Two crafts: one dying, the other revived but trapped

First of all, the solar probe Ulysses:

Farewell, Ulysses: Lights Out for Solar Probe

Ulysses Hears the Siren's Song


[Design by Emil Petrinic - http://www.strangegoat.com/ - merchandise at http://www.cafepress.com/strangegoat]

There are videos that show efforts to free Spirit, but my attempts to embed the videos didn't work very well; the original wouldn't work and the update played automatically and had to be turned off. Sorry about that. I've included the links, though, and here's a story about what Spirit is doing in the meantime:

Spirit Rover Begins Making Night Sky Observations

In the 'World of Darkness'

specifically in the game Werewolf: the Apocalypse by White Wolf, these would be the Glass Walkers:

Gadget Blessings: Shinto Priest Protects Electronics From Bad Mojo

Japan's Shinto religion holds that nearly every object in the world, animate or inanimate, has a spiritual essence. Therefore, anything can be blessed, from a newborn child to an automobile. Priests at the Kanda Shrine, which overlooks Akihabara—Tokyo's mecca for consumer electronics—offer prayers for the well-being of gadgets.

In the game I play, the Gifts of the Glass Walkers and other tribes from this system have been incorporated as a system of witchcraft among humans, not werewolves. In the Werewolf system, the spirits are seen to be in all things. Most tribes deal with spirits of the Wyld, that of nature. The Glass Walkers see the spirits of the Weaver--of which technology is a part--as being a part of creation and tend to interact with them, unlike their brethren, at least as I understand the game. One of the characters in our game has a cell phone that was given to her by the Glass Walkers whose inner spirit makes sure that calls are never dropped, service never falters, that it cannot be tracked, etc. The author in the article above has had tremendously bad luck with cell phones either going dead or disappearing, and has his blessed by the Shinto priests, who believe in a cell phone's spirit. After the blessing, he has gone several months without problems. Maybe there is some truth in fiction. Maybe the creators of Werewolf were incorporating principles of Shinto, I don't know. But I was struck by the similarities.

Fascinating

Girl Who Doesn't Age 'Infant' of Family [video]

Doctors Baffled, Intrigued by Girl Who Doesn't Age: Years Pass, but Brooke Greenberg Remains a Toddler. No One Can Explain How or Why [article]

I went to the dentist today

for two temporary crowns. One of the nice things about Dr Stech's office is that it is in front of a pond and they get lots of geese and other birds there. The geese had goslings earlier this year, but they're adolescents now. Here's a parent....

I got this the other day

because I was one of the first to apply for a grant. It's Tugger, the DOCLINE mascot! Cute. :) By the way, I took the picture with my new phone. :)

Whimsy

The moon rather reminds me of Dick Cheney in looks (and in being full of hot air), but it comes through in the end. Thanks to Cory over at Voyages Extraordinaires for the link to the video.

Yay, I got a new cell phone!

I got my cell phone in yesterday. I'm excited. As you probably know, I'm gadget girl. I've had the same cell phone for nine years. It's an old reliable Nokia 'brick' phone with a monochrome display and no real features. I finally decided I wanted something different.

The Nokia 6263 that I got has a lot of interesting features. It is a clamshell phone that has a music player, a camera, an FM radio, text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail (although I don't have a plan to cover that, so I'm not accessing my Gmail account through the phone). It's the first 3G-capable phone T-Mobile bought into.

If you read reviews of the phone, battery life is an issue. I played all day on mine, talked with customer service (I added an text messaging plan for Twitter), and the battery indicator light went down a bit after that. But I'm used to charging my other Nokia nightly or every other night, so I don't think that will be an issue for me. There was a certain tinniness to the call to customer service but that may have been isolated; I don't know yet. Otherwise the phone seems great. I've loaded some music to listen to at work today.

I guess that's all for now. I need to take out the garbage before the exterminator comes, and then stop by the local library branch. Have a great day.

Sad, but a life well lived

Doctor in gripping South Pole rescue dies: Trapped by weather, she treated her own breast cancer

'More and more as I am here and see what life really is, I understand that it is not when or how you die but how and if you truly were ever alive,' she wrote in an e-mail to her parents in June, 1999 from the South Pole.

Nielsen FitzGerald never lost her adventurous spirit and even returned to desolate Antarctica several more times.

'She had incredible zest and enthusiasm for life,' said her husband, whom she first met 23 years ago when they were both on vacation in the Amazon. 'She was kindest soul I ever met, she was intelligent, with a great sense of humor, and she lived each day to the fullest.'

I am so sorry to hear of the loss of this intrepid woman. My sympathies to her family and other loved ones.

Good news

I got the results of the MRI and there are no stress fractures, which makes me feel better. See, the ones I had before were in an area where a very large friend stepped on my foot years before and probably broke the bones then, so they were weaker and fractured with my weight and standing up to 10 hours a day at work. But if normal bone fractured, then there must be something wrong with my bone density or something. I haven't reached the age where they start scans yet, so I haven't had one. I so need to increase my calcium, though. I understand calcium citrate comes in something other than horse pills now. :)

What I do have, however, is a severe (she stressed that several times on the phone) case of peroneal tendonitis, so I have to wear the boot for at least a month. If the pain gets worse, then they want to take me to non-weight-bearing, so I'd need crutches. That would seriously be a problem at work. I will say that when in the boot I have no pain other than a spot on my leg where the boot's plastic rubs. I've been putting on band aids and wearing heavy socks (despite the fact that it's summer) in an effort to counteract that. Being diabetic, I have to be vigilant about eroding patches of skin.

Speaking of summer, I think I spent all day sweating. The hospital is air conditioned, of course, but I put a lot of boxes of children's books on a cart, took them to a closet, pulled out different boxes to unpack and put books on our clinic book cart, and put the newer ones (many were the same title, and I didn't want to overwhelm the clinic with too many of them at once) in the closet. I really worked up a sweat between pushing the cart with the boot on (although two people helped me out with that part) and toting boxes. I worked on that right up to time to go and went straight into errands in an unconditioned car, then over to a house where the air conditioning is turned off for reasons I won't go into. I also cooked over a stove there and did my laundry, so that raised the temperature around me even more.

So the first thing I did after getting home was take a shower. I'm clean, and I have a clean night shirt on, and this makes me happy, especially as I have both air conditioning and a fan if necessary.

Speaking of heat, on Friday I got my hair cut. I donated 10 inches of hair to Locks of Love, and the hair cut was free as a result. It's now very short, but I couldn't stand the long hair anymore even in a ponytail given the heat, so it's fine now, although when I perspire my hair as a whole goes damp, and then it starts to do a flip up. It's a little longer in the front than back, with layers. Here's a somewhat fuzzy picture:



I like it, but I'm not used to it yet. I'm used to flipping my hair up on the pillow when I go to bed, for example. But it doesn't get tangled and it's really easy to take care of. I can poof it up a little with mousse and a hair dryer, but this is just me after a quick shower and not doing anything but running a comb through it.

Heaven help me I am not photogenic in the least.

Well, that's all for now. I think I'll turn in early tonight.

The reason I still cross my sevens nearly fifteen years after German class

Have you seen the Marshalls 'Bjorn' ad? I can't find a copy of it online just now but it goes something like this. They show a designer. This is Bjorn. Bjorn is European. This means he has cool European hair and clothes. It also means that he makes those cool 'ones' that look like 'sevens'. They show him writing the aforementioned '100' that to an American would look like '700'. Of course, this means Bjorn orders seven times more shirts than he meant to, and we can sell them to you at reduced prices. [Not an exact transcript; I'm pulling from my imperfect memory, but you do get the gist, hopefully.] I also cross my Z's. That's from physics, not German. :)

Funny how you pick these things up. Anyway, I thought it was a hilarious commercial, and it somehow made all my semesters of German worthwhile (even the part where the Frau would not let us leave during a fire drill due to a test)...that woman was like a Doberman in terms of discipline, but I remember her now quite fondly, despite my fear of her at the time.