Iran, Artemis II, new toys

Honestly, the news this last week has seemed far more important than my little life, although my little life trundles along -- and part of me feels that I should be navel gazing, as it's been a year since I left Zillian and I am supposed to be having deep thoughts about that.

In the world:

• Our insane, broken reality TV star president seemed to threaten a nuclear war -- at minimum, he said "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again". Nothing but nukes can actually do that. You may wonder: is this a war crime? Yes! Both the US and Iran have ratified the Geneva conventions of 1949 onwards, and Article 33 of the fourth convention explicitly prohibits collective punishment of a civilian population. He didn't do it, but he drew harsh reprisals from a lot of his base and his own party.


• We (humanity, the USA, NASA) sent four absolute studs around the Moon, and brought them back safely, in the Artemis II mission. Still waiting to see how the heat shield held up, as there were concerns, but we watched the splashdown live on NASA's YouTube channel and it held well enough. Splashdown was perfect, and now we have years of advancing Moon re-exploration to look forward to! Manned landing in 2028, bring it. I only hope the goodwill from this mission can buy NASA some more budget.

My little life:

• One of Alan's friends from college visited for a couple of days, after being in England for 25 years. She got to see a bunch of her old friends, and to meet Birdie and the squirrel, and it was generally great to see her. Life has kicked her around a little bit, but she's still herself.


• I might be a little overwhelmed by my new toys? It took me most of the week to trash my old sewing machine (recycling the pieces I could, but that wasn't much) and set up the new one. Then I spent a few more hours setting up my new DDR pads -- the pads are great, but the software needed a lot of obscure settings changed in order to be beginner-friendly, and now it is crashing. So there's more to be fixed.


• I did some phone banking for the first time ever! Eeek, scary. Is this really the way to get anywhere, politically? It went okay though.


• Technically last week's news: I applied to be a member of my town's Urban Design Commission. I haven't heard back and don't expect success, but it's kind of cool that I applied.

Somehow this weekend got very heavily scheduled, and there's much administrative action to take (including Q1 estimated taxes, bleh). Luckily the next two days have long, long swaths of unscheduled alone time. I quite look forward to that.