theandrewhickey

I woke up about fifteen minutes before my alarm this morning.

And it wasn't a struggle to get out of bed. Or to have my meds, or get dressed. I checked the weather first, and the predicted high was 69(F, of course), which is nice indeed! So I got to wear a sleeveless top and shorts and sandals.

I started work on time, if not a bit early. It was easy to get my morning chores done, even with a hurty tummy -- I didn't want breakfast yet but I had mint-and-vanilla tea which is my go-to for hurty tummy. I made the regular pot of tea for everyone else, though.

I hung the towels and bedsheets outside -- for the first time this year! -- and was so happy to get to do this, under a bright blue sky, my skin warming in the sun.

I did so many extra little chores during the day! I cleaned my glasses. I cleaned my phone. I refilled the bottles of spray cleaner and toilet cleaner that needed refilling from the 5-liter jugs. I put laundry away. I was able to prepare most of dinner before counseling -- instead of not at all, which is my usual for Tuesdays.

All of this is because the days have gotten longer and the sun has come back out.

Every fall/winter, I worry that I'm just bad at stuff and things will be horrible forever. And every spring, there's a Monday (or in this case a Tuesday) where something in my brain clicks into place when I get a certain amount of sunlight -- not vitamin D from the pills, not lumens from the SAD lamp; I have those things and I'm sure they help but nothing like the fact that the colors are right and the outside is hospitable again.

Very sad to realize that I have to start caring about bedtime again.

I've had a pretty great bank holiday weekend though.

• Tried to skive off work a bit early to go for a drink with D in the sunshine. It ended up not being that sunny by then, but we had a nice time. And I got us ice-cream cones from an ice-cream van as we walked home!
• We did indeed go out for Best Friday, which was lovely if slightly overdoing it for D
• I made it to transgym, sent good wishes back and forth between D and the gymgoers, and got my gloves back that I accidentally left in a friend's car when they gave me a lift home...and then proceeded not to see said friend for the last couple of months. I've been thinking about those gloves every so often: I got them in Stornoway so they're nice and warm, fair-isle type colorwork, and most important for me fingerless. I don't need them now but it's very nice to have them back!
• our friends Alex and Ian came over that evening, yay. It was so so lovely to see them. We got pizza.
• We were invited for afternoon tea at angelofthenorth's yesterday. Little sandwiches and sweets and many pots of tea (and I had coffee), beautifully showed off her new table and chairs!
• We bought some more plants, and when we got home I did some dad chores: added air to the car tires that needed it, cut back a tree that's overhanging from the neighbor's yard, started in on the ivy that has already claimed a couple of fence panels, and then sat outside with a book and a cold beer, in shorts and sandals (it's only about 60F, but thanks to testosterone I've become the guy who needs to wear a sleeveless top and sandals and shorts when it's 60F...)

Storm Dave aside, we had good weather this weekend, even great today -- and this is the opposite of what bank holiday Mondays are usually like. And it's not even dark at 8pm now; I'm so relieved.

I've found the most me thing ever: Baseball Scores, a website that procedurally generates ambient music during MLB games, based on the game situation - the score, count, runners on base, how many outs there are...

It ends up kinda musique concrète, which I also love.

Last night I was watching my Twinkies with this in one ear, and it was so fun to notice the sound change every time the game state does (and it's still fun during commercial breaks).

The creator of this said "I grew up listening to baseball on the radio, that was the first ambient music I ever heard"...and, I just, yes, I love this so much. I love baseball, I love listening to baseball, and I love ambient music; I never thought about these things as related but of course they are.

Well, as I'm always saying at work -- and I learned this from trans activists, if you don't have access to public toilets, you don't have access to public life.

This article, no doubt among others, points out that if we don't have access to space toilets, we don't really have access to space.

It’s very funny, because toilets are funny, but I also find it touching because it’s so relatably human. Space missions are filled with impossibly genius men and women achieving scientific feats far beyond our intelligence, discussing them with indecipherable jargon and initialisms, and then they’re talking about toilets. Hey! Toilets! I use those things too. Everyone needs toilets. ...

It took NASA six years and $23 million to design the Universal Waste Management System, and it was first installed on the International Space Station in 2020. The UWMS—invariably referred to by everyone at NASA as simply "the toilet"—uses suction to keep waste from escaping, and captures and filters the urine it collects to return to the craft's water supply. Just as importantly, it is capable of handling what NASA calls "dual ops—when they’re doing both defecation and urination at the same time,” said Melissa McKinley, the toilet's project manager.

I'm charmed that the toilet status is right at the top of this pleasing website where you can track the mission.

Before the crew settled in for their first sleep, ahead of a perigee burn Thursday morning, Koch called down with a question: The astronauts would like to pee before bed. Are you sure this thing is safe to use? Houston offered reassurance. "Christina, you are good to use toilet all night."

It's so lovely go to bed knowing that the toilet is there for you, any time you need it.

My crash nap yesterday after work meant I was still awake when the Artemis 2 launch window opened. I'd gone to bed but hadn't been able to sleep so figured I'd come back downstairs to watch it with D, but he came up with his laptop so we could watch it in bed on a biggish screen. Which worked out great: it was very fun to watch it snuggled up together.

My Apollo-era space nerdery and his experience with Kerbal Space Program mesh into an excited understanding of, at a generous estimate, half of what is being said on the broadcast. I imagined clutching a phrasebook as we toddle around the land of spaceflight, garishly dressed tourists trying to look in every direction at once in both excitement and confusion. ("PRM" is an acronym I'm used to hearing at work every so often, but in my line of work it doesn't mean perigee raise maneuver!)

An online pal said "I am clearly not the only one looking up 'perigee' on Merriam-Webster's website lol" and shared a screenshot of a list I immediately fell in love with: that dictionary's current top lookups were

1. Artemis
2. apogee
3. perigee
4. Godspeed
5. nominal
6. how
7. verklempt

It just gets better the more you read -- even the random how in there is somehow part of what makes it so delightful.