Leaving Eve

PAN HANDLING: This weekend, we got into the kit that we bought at the Klondike Gold Rush Museum last Friday.

The kit consisted of a plastic pan, an instruction book, a vial, a magnifying glass, a magnet, and a bag of sand/gravel/potential gold.

Christian and the kids spent about 20 minutes reading the instruction book carefully. Then, the kids carefully poured the gritty mixture into the pan. We added water and the kids started shaking and swirling per instructions.

It was a slow process and (drat!) no gold nuggets popped out of it. After many, many minutes of work, the kids did manage to find three little flecks of gold, which thrilled them enormously! See if you can spot the gold speck in this photo.

TOUCHING DOWN: This evening, we watched three men being extracted from a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan 167 days after they left our planet. Man, it must take a bit to get used to gravity again after being weightless for so long. 

The returning trio were Expedition 29 Commander Mike Fossum, Flight Engineers Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Sergei Volkov of the Russian Federal Space Agency. 

PACKING UP: A lot of today's energy was spent on getting ready for our respective trips. I fly out of Seatac tomorrow at 6 a.m., winging toward the Tweetup and Mars Science Laboratory launch on the Space Coast of Florida.

Here is a GREAT Web site for following all the action leading up to the launch: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/timeline/launch/

I'm taking about 15 pounds of cookies with me. Here's a sample. ...