You are an astronaut

Describe your perfect day.

A lot of people seem to think that when you’re an astronaut you spend your time with these glorious sunrises and sunsets. Well, yes, those are nothing short of spectacular. If you ever get a chance to see the sun either rising or setting against the backdrop of the curve of the earth, take it! Nothing, and I mean nothing, on earth, compares.

But, my perfect day?

We don’t have much spare time up here. There are too many experiments going and a lot of maintenance to be done. We have some equipment that just seems to not want to work right. One centrifuge in the soil density test works about half the time. It is a commercial centrifuge and I keep saying we should send it back down and get a refund, but can you imagine the paperwork? FedEx doesn’t deliver here yet, but they will someday. Won’t that be cool? We threaten to fix it with blunt force trauma delivered by a hammer but we can’t get a good swing at it because, as Newton’s law of motion reminds us, we’re up here in gravity-free space.

We do generally have time set aside to read (I love to read) or play cards although we have a game of Parcheesi going playing against a Google app. It doesn’t win nearly as often as you’d think. Sometimes I sense the game is rigged to let me win once in a while.

One thing that keeps life interesting up here is that we play background music via Siri that doubles as the intra-station communication device. We recognize that Siri also listens in on our conversations without our permission and the folks back home might be listening, as well. We get three songs each at a time but we can put as many songs as we like on the playlist. I think the playlist right now is about seventy songs long! My kids keep sending up songs for me to listen to and I put ‘em on the playlist but, heck, I’m old, I don’t know these bands.

Ultimately this is just like a day at work except without the commute! I miss my coffee. We had a coffee pot in the office at Houston and our secretary, Martina Higgins, a great person, could blend and make a perfect cup of coffee. We talked the other day when she called us about our W-2s, some things you can’t escape, and I asked if they could send up a thermos of her coffee. Of course, they couldn’t, it would explode en route but I was really eager for a cup of her coffee. My wife, Julia, figured out how to send up a big serving of lasagna that we can reheat in the low-power microwave. Talk about delicious! Now all we have to do is figure up a way to send up Julia and the kids! That would be perfect!

So, long answer to a short question. The perfect day? The perfect day will be when I get back home to my family.

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