Printemps

What a week - where to start...

First, we survived the Why the Moon? symposium last week, in which we heard the agency lines justifying their budgets countered by Harley Thronson's plaintiff Why not the Libration Points? Some amazing presentations, lots of energy in the poster session (I talked myself hoarse about planetary resources) and great dinner conversations.

In the final analysis, we have our feet firmly planted on more rational project topics (I hope), my internship application is winging its way North (can I assume the good doctor's "See you in Bremen" is a statement of fact?) and my abstract is being perused jointly in the halls of the Austrian Space Forum and the Canadian Space Agency. Can you say "international cooperation"?

Finally, Sunday afternoon found me relaxing over a cup of tea on my boat after a gruelling rainy ride to Kehl and back to pick up Liliana's passport for the Russia trip visa. I randomly replayed an old BBC radio episode of "Material World" called Using Nature's Good Ideas. And therein lay a possible solution for my personal assignment - auxetic materials! This looks promising, since a specific application is "constant pressure structure" which is precisely what a spacesuit needs to be (to replace atmosphere).

To the Moon!

Gung hei faat choi!

In honour of Chinese New Year on Saturday, my classmates cooked up a feast of spicy Indonesian noodles, steamed rice, deep-fried prawns and dumplings. We watched "The Curse of the Golden Flower." It's like Hamlet with subtitles - Yun-Fat Chow as king poisoning wife, his son in love with a half-sister, everybody dies in the end.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch the Why the Moon? symposium starts tomorrow - our glossy poster is up (no typos!) and the handouts are on the printer.
Our newly-elected Project Facilitators are buzzing about like bees (today's helpful directions "Should we have a handout?" "Who's meeting with the presenters?"), but everything is in hand. Our project, nicknamed Planetary Resources, even has a new website, thanks to monumental efforts in the last few days by Isra.

Spring is in the air and Russia and Star City are just a few weeks away... looks like I'll be bunking with an SSP05-er for the trip.

And in honour of "pancake Tuesday" and the start of Lent, I'm giving up gambling away my student funds in the vending machine.

V-Day

This is one of the most beautiful videos I've ever seen: Sigur Rós - thanks to Shane for that. Today is V-Day for our secret buddy game - chocolates and roses are flying around.

And leaves blasting past in the wind once again - reminds me of Brighton Beach.

Teamwork rocks!

Today, our poster team suffered a catastrophic set-back - an untimely change in direction from faculty that now wants us to reduce from a full professionally-printed poster to 2 A3 colour sheets (~25% area) 2 days before the printer deadline. We regrouped and came out fighting for a poster paid for by our own team. (We want our work to be considered seriously.)

And then we spent the afternoon in animated discussion honing our content. What started as a heated angry despairing meeting turned into some of the most productive time we've spent together. That was the most fun I've had since our team project started!

Our draft is a bit rough (in the process of being converted to higher resolution) and most of the content hasn't been input yet (lorem ipsum... is printer-speak for "space filler"), but this will give you a general idea.
On the water-front, Christof repaired the hose connection I broke at 11 last night, so I have a full water tank again - now with chemical treatment. And no excuse not to do dishes :-(

All in all, a productive, fun day.

The sun goes down on another week at ISU...

Some days I don't know time is passing. One day of lectures just rolls into another. Another bleary sunrise turns to glum grey by lunch and back to a vivid jelly-roll sunset fading to black behind the black shutters of this computer lab. The bit of snow last week seems like a season ago, yet I can't believe my classmates are in the final countdown to Valentine's with a "secret buddy" game. (More on that later.) This is the eerie other-worldly existence of a student.

From inside the fortress we all live in, each week starts with students trickling in through the first lecture and ends with another movie projected on the lounge wall and the next revised schedule. This week, our team project stopped spinning its wheels finally and lurched forward with new organization structure and the first (finally) team-building/topic-refining brainstorming session. Our librarian returned and we started ordering materials for our personal assignments. We recycled our lectures into even more unlikely assignment presentations and voted in our new student council, which consists of 90% recycled student council.

I apologize for the vacuum of blog entries last month - they exist virtually, but the photos are still locked away in camera. I did make progress on other fronts this week. I made contact with an internship opportunity that could be more. I fell upon my usual computer station and turned it into an office. I gave up on the bike that was stolen and refitted the old stand-by that carried me through the summer. And I finally finished The Sykaos Papers, a decidedly external view of our world.

And in my spare time, I practiced penning poetry in a few other languages and fonts. I finally made it back to the calligraphy shop to get some India ink. All so I could send my "secret buddy" on a wild goose chase of international proportions. (She doesn't suspect that the person sitting next to her who can't even read her own lecture notes by day is inking gothic script and Japanese kanji by night.) The game is to pull a series of pranks on a classmate until V-Day when we must deliver a small gift. I, on the other hand, am tormented by someone who is decidedly lazier than me, but I did get a hoot out of trying to locate my student mailbox (that took some deconstruction).

In the final analysis, this week weighs in with 10% frittery details, 30% attentive listening, 35% entertainment and 25% creative inspiration. The weekend will either end in a fully lined boat or the disappearance of one boat-dweller in a tangle of cork and contact cement.

The game is afoot.