some pictures for me! If these go well, we might take images every day or two for several days and make a little movie.

Shoshe - Harvest!

Over the weekend I thinned out the indoor lettuce crop, and we had miniature salads. The remaining lettuces have grown impressively over the past few days.

And my GI doctor has me eating plastic (literally).

Shoshe - Sprouted!

The lettuce that I planted on Sunday sprouted today (Wednesday)!

Shoshe - Groundhog Day

Sadly, Groundhog Day doesn't mean as much when you know that there will be (way) more than 6 weeks of winter, and that spring is most certainly not right around the corner.

Shoshe - Go my brain!

I got brilliant insight into 2 of the questions on my Celestial Mechanics homework last night at about 2:30am, after finishing a teen vamp novel. I even figured out some stuff that the super-maths officemates didn't get! Clearly I should be doing more...light reading.

Over the weekend we set up the winter greenhouse. I re-potted the aloe and planted six little pots of lettuce, and we brought the bay tree, rosemary, and orchid home from uni. They're all in a bookcase sort of thing with growlights and mylar. The greenhouse is bright!