alexpgp | Losing it...

There comes a point on these campaigns when I start losing track of time. Although I've never been one of those people that live for the weekend and consider the work week to be an unavoidable impediment to The Good Life™, there is enough social "inertia" back home to make it relatively easy to distinguish days from each other. Today doesn't feel like a Sunday.

Immediately after work yesterday, I stopped by the TV room to see if there were any interesting DVDs to watch on the player in my room, when Yuri, our senior admin (and, I suspect, the inspiration for the character of Radar O'Reilly on M*A*S*H) came in and proceeded to sit down and play Gears of War, a shoot-em-up that is one of the games available for the Xbox 360 setup downstairs.

Watching Yuri play a game like this entails a whole lotta cognitive dissonance, because Yuri is about the last person you'd expect to take an interest in such a pastime. In real life, he's a quiet, unassuming fellow who's never without a smile on his face (which, television teaches us, endows him the quintessential chops to be a serial killer, but television isn't about real life... and I digress...).

Seriously, Yuri never gets ruffled or upset, he handles the most complicated coordination assignments the way one might tie one's shoes, and in general he's a very nice guy. But with that Xbox 360 controller in his hand, he's a bloodthirsty killing machine.

Perhaps it was Yuri's way of relieving the frustrations of the day, I don't know, because yesterday was pretty stressful, at least on management. The rainstorm that passed through on Friday afternoon not only played havoc with communications, but apparently, with some environmental controls as well. Stir in a couple of other issues that may have potential schedule impacts and, well, you get the picture. It's the nature of any human endeavor, and why managers get paid The Big Bucks™.

Anyway, after getting himself killed a couple of times, Yuri's interest in the game jaded and he ceded control of the television, whereupon I stuck around to watch the "Final Cut" version of Blade Runner that one of the other fellows put in the player. I found myself wondering how anyone could think that Deckerd was a replicant, as is often suggested by the cognoscenti, and more important, what ever happened to the actress who played Rachel (an attractive leading lady, naturally, but in retrospect, she plays a character that is barely two-dimensional, her face does not register in my limited mental store of thespian mug shots, and thus my question, to which I shall find an answer, doubtless, online).

Yesterday must've been my day to catch up on television viewing, because after dinner, I joined a couple of the ILS managers to watch Blazing Saddles, during which various other folks - non-Americans mostly - wandered in and out, doubtless wondering as to our sanity and, perhaps, the prospects of a culture that comes up with such cinema (they don't call it Hollyweird for nothing). Still, it's hard to imagine that the film was released back when I was in college.

Today is pretty much a "standby" day for the campaign, as we prepare for the phase during which the spacecraft is loaded with propellant. Our bird is so massive, both loading operations - oxidizer and fuel - will take two days each. (One of the prop team members noted, en passant, that the satellite we're launching in just under 4 weeks weighs more empty than Arabsat - which was the satellite launched during my previous campaign, back in 2006 - weighed after it had been loaded with propellant.)

Anyway, I am slated to go into town in a little bit. I had toyed with the idea of staying in the hotel area, but I'm "on call" tomorrow, so I'll already be in the hotel area all day, and who knows? Maybe there'll be something interesting in town.

Cheers...