Day 4775

Today was uneventful. We took our regular sunrise walk with Dawn. I had my regular breakfast of shredded wheat and fruit. I took my regular long walk in the park and somehow the day was over before I knew what happened. The days are starting to get longer now. It is still dark when we start our early walk, but the sky is lighter. Usually the sun rises while we are out walking. I'll be glad when the winter rainy season is over. It is doubtful that we will get any snow this year, but we will definitely get more rain. All the leaves are off the trees now. One more weekend of raking and bagging leaves and we'll have the yard looking good again.

This morning I received a PDF copy of my Falcon Heavy article as it will appear in the March issue of SpaceFlight. These guys are fast. I only sent them the material two days ago. The article looks good and my editor seems happy. The British magazine describes me as their U.S. correspondent now. I could probably write more articles if I could afford to go to more launches. It's a shame that I'm not in demand as a web designer anymore. Travel is expensive and I could use the extra income.

I've been doing pretty good at walking this week. This was my third 20,000 step day in a row. It's easy to walk 10,000 steps in a day. A little harder to reach 20,000 steps. I hope I can keep this up. Almost every week I hear of friends my age starting to have health problems. I'd like to keep old age at bay for as long as I can. It's inevitable that I'm going to start falling apart at some point, but there's a lot more that I'd like to do. It's encouraging when I read about healthy, active people in their 90's. It's not common, but it is possible.

I cleaned my cameras and put them away this afternoon. Now there is no evidence in the office that I've been out of town recently. I don't know how the cameras get so dirty when I'm down at the space center. There are almost always fingerprints on the lenses. A lot of things happen very quickly during a launch and frequently these launches take place at night. It's really easy to put your hands in the wrong place when you are in a hurry to change settings. It's also really easy to knock something out of focus. I got a lot of really nice pictures on this trip, but my automated launch sequence camera malfunctioned and I didn't get any close-up pictures of the rocket leaving the pad. Luckily the second camera worked just fine.

I always learn something on these trips. I've seen several photographers add a horizontal bar to their tripod, allowing them to mount and control several cameras on a single tripod. Currently I only take a single camera and tripod, but I could easily pack a second camera body. With two cameras I could take close up pictures of the rocket and do a streak shot of the launch. These streak shots seem quite popular now and are often quite beautiful. I also could use a larger camera bag that was exactly the same length as the top of my carry-on luggage. This is not a popular size, but I'm sure I could find something if I looked hard enough. A longer telephoto lens would be nice, but now we're talking big bucks. My 800mm is probably good enough.

I'm just rambling today because nothing really happened. Tomorrow I'll do my weekly grocery shopping and I'll make an effort to go to the gym. 

April is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day