Sauntering Vaguely Downward

I’m stressed for a specific reason about which I’m obliged to be vague until some point next week (hopefully), which has been inhibiting my ability to write a coherent journal post. I realise this presumes my usual journal posts are coherent. Shush.

I haven’t been to my place of work since Thursday 19 March. I haven’t driven the car since Friday 20 March. We’ve been attempting to home-school the children whilst simultaneously working from home since Monday 23 March. It’s very difficult to judge how well we’re doing at either of those things. I experience a fairly continuous low-level grade of frustration about nearly every activity I perform. We talk to our friends and colleagues via Zoom, WhatsApp, Messenger, Teams and Skype, depending on which we’re connected on, and which form of technology is being least hinky at the time. Every time Keiki speaks to one of his friends, he has a meltdown afterward because he’s so frustrated. He saw one of his schoolmates on the canal towpath last week. He tried to climb the eight-foot builder’s fence to get to him, and spent their whole conversation clinging to the top of it, shouting every piece of news he could think of to him. After we came inside, he cried for twenty minutes because they couldn’t play together.

I want to do the same when I close a Zoom meeting with a friend.

The weather has been fantastic, which is a blessing because we get to spend a lot of time outside in the garden and that has got to be good for us in many ways. (Also we have a garden, which makes us fortunate.) And yet I futilely resent the weather for being so relentlessly and obliviously nice. Has it not read the latest Financial Times analysis with the terrifying graphs that show how the mortality rates are 50% to 400% higher than they normally are at this point in the year, no matter what a given country or city is reporting as attributable to covid deaths? Dark clouds! Icy pelting rain! Sturm und drang! That’s what’s appropriate right now. Do you not get it, weather? Although if the forecast for the week is correct, I’m about to get what I’m not genuinely asking for here.

I’m trying to be patient, but oh, how I want schools to re-open. I want to go back to work. I want to have a moan with my colleagues about late trains and overpriced bad coffee and inconsiderate fellow commuters. I want to see my friends in person.

If you read that, I’m sorry, and have a duckling photo. If you skipped it, well, I’m still sorry, because you’re probably similarly frustrated. Have a duckling photo.

As many of you know, I work on the Cassini mission as an operations engineer and have done for over a decade.

Tomorrow is the spacecraft’s final close flyby (T126) of Saturn’s moon Titan.

Just to put this into perspective for you, this may be the last time in decades that we get anywhere near Titan. There are no missions to Saturn or its most interesting* moons, Titan and Enceladus, currently funded or being built. That means there’s a minimum of ten years before a new mission could be launched. Given that the transit time to Saturn is, at a minimum, seven years and on average more like ten, that’s two decades until we can repeat Cassini’s observations.

Cassini’s impending demise makes me sad, of course, but what bothers me even more is the lack of continuity in our exploration of our solar system.

You can read the details of tomorrow’s Cassini’s observations on the NASA-JPL press release here. It includes an animation of the flyby over the surface, from the perspective of the spacecraft.

* “most interesting” being ever so slightly subjective, of course

The Rosetta mission to Comet 67P came to an end today, with the orbital spacecraft landing on the surface of the comet and switching off.


Cartoon of Rosetta with its busted solar panels, clutching its Mission Achievements log. *sniff*


Cartoon of the Philae lander going to sleep forever on the comet's surface. *wibble*