Blackout

The Artemis II mission is currently circling the moon and is out of line of site communication with NASA on Earth. That great big empty rock in the sky is blocking the way.

They are less than half an hour away from their closest approach to the Moon. Earlier this afternoon they broke Apollo 13’s record for flying the farthest distance from Earth. At this very moment they are looking at the dark side of the moon from a point of view that no human being has ever seen.

To say that today is a great day for humanity is an understatement.

Meanwhile, the orange piece of shit clown gave a press conference where he said he was going to destroy Iran completely. He didn’t use the words “nuclear weapons” but the implication was as clear as a mentally defective nazi can get.

How can america simultaneously have its finest moment and its worse moment?

Where is Artemis II Now?

The Artemis II mission is well underway. The Orion Capsule with its crew of four humans (unlike Artemis I which was crewed by four manikins) launched atop NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) last night and boy do I hope I have all of these terms correct. Oh well.

Did I see the launch? No. I live near Boston which means while the rocket was blasting its way toward the stars down in Florida I was stuck in stupidly awful traffic on route 128. You know, like you do.

Despite my traffic woes, Artemis II launched and made it into orbit. That leaves me with a new question. Where are they now? Turns out NASA kind of has an answer, thought the reality of it was a little underwhelming.

NASA’s Artemis Real-time Orbit Website (AROW) let’s you track where the capsule and its four astronauts are at any given moment. Can you imagine how much internet traffic a page like that would have had back in July of 1969 when Apollo 11 was making its trip to the moon? Or at least how much internet traffic it would have seen if internet traffic actually existed. You know what I mean though. You’re pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down, right?

I’m somewhat underwhelmed by the site. At least so far. I don’t know if its the site itself or if its just getting slammed with visitors or what, but it is unbelievably slow for me right now and it took a really long time before I could do anything at all. Once it loaded though, it gave me some cool stats. Right now they are 35,553 miles from Earth, 235,997 miles from the Moon, and they are traveling at a brisk 3,841 miles per hour. May the rest of the world pardon my use of English units. We’re ass backwards Americans in these parts after all.

Check out the site and have fun keeping an eye on things as they travel to the moon, do a lap, and then come home safely. Space exploration is super freakin’ fun, even when the mission is just a test drive. Enjoy!

Launch Day

I’m sitting at my desk at work and the lights just went out. It wasn’t a power failure, it was just that none of us moved enough to trip the motion sensors that turn on the lights.

Sigh.

Hey, we’re going to the moon! The Artemis II mission is about an hour away from its launch window. I’ve been putzing around social media for the last 25 minutes or so and I think I just saw that the crew was loaded into the Orion Capsule. Assuming we don’t abort, they won’t leave the capsule for 10 days or so. They will fly into Earth orbit, circle the globe a couple of times, then head off to the moon. They aren’t landing (that will be Artemis III), they are just circling around once and then heading back.

This is just a test mission. It’s basically the same mission as Artemis I. The main difference is episode I had manikins for crew while episode II has humans. Four of them. Three Americans and a Canadian.

The launch window opens at 6:24pm Eastern time. It is currently 5:32pm Eastern time. The weather forecast is mostly sunny and warm. Things are looking good right now, but there is still plenty of time for issues to pop up.

Fingers crossed they launch tonight, circle the moon, and come home safely.

They’re Back, Babie!

Last night was the Juno Awards ceremony. That’s the Canadian version of the Grammy’s. The show included this one ditty from this little Toronto based rock and roll combo…

They are back! For really reals, Rush is back!

Maybe an odd choice of song, but it was the first song on their first album so it was sort of fitting that the first public appearance with their two new people, Anika Nilles on drums and Loren Gold on keyboards, was that same first song… though if they were going to go with literal first songs they should have gone with their cover of Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away, which was their first single. But I digress. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson on stage again. We’re going to see them in New York in a couple of months and I CAN’T FUCKING WAIT!

Out Running Errands

I went out to run some errands today in Andover and Methuen, MA. I took my camera for some stop light theater pics.

Route 28 in Andover.

Same building from the opposite direction.

Downtown Methuen. Still route 28 but with the clock that I can’t ever stop taking pics of every time I am near it. It’s a compulsion. I should probably talk to a therapist about it or something.

The clock through the sunroof. Epic.

Longest Week Ever

Man… I sure do bitch about work a lot, don’t I?

This has been the longest work week ever and it’s only 1:00pm on Wednesday. Why is that? Why am I so stressed? There’s nothing going on that requires my stress level to elevate out of control. It’s just been a reasonably normal week. Sure, my dining room did flood yesterday…

Did I mention that? We have an office water cooler in our dining room. It is exactly the thing you picture in your head when you hear people talking about being at work and talking around the water cooler. A great big five gallon jug of water sitting upside down and draining into a tall cooler. Yup, exactly what you think. Yesterday it seemed to spring a leak and we had a small lake forming on our dining room floor.

I unplugged the unit and pulled the full bottle off of the top. I had put a new bottle on that morning. There had never been any leaks before. Was it the cooler or was it the new bottle? I betcha you can guess. Once the bottle was out of the equation the leaking stopped. Yup, there was something wrong with the bottle. I put a new bottle on to see what happened and it’s been leak free for about 24 hours now. Problem solved, I think.

Anyway, outside of that and the ugly fact that it snowed twice this week, it’s been a normal few days. Why am I stressin’? Why am I bitchin’? Who knows.

I do know that we’re planning to go to a No Kings rally this weekend, so maybe it’s not so much work stress but it is actually excitement over the coming event. Maybe.

Until then… 2.5 days left in this already long, long, long work week. Crud.

More Spring Snow

Adding insult to injury, am I right?

I wrote yesterday about how we got a little snow on the third day of Spring. Wouldn’t you know it, today, the fourth day of Spring, we got more. I had brush snow and scrape ice off of the car when I left for work this morning. It was more than yesterday, but still basically just a dusting. That’s not the issue though. The issue is that snow in Springtime sucks the mighty ass.

I’m going to seriously be afraid to look out the window when I get out of bed tomorrow morning. We’re probably going to get a blizzard overnight tonight.