Musha rig um du rum da!

Feeling... alert!

Got home around 10 am yesterday and set about cleaning the place. I had hoped to fall asleep around noon or so, in order to wake up around 7 pm, which would give me an opportunity to go out to dinner with Lee, perhaps, but by 11:30 am, it was obvious that I was not going to be able to go to sleep, so I called Lee and left a message to the effect that I was reverting to my previous schedule, that of retiring at 3 pm and getting up at 10 pm.

The problem was that at 2:30, I still was not sleepy, but I went and lay down at 3:00 anyway, with something by Bruckner playing softly from the stereo.

In a repeat of yesterday, I regained consciousness again at 5 pm, then at 7:30 pm or so, after which I tossed and turned for about half and hour (resetting the Bruckner) and went back to sleep.

When the alarm went off around 10:10 pm, I was well and truly asleep. I hit the snooze several times, finally getting up at about 10:45, which was entirely too late. I got out of the house late (but still early enough to get to work on time), wondering why it took almost a week for me to get to the point where I needed an alarm clock to rouse me from bed.

Anyway...

I prowled the local Half Price Bookstore and found a couple of good CDs. One is Andrea Bocelli's The Opera Album; the other, a remastered release of Orff's Carmina Burana and Stravinsky's Firebird Suite.

I bought the Bocelli because he has a great voice. I have to admit I was unfamiliar with most of the selections on the CD, but that didn't matter: Just listening to the music and Bocelli's voice was enough to bring involuntary smiles to my mug. Fortunately, the rental I'm driving is equipped with a CD player in its sound system, so I get to listen to this music on the way to and from work.

I bought the other CD on the strength of the Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (free translation: Fortune, Empress of the World) segment from Carmina Burana, which is used often in movies and commercials to communicate a feeling of drama, suspense, struggle, and triumph. (I seem to recall it being used, for example, in the opening credits for the Peter the Great miniseries shown some time ago.)

The music in the Carmina has an almost irresistable vitality and the content of the lyrics mingle Christianity and paganism, amounting to an uninhibited celebration of the pleasures of life and, in particular, love. Sex, carousal, and bawdiness figure strongly in them. Then again, I would imagine not one person in ten thousand would understand the lyrics as they are being sung, so that aspect of the Carmina is really low-profile.

The opening lines:

O Fortuna velit luna statu variabilis, semper crescis aut decrescis, vita detestabilis, nunc obdurat et tunc curat; ludo mentis aciem, egestatem, potestate dissolvit ut glaciem.

Fortune reigning, waxing, waning, Always doing as You please, You never cease From Your caprice. Our luck forever varies. You bring us wealth, Then with Your stealth You quietly absolve us. As sun melts ice, By your device So too do You dissolve us. [Translation by Jay Ducharme]

The CD is a rerelease of a Columbia LP, and the performance of the Carmina, it turns out, took place at the Jones Auditorium here in Houston, in April 1958.

Cheers...

Sixteen tons...

...describes how heavy my eyelids feel.

It's been a relatively slow shift, the major action being a 30-minute discussion between the Moscow MCC and the crew on inventory issues.

Inventory, in the context of the ISS, means keeping track of everything, down to its stowage location. This is important, from the point of view of not only keeping track of where the food, underwear, hygiene items, etc. are stowed, but also where various science equipment is located. Also, when you consider that crews stay on board for only a relatively limited time (several months), it's clear that a new crew will be able to find things only if the old crew keeps very careful records.

Keeping track of everything is a very challenging problem, and this has been known for a long time, as it was a very challenging problem on the Mir space station. In fact, somewhere I still have a video I picked up at an Atlanta Comdex show (in 1993 or so) featuring footage of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev using a handheld bar-code scanner on the Mir.

I'm not sure how useful that scanner was, as Krikalev's use of it predated the Shuttle-Mir program by several years, and during that program, inventory management continued to be an ongoing issue. I seem to recall reports, during the last or next to last U.S. long-duration stay, of the crew finding various items that had been stowed years before on the station.

Anyway, difficulties start cropping up when items get missed, or a bag doesn't get a bar-code applied to it, or something along those lines. Too, when Shuttles come by to resupply the ISS, there's typically not enough time to enter things into the inventory management system (IMS); all of the cargo items get put into a pile and tied down with bungees. The idea is that after the Shuttle leaves, the crew will go about checking the items into the IMS and stow them in the correct, preplanned location.

This phase of the flight is so important, that a daily "delta file" of changes to the IMS database is a high-importance item for downlink to the ground, so that specialists can keep track of what's going on in space.

(Is it obvious I'm making a valiant effort to stay awake? :^)

There's about an hour and a half left in the shift. Tomorrow night/morning's shift will be the last night work for this trip, and I can't say I'm sorry to see it end.

Y-A-W-N.

Cheers...