Sushi For Breakfast

Space Shuttle Discovery landed back on Earth for the final time earlier today:



Thank you, Discovery, for a full year in space, for 27 years of space missions, for the hundreds of astronauts you carried into space and brought home safely, for the space stations you helped to build and serve, for the planetary probes you launched on their way, for the satellites you deployed, serviced, and brought back to Earth, and for your immesurable inspiration and awesomeness. Thank you for being the vehicle of our dreams, and for allowing us to make our dreams come true. And thank you to the thousands of engineers, managers and other workers for looking after this beautiful vehicle so wonderfully for us all. With love from me and the World.

Day 1 of my five-day weekend began with a lie-in, of course, followed by a two-course breakfast - my usual cereal (with a cup of filter coffee), and a mushroom & spring onion omelette. Perhaps a bit too heavy on the mushrooms in relation to the onions, but spring onions (known to some as salad onions) are excellent in an omelette. Got the amount of butter right I think this time, and also remembered to season it first. It cooked well, I like them well done, perhaps will try a cheese & onion omelette over the weekend. Another good thing about omelettes is that the washing-up isn't too onerous.

In the afternoon we went to see my sister and Bean. Bean was happy and smiling as usual, she got a bit grumpy when she had her fingernails trimmed, but that's fine cos I was a bit grumpy at her attempt to gouge a piece of flesh out of my cheek with her sharp claws. She was also playing in her bouncy chair, which she absolutely loves, and with the Winnie-The-Pooh spinning top I bought her for Christmas.

I have also had a major sortout, one of the drawers in my chest of drawers collapsed, followed by another teetering on the edge, so in an effort to lighten their loads I have sorted out some clothes and other stuff (scented oil burners, candle-related items) to go to the charity shop. I also threw away loads of stuff, and discovered the real size of my toiletries bounty. This is the stock of toiletries I have built up by only buying stuff when it's on offer and so on, and was revealed to include four deodorant sticks, seven toothbrushes, five bottles of shampoo (plus a two-in-one), two tubes of handcream, and a collection of miniature things I'd swiped from the hotel we stayed at for that awful staff conference. Anyway, the drawers have had running repairs, which will become full repairs once some parts arrive, and I've now got a full large drawer free - but with items earmarked to be transferred there so as not to overload the others.

Have also heard that Discovery has had another extra day's extension, meaning she will have accumumated exactly 1 year in space overall by her retirement. Landing is due late next Wednesday afternoon my time, so I should be watching that online at work followed by a dash home through rush-hour traffic in time for Zumba. If there's a one-orbit waveoff I should know in time to leave work at the usual time, but no Zumba cos I'll be watching the landing.

Day 305 Took my car in for its MOT & service today, which it passed. The place I go to is a couple of miles from work, so I drop it off and then walk up to work, which is a pain cos the last bit is uphill and because I'm not used to it I'm sweaty and yeuch for the rest of the day. But I did see some nice autumn trees, including this one, which was near the dealership:



Twitter is making me sad. Quite apart from feeling like I'm the only space person on Earth who isn't gathering for the (delayed) tweetup in Florida (all the Space Tweeps tweeting 'OMG I met this astronaut, that astronaut, OMG it's Camilla/Nicole/Ron/Swanny' etc), all the vitriol that's been fired at Stephen Fry is making my angry and worried. Angry, cos it's from people who ought to know better (and newspapers who ought to have an understanding of the Disability Discrimination Act maybe) and worried because this has been a big year for Stephen Fry, and perhaps not all good. I hope he is surrounded well by people who care for him. I don't mind not hearing from him on Twitter but I would like to believe he's happy, which I'm not convinced is the case right now.

Hello peeps. If you're online now, as in right now (kinda midnightish UTC) visit http://www.spacevidcast.com/live/ to watch Space Shuttle Discovery on her final rollout to the launchpad. This is her final mission, after she's home and cleaned off she'll be off to her retirement home of a museum, where grown women will queue for hours to see her and weep at her beauty and her awesomeness. Please enjoy this beautiful bird now while you can, and wish her a safe mission (launchdate 1 November) and Godspeed Discovery.

Yay I changed my LJ layout :) I've always liked the Art Deco layouts, but I resisted for ages cos it felt like everyone was using them at one point. But recently I've been feeling that the previous layout was rather plain and that maybe it was time to experiment with something a bit sunnier.

My friend C, who I feared was caught up in the travel delays with the volcano ash, was back at work today as planned - they had Eurostar bookings and didn't know about the problems until they turned up on Friday afternoon for the Eurostar.

Discovery didn't land today cos of bad weather at KSC - bad enough for the STA to be unable to take off to investigate the weather due to fog. So it should land tomorrow as the weather forecast for both KSC and Edwards are looking good, but it means I won't get to see the landing as I'm in a meeting all morning and then we're out at lunch. Unless the restaurant has free wi-fi. It's unfortunate that for reasons of Ku problems and time zoneage this has been a difficult mission to follow closely, cos together they've been a really awesome crew. And it's the final seven-person shuttle crew, so the last time there will be thirteen people together in space till who knows when. And four women together in space, and two Japanese astronauts together in space. And I'm looking forward to seeing Clay Anderson on Dancing With The Stars next year :D

From karaokegal: Comment if you'd like a color. Then list ten things that you like/love which are that color.

K-gal gave me the colour White - ( under here cos there's lots of wordage )
:)

A separate post for everything else. Stuff in the news.

The General Election has been announced for 6 May. So a whole month of suffering all the right-wing loons who crawl out of the woodwork (no web link because it's all over the place) :(

Corin Redgrave dies at age 70 I know he'd been ill in recent years, but :( And Four Weddings And A Funeral was only on TV on Sunday. The only other thing I know him from is the BBC's Persuasion from the mid-1990s, he played Sir Walter Elliot as a totally unspeakable upper-class arse. If you haven't seen this, I do recommend it very highly - also stars Amanda Root, Ciaran Hinds, Simon Russell Beale, Susan Fleetwood and Sophie Thompson.

Dawn French and Lenny Henry split after 25 years of marriage Double :(

Discovery is in orbit and things are progressing well, but the Ku band has packed in completely - won't send or receive, so no onboard coverage on NASA TV. They're going to record the tile survey and edit/compress it in Windows Movie Maker 7 and then send it down from the ISS after docking & hatch open, apparently (cue discussion of PC vs Mac and Windows in general from space tweeps). There's alternatives and/or workarounds they can use for docking without Ku, I guess that's what the training's for. But NASA TV are replaying highlights of the crew's training, or stuff from previous missions in the absence of Flight Day Highlights. It feels like when it keeps raining at Wimbledon and they show you a 'classic' match from 1980.

There are now 49308493840328 potholes on my journey to/from work, more than there was immediately after the freezing weather had left its mark. I think the plan is to wait until the rest of the road is worn down to the level of the potholes and then claim they're "fixed".

Discovery finally returned home last night, to Edwards AFB in California, ending the STS-128 mission. I stayed up to watch it on NASA TV, and to follow on Twitter with all the other space tweeps. It's so much more fun with Twitter, like being in a big crowd of people following the events. And of course, the orbiter looked so beautiful. You can see a hi-res pic of Discovery at main gear touchdown here.

Because of NASA TV's scheduling and the late hour (here) that everything happened, I still haven't seen any footage of the walkaround, but I did hear them say that Ken Ham was part of the astronaut support crew again, like he was for the previous Edwards landing. However the BBC have coverage here, including footage of the landing. I had to contact them via their online form as they originally said that NASA try to avoid landings at Edwards because the shuttle has to be transported back to Florida by road - noooo, it goes atop a 747 as you well know. So they corrected it.

One thing I love about landings (and launches too) is the progression through familiar procedures. For landing, the twin sonic booms signal the orbiter is now travelling subsonic, only a few minutes to landing. It would be so cool to hear them for real, but I know not everyone agrees with me:

I had planned to visit Birmingham today, but felt very unenthusiastic about the whole idea this morning, so I went back to bed. The only thing Birmingham has that Coventry doesn't which I could really crave is Hotel Chocolat, which I have on Internet ordering - and they phoned me this evening trying to get me to spend money with them (I said no).

So, I slept in again, and then spent the day online. I've already posted today about my first YouTube uploading; I've also been downloading YouTubery including some 1980s Hugh Laurie adverts and a Stephen Fry interview from 1992 which I have on videotape somewhere. There are lots of incidences of people pinching stuff from Marykir's website to put on YouTube, including stuff that was on the videotape I sent her years ago. I remember one time I even had someone leave me a message (on LJ I think) saying "I just found this, you'll love this" and it was something from the tape.

Discovery is due to land tonight, but they've already waived off the first attempt (there's always a pair of landing opportunities, on consecutive orbits) due to poor weather at KSC. I saw Discovery and then the ISS pass overhead a couple of hours ago; I tried looking for the newly-launched HTV but no luck. I don't know for sure when it can be seen, or indeed if.

Tomorrow I am possibly going in town again. It only takes about 15 minutes to drive into town, as opposed to the 90 minutes average to get to Birmingham by bus & train. Am thinking of getting some yummy food from M&S, they have a much bigger selection in the store in town.

Techie stuff is happening - or not happening, as is more appropriately the case.

( Does this work? )
I'd like to be more involved in the current shuttle mission, but they've been on a time zone shared by no-one on Earth, apparently. I've been getting home from work in time for their wake-up, which as per routine is followed by a couple of hours of Post-Sleep, ie "personal time" (a shit, a shower, and breakfast, in my father's vernacular). Now all the EVAs are over and they're heading towards hatch closure and undocking before landing at the end of the week.