George bush does yoga!

okay... another concert:

Hawksley Workman is coming March 24 to the WINSPEAR. This should be an awesome show. The Orchestra section has already pretty much sold out.

I will be buying tickets next week... let's say... Tuesday.
If you are interested, please let me know. I'm going to buy for a whole bunch of people, so please check your schedule.

Gah! Darn no speakers on this infernal machine! I'm going to have to watch at home.

I'm SO making my dad watch this!

awesome video.

How It All Ends:

I intended to post this once I finished reading them all, but I don't think that's going to happen for a little while. In any case, NASA's got this great page called the Don Pettite Space Chronicles, where the science officer on the ISS wrote about this and that. Some amazing and mindtwisting experiments, and the writing is really quite good, too. A short piece:

The Smell of Space

Few people have experienced traveling into space. Even fewer have experienced the smell of space. Now this sounds strange, that a vacuum could have a smell and that a human being could live to smell that smell. It seems about as improbable as listening to sounds in space, yet space has a definite smell. Being creatures of an atmosphere, we can only smell space indirectly. Sort of like the way a pit viper smells by waving its tongue in the air and thenpressing it to the roof of its mouth where sensors process the molecules that have been adsorbed onto the waggling appendage. I had the pleasure of operating the airlock for two of my crewmates while they went on several space walks. Each time, when I repressed the airlock, opened the hatch and welcomed two tired workers inside, a peculiar odor tickled my olfactory senses. At first I couldn't quite place it. It must have come from the air ducts that re-pressed the compartment. Then I noticed that this smell was on their suit, helmet, gloves, and tools. It was more pronounced on fabrics than on metal or plastic surfaces. It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as "tastes like chicken." The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.

Also, your regular mumps update: the immunizations are on hold. Just because a few people went and got anaphylactic, some worry-worts want to suspend the hold thing and get rid of all the vaccines from that batch. Geez.

I think the town is trying to remind me that I am, indeed, in Hinton. My last patient tonight had an infected cut on his hand from a skinning knife, and as I got home, the rustling I heard in the bushes turned out to be a deer not 30 feet from the door to my building.

Also, I didn't think it was possible, but it seems that I actually upped my baseline level of snarkiness in an unconscious response to the... unique personality of the general surgeon here. This can only end badly.

Al, sounds pretty much like what I would have said (although it would have taken me a lot longer to remember how to find that info in Windows...). I'd be surprised if what you have there doesn't work, Jess. My best advice would be to try it and see what happens.

By the way, glad to see you're finally getting cracking on learning that printer repair, Jess.

Sounds good enough for me. Thanks again Al!