midweek, midmonth, midyear, midlife

I thought I'd try out this blog, join the new era of blogness, and blog for a while. It's after midnight, I just walked the dogs through the park and visited with Meemaw for a while. Deposited a few checks on line (that is so cool when it works) whilst drinking a little bit of small-batch bourbon and mellowing out in the quiet of the late night.

Michele made a nice picnic dinner tonight so when I got home from my rather crazy day at the office dealing with random things like where to collect new Mars data, liquid Helium in the paleomag lab (that stuff is even colder than Mars!), the rejection of a paper on Mars data, aircraft modifications for possible Antarctic work, sharing said aircraft with the Italians to reduce costs and multiple attempts to clean my office, we loaded up in the Jeep and went to Pease park to eat fish tacos, play and then go get a surprise dessert on the south side. (By the way, our computer's keyboard is rather noisy.) The real surprise was that the surprise dessert place was closed! A hip airstream cupcake retailer it was! But we found a very well stocked candy and ice cream shop nearby and had fun picking out various treats. We drove home through downtown and took in the summer night, and looked at the pretty moon with bright Jupiter nearby.

The summer is flying by like none before. Work has been busy, making it difficult to take time off and that is unfortunate. I'm having fun with Mars, but I just want to do nothing for a while, play with Finn and go exploring, soak up summer. Not to mention lots of house projects I'd like to get finished or at least moving along. The time just flies flies and I can't slow it down. Is this the rat race? I hear rats racing in the attic sometimes, but not tonight. Must be too hot up there for any mammal. I know that someday I will miss this time and wonder how it went by so fast. I wonder what the average life span of a rat is.

I haven't yet accepted the near-reality that I may have to go back to Antarctica this year. I keep expecting that somehow it will all fall through and be delayed by another year. The last time I went Finn was 8 months old and his first tooth came in while I was there. This is what it looked like. I still remember with perfect clarity looking at this picture from inside a hut in one of the most remote places on this planet, yet connected by satellite to home for a few hours each day. That memory is at once surreal and frighteningly real.