Current location:	Koobikal Hel
Current mood:	irritated
Current music:	None, wrestling with a sluggish server.

Here's hoping that's all this is.
I think I've figured out why I've been in "snarling badger" mode lately; there's a story hatching in my brain. It is, alas, not a happy story... it's more of a wild-haymaker-to-the-limbic-system story, with all the pain the metaphor implies, and it promises to be a rather unpleasant one to write. It seems to want to be in 2nd person present tense, too, sort of a voice-in-your-head story with a lot of sensory content and not a lot of imagery or other poetic touches.

So now to find some more resources to do some background reading on proposed Mars missions, and what life is like on ISS and was like on Skylab and Mir.

Also, the story is predicated on the Mars mission taking two identical landers for redundancy; should both birds be cleared for landing status, one would land the crew for the primary mission and the other landed near the end of the mission at a different site to serve as a long-duration teleoperated lab. Is this practical, or would the weight penalties be prohibitive?

-- Steve hopes that putting this blasted thing down on electrons will stop it from eating its way out his skull.