Chris' Adventure -- China and The Moon

While Theresa was in Las Vegas (see next post), I put together LEGO's awesome Lunar Module set. Besides doing a good job looking like the real deal, it was fun to play with assemble. Has these great gold stickers and the lunar surface you build even has little minifigure-footprints. Here's an assembly shot--excuse all of the quality of these photos, my phone is in rough shape and I'm waiting on a new one to come out before I replace it:

The little lander in the foreground is from my Saturn V LEGO set that many of you helped me get! It was a cool set and has a good connection to New York, the Grumman company designed and assembled them in the state. I only had one complaint: the "drogue" for connecting the Lunar Module to the Apollo Capsule was a horrible imitation. Since Theresa and I had spent weeks researching the docking system while at the Cosmosphere, I couldn't stand for that so I went online and shelled out a few more dollars to get a single piece shipped here to replace it. It's better but not great...maybe later I'll rebuild it further so everything looks just right.

I also met another cat in the apartment complex. This one wasn't as needy as the last one (which was an indoor cat that had gotten lost) since it seems to live outside and people all over the complex put food out for it. In fact it was very nervous about not being able to see outside when I invited it inside, then when it found the screen door that would let it see outside got scared of that and wanted nothing to do with that.

I also spent the weekend of Theresa's trip (and a few before that, too) modifying a program to show Chinese\Korean\Japanese constellations instead of the Western ones. Ultimately I want to use it to make sky maps for any culture I want to see, I just started with Chinese since they're the most complicated. It took a lot of manual work in addition to what I could get the program to do, but eventually I'll use it to update Wikipedia's rather terrible articles on Chinese astronomy.

Orange/Yellow are the actual constellations, gray dotted lines are the ones we're used to. Everything else relates to the complicated organizational scheme they use. There's over 300 constellations total, but I only chose the largest ones!

Finally, one last adventure, happening in slow motion. Valerie, my boss, is employed by the museum but her position is funded by a second organization (the Dudley Observatory). Much like what was going on in Liberal before we left, the Dudley hasn't been getting along with the museum and has chosen to separate, which means that there's a "hard Brexit" for Valerie at the end of October if her contract expires. The CEO is trying to negotiate a one year extension to at least improve the transition, but that's up in the air. Accordingly, Valerie has decided to look for jobs in the industry so in anywhere from 1 month to 1 year, she'll be leaving. My job won't be in jeopardy, but there's a lot she does that I can't do and a lot she knows that no one else in the Education department knows, so however she leaves, it's going to be an adventure!