The best laid schemes, says Burns, gang aft a-gley!

Take, for example, my plan to shift my sleep schedule last night.

I got into bed on time at about 3 pm, ready to saw wood untl after 9 pm, but imagine my surprise when I woke up - in absolute pitch blackness - completely alert and unwilling to fall asleep again, due mostly to the now rather noticeable traffic noises from outside the house. I wondered for a moment whether it was closer to 4 pm or 9 pm, and finally decided to stop trying to fall back asleep and take a look.

It was 7:45 pm. Yikes.

After a few more minutes of tossing and turning, I got up for the day and took my time getting ready to report to the night shift at the Moscow Support Room. The shift was not particular stressful - in fact, it was lighter than usual - and this actually made the time go slower, and accentuated my desire to fall back into the arms of Morpheus at around 4 am. For now, it appears that the ISS crew does most of its communications during the time the station passes over Russian ground control stations, which occurs for a period of from about 10 to 20 minutes once every orbit (which takes 90 minutes). Comm was a little rocky today, with a lot of requests for repetition.

Upon finishing my shift, I went to visit a relatively new (ex-)coworker and his family, had a couple of beers and some snacks, and then returned home.

I've just gotten back from a short walk (25 min), and am cooking some udon noodles for "dinner." Then it's off to see whether I can pull this plan off this time.

Cheers...

What is today?

Today is the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Eighty-two years ago, on the eleventh hour of the day, the hostilities generally known as the "Great War" - also the "World War" - came to an end. Grateful nations set aside the day to celebrate the armistice that was to mark the end of the war to end all wars.

But that was in an era when we were naive, and didn't know that soon, we'd have to assign numbers to our wars.

Here in the U.S., that day is now known as Veteran's Day, and is celebrated the way most federal holidays are: on a Monday or Friday for the sake of convenience. In Canada, I believe it's called Remembrance Day.

A young Canadian, John McCrae, soon after losing a friend to an artillery shell in the battle of the Ypres salient in 1915, spent twenty minutes during a break and wrote a poem that expressed how he felt about the war and about life. He then threw the poem away, according to some accounts. It was retrieved by an officer and later published in England, and has become perhaps the best-known poem to come out of World War I. (McCrae himself died on active duty, of pneumonia, in 1918.)

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

It is easy, I suppose, with our modern conceit, to imagine that such sentiments are false, and that the seeming cynicism of our age - a sort of permanent screw-your-buddy attitude - was rampant and the governing mode at that time as well. And there is some evidence to suggest that some of the poets that died in that war - and here I have in mind Rupert Brooke ("If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.") - were built into larger-than-life, fallen-warrior symbols.

Yet I think in general, the sentiment was genuine, and it was shared among a wide group of people, from Canadians like McCrae, to Americans (some of whom didn't wait for the U.S. to declare war, but fought under the French flag), to Britishers, to Frenchmen, and all of the Allies united against a commonly perceived threat. Much the same feelings were reawakened just over two decades later, too, but that's a big digression.

It occurs to me that if there are any veterans of World War I left alive, they are in their late nineties and older. Health and longevity to them all!

Cheers...