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Planetary News: Mars (2005)The Planetary Society's Mars Analog Blog:
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Credit: Troy Hudson |
5:15 pm
Current Mood: at ease
Current Music: coffee makers at Starbucks...my best friend is listening to John Tavener on my laptop, but the headphones are in his ears.
It's the weekend and things have slowed down a little bit. I was able to enjoy a garden party with some friends out near the Van Nuys airport this afternoon, but I was running around a bit this morning to get everything done.
I did laundry, which is an absolute necessity. Not only because there were some dirty items that I wanted to take with me to Chile, but also because I like leaving and coming home to a clean house. I'll generate minimal laundry in the next few days and I'll be happy leaving what little of that there is in the bin for two weeks.
I also took my flight jacket to the dry cleaners so it'll be a bit cleaner and smell a bit nicer for the trip. I needed to do this anyway, but the impending travel just made it happen that much sooner. But I learned from all the various errands that I had to run today that in some ways this trip is happening at a very inopportune time. I'm not saying that I'm at all reluctant to go; far from it. I'm totally excited. But it's a Saturday near the end of the month. Monday is a federal holiday and all services (mailing and shipping, dry-cleaning, banks) are closed until Tuesday. And Caltech only pays me once a month, so I'm scraping by until they cut my check on June 1st. Thankfully, it's direct deposit...but I won't be able to do anything with that money until I transfer it into the proper account and I can't do that until I'm in Chile...if I can do it at all once I'm there. How does one call an 800-number from a foreign country? I'm sure there's something on the USAA website about this, but I can't check that right now. There's something else to add to my to-do list. (Never seems to get any shorter, does it?)
Not much else to report here today. I'm going to try to figure out exactly how I'm getting to the airport on Tuesday and how I'm going to come up with the $100 entry fee that Chile charges US citizens. (Apparently, the entry fee is good for the life of your passport, but I still have to pay it this first time.) I got my international driver's license about a month ago when my advisor gave the green light for this trip. Took only about 10 minutes at the local Automobile Association office. It might prove useful...if I can figure out what I did with that paper. Probably put it with my passport and immunization records.
Chile isn't subject to most diseases you worry about in most other South American countries. Malaria, dengue...they've been reported in Chile, but never to an extensive degree. As a result of that, and my generally healthy disposition, I haven't taken any shots particularly for this trip. And since mosquitoes, flies, or any other macroscopic vectors are completely absent from the center of the Atacama, this seems a totally reasonable course of action to me.
Hrm - I wonder if someone could walk the contact of the border between the last macroscopic plant life and the inner Atacama with a GPS and see anything interesting. It's got to be rather striking to be walking through a regular desert with the occasional scrub brush or cactus and then come across a region with no plants at all....or does it fade out so slowly that marking the boundary would be fruitless or too arbitrary? I guess I'll see when I get there.
[ what is this? ]