Tonight M.S. comes back after being home for a couple of weeks, and then in Colorodo for another. Unfortunatly she gets back rather late tonight, and she and I have school and work tomorrow respectivly, but at least I'll get to see her.
I'm trying to finish a paper today for the National Radio Science Meeting in Colorodo, which begins on 05 Jan. Originally, my master plan was to write a paper for the conference, go a few days early so I could meet up with M.S. while she was in town for a wedding, go skiing, present my paper, listen to the other interesting stuff, and then go back to JPL. Well, that didn't work out so well. Instead I'm getting sent down to Parkes, Australia to help with the direct to earth recording of the Huygens landing signal. I guess the compromise isn't all that bad, but I still get stuck writing this paper which I wont be able to present. The paper is a case study of communications during spacecraft critical sequences, which I've done a couple of times while at JPL, and is the purpose of my visit to AU later this week.
Still a lot of work to get done this week. On my adjenda are frequency predicts, hardware configuration, network connections between JPL and Parkes, and antenna pointing files. Oh, and packing clothes, etc. So that's why this paper has to get done today. While writing this is a great pocrastination technique, I should get back to it.
To follow up on what I said yesterday about the weather - it is indeed raining here today.