Things have been pretty slow lately, needless to say. While the period of time during Chinese New Year’s gets more and more active and bustling each year, it’s still a general slump in the general scheme of things. It’s just as well, I suppose. I’ve been spending the majority of my time up here in the mountains, watching TV and DVDs, spending time online of course. I watched the entire British Queer as Folk series, which was good, better than the copycat US version, which I also liked. Of course it’s full of stereotypical characters, but it’s not just stereotypes; there’s a lot of accurate stuff in there as well, and being drama, it can’t very well be representative otherwise it would be an hour’s worth of two chaps sitting at home having dinner.
I’m feeling back in limbo lately, in the in-between of things, up in the air. You’d think I’d get used to that feeling by now, but I think I dealt with this kind of situation better when I was younger. No, that’s not entirely true; I’m more resigned to it now than I used to be, and yet somehow that makes it worse. It says more about me than the situation, and not in a good way, either. But life is like that; you just slog through and hope you’re doing ok.
It’s cold again, of course, supposed to get down to 7 or 8 degrees Celsius tomorrow. Most people go back to work in the next couple of days. I’ve got another week and a half up here, and until the 27th to move if I want to avoid next month’s rent. Things are moving on, so I’d better do so as well.
posted by Poagao at 8:08 am
I just got back from Maoman’s place, where he fed me some delicious mashed potatoes and sauce for dinner. Afterwards, we settled down to watch some Red Dwarf, but Maoman got bored and went over to fiddle with his computer, so I switched the TV back to cable and saw a picture of something flying through the sky and NASA captions on it. Oh, I thought, they’re replaying the Challenger disaster tape. But when I looked closer, I saw that the logo said Columbia, not Challenger. Oh, no, I thought, not again.
I can’t say it seems like yesterday because I was a junior in high school that frosty Florida morning when I had to scrape the ice off my ’77 Datsun before coaxing the engine to life and driving to school for an Algebra test in Mrs. Wright’s class that was interrupted for an announcement that the shuttle had exploded. Of course we all knew something was wrong as we could all see the oddly forked trail of smoke on the horizon out the windows for an hour or two afterwards. I spent my lunch hour writing a hasty report for Mrs. Bell’s history class comparing and contrasting the Challenger disaster to that of the Hindenberg. Needless to say, I got a poor grade as well as Mrs. Bell’s undying antipathy for that stunt.
All of these thoughts came rushing into my head along with a great sorrow for the crew when I saw the TV screen. It’s happened again. At least we know what’s happened –the shuttle broke apart upon re-entry– but not why or how yet. I hope this accident, if accident it was, doesn’t again cripple the space industry as the last one did. The shuttle fleet is over two decades old, and I’m actually surprised we’re still using them, but the pace of space-related technology development has been agonizingly slow ever since the Apollo program was discontinued. My father worked on the shuttle program in the late 70’s; I remember him trying to tell me about re-entry strategies with models even though I was only 8 or 9 years old. He lives with my mother in his hometown of Ardmore, Oklahoma now; I wonder if he heard the booms.
posted by Poagao at 4:48 pm
