Earth to Mars and in Need of a Haircut

I finished work on the larger stained glass panel I mentioned in my last update. I'm pleased with how it turned out and I'm also pleased to have all of the windows in our sunroom once again mostly protected from bird strikes. Here's a link to more photos of the panel on my Instagram account where someone commented that I "must be a perfectionist." I replied that I am and that it's sort of a blessing and a curse. All of my life I've been someone who needs order to my surroundings. I don't do messes well. The lines in the stained glass panel work really well to satisfy that need in me. There's order in the chaos of those many lines.

With the remaining weeks of winter, I hope to keep adding to my somewhat depleted inventory of sun-catchers in my Etsy shop before turning my focus to more outdoor activities.

We came out of our polar vortex deep-freeze that gripped much of the country a couple days ago. Our daytime highs are well above freezing and eating away at our not too terribly deep base of snow. 

Mars Mission 2020 has successfully landed on Mars after traveling 292,526,838 miles (470,776,311 km) in 7 months to get there. I can't even begin to comprehend the intelligence it took to pull that off. Traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles / 299,337 km per second), a radio signal to NASA's Perseverance rover takes anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes to be received depending on the relation of Mars to Earth in their orbits around the sun. These numbers are mind-boggling to me. I was perusing the mission's website and learned that I could've had my name forever on the Red Planet along with the names of 10,932,295 others who had submitted their names for this project. I've signed up to have my name included in the next mission's list of names set to make the journey in 2026. Get your boarding pass here.

Is space exploration worth it? I think so. There are so many spinoff technologies that come from it (GPS for one) that most of us routinely use and benefit from. It's estimated that one half of one percent of tax revenues go to fund NASA whereas .24c of ever dollar goes to fund the military. 

Cotton has been with us for a few months and is doing really well. She's not able to go down longer flights of stairs but she can negotiate the two steps down off our front porch. She's not shy about barking when she wants attention and sounds a little like Popeye with her gravely smoker's-cough voice. She'll be 16 this summer. It's cute how every morning she comes downstairs to look for me where I can usually be found in a chair in the sunroom with Charlie sitting between my legs on the ottoman my feet are propped up on. She begs to be brought into my lap and I'm happy to ablige her. She's a sweetheart. 

Now that we're enjoying warmer temps, the winter fatbike season is going to be very hit or miss—mostly miss through the rest of winter. I can't complain as I've enjoyed myself quite a lot on the trails the past few months. The past couple of weeks have been especially awesome at any of the numerous trails the metro area has to offer. In the 9 years I've been riding the river bottoms trails, I've never seen conditions so nice with very little rutting of the trails and very little ice to contend with. It's been a good run.

Did I mention that I need a haircut? It's the longest it's been in decades. Seriously. 

That's all I've got.