I would like to officially reassure people who, seeing no blog updates for almost two weeks, thought I had succumbed to some manner of horrible catastrophe. I am okay, but have been too busy to write posts. I have, however, managed to find time for taking occasional photographs. I hope to soon post what I have, and fill in the gap a little. For now, the next best thing to a dog post: irregular haircuts. A couple of weeks go, Ed bought hair clippers to get himself a haircut. And for a change of pace, he opted to get a mohawk. In the Texas heat, I felt like having some shorter hair, so this seemed like a good bandwagon to jump on. And after a few days, presumably because Ed and I looked “so good”, Jamil decided to round off Team Mohawk. Sasha did the clipping. […]
|
||||
|
|
||||
Laika recenlty spent a night at the vet after “exploratory surgery”. This is what it’s called when you take a dog in for spaying, she gets cut open, and it’s discovered that she’s already been spayed. Afterwards, she wouldn’t stop licking at her wound so she was given a baffle, just like Spider. (Theo has no wounds to lick, but she would also be unable to.) Otherwise we juggled around pivot suspension ropes, and sun shields, and did more beam maps. Lots of non-dog things. […]
With Theo on the gondola, it’s time to start scanning. That is, after all, what we’re supposed to be able to do. As a telescope. The first thing to scan is a calibration source, mapping out Spider’s beams (how each detector sees a point source). […]
Last week, at the end of my time on night shift, Theo was moved onto the gondola. I missed the operation itself but, thanks to camera and lens loans from John and Jon, I got some photos of the result. We also concluded our epic water balloon fight. Sean and I won by getting the most wet while wrestling over a garden hose. […]
I know I haven’t been super punctual about posting photos this time around. Sadly, things took a turn for the worse when my general-purpose lens lost a fight with the floor. […]
I spent much of the past week on night shift. Here’s a few photos taken during the parts of the days in which I wasn’t entirely zombified. […]
With Theo fully cold again, we’re back to attempting to characterize detectors. We ran lots of tests this weekend and primarily learned that Theo is really good at sensing when radio transmitters operate in the highbay. Sadly, in learning this, we didn’t learn much else. Also, animals (mainly Laika). […]
CSBF’s SIP is ready to install in the Spider gondola, so that we can command and communicate like we will during the flight. This means that our flight engineer, Joseph, will be spending more time over in our highbay. And that means that I need to spend a couple days attacking him with the camera. He defends himself with frequent evasive manoeuvres. They are not always perfectly effective. […]
Because Laika insistently follows people, she’s often found in the common area of the highbay building. But it has become necessary to remind her, via signage, that she is not so welcome in the Forbidden Cave of Wonder (not to be confused with the Cave of Forbidden Wonder, or the Forboding Cave of Wonder) (aka the lab). And to further demonstrate how wondrous a place it is, I have a few photos of people doing tedious jobs. […]
Yesterday was Jon’s brithday, so Anne planned a surprise water balloon fight for when he and the night shift arrived. And a special meal. We divided into teams by shift, and identified ourselves with bandanas: red for the early shift, camo for the day shift, and stars for the night shift. Laika joined the red team. She also got a new (replacement) toy, so I followed her with a camera for a while. After playing with her myself. The festivities were interrupted when Barth took a nasty fall (while strafing Sean with water balloons). He dislocated his shoulder, getting hurt a lot, but is expected to eventually make a full recovery. […]