Exploring the Universe

In my blog posts about the Falcon Heavy Launch and my trip to Cape Canaveral I explained that in my opinion the exploration of space represents the best of humanity when it pushes us to work together and develop amazing new technologies (Visit to see the Falcon Heavy and Falcon Heavy Launch.)

For example what started as a space race during the Cold War has turned into a global partnership. The Mars InSight Lander, The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport, was manufactured and managed by American companies but a lot of the instruments on it were made by European Agencies. The International Space Station has been in operation for over 20 years. And, since the end of the Space Shuttle program, all crews have launched to the ISS from Russia.

As far as new technology there are a lot of things we use every day that may not exist if not for the space program. For example memory foam pillows and mattresses. Memory foam was created so that the seats would be individualized for the crew who would spend long amounts of time in them. However the seats needed to be able to adapt to different body shapes and sizes. Hence memory foam which would fit the person in the seat and then return to a rest position for the next person. Also the thin reflective heat blankets that come in emergency kits and first aid kits got their start because of the space race. A third invention I never realized before is ear thermometers that allow temperature to be taken from a distance, thanks to space exploration. And scratch resistant lens for glasses started by NASA trying to find a material to make visors in astronauts' helmets.

Now I've been thinking about another reason I love Space Exploration. And that is for the simple desire that we all have to know. They say curiosity killed the cat but I call that a prime example of "you spot it, you got it" for humans. We love to learn and know and explore. A desire to know has brought people around the globe, inspired humans to take flight, and in 1968 on Christmas Eve it caused man to look back at Earth from the moon as the crew of Apollo 8 saw Earth rise:

Now 50 years after that mankind is about to achieve a new grand accomplishment. On New Years Day New Horizons will flyby Ultima Thule (2014 MU69), which I have just learned I was saying wrong up until today. Ultima was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014 while it searched for objects that New Horizons would be able to flyby after it's 2015 flyby of Pluto. Which brings me to another topic that I love (and a big reason why I love New Horizons) Pluto!

Pluto is my favorite planet, yes planet I will continue to call it a planet. In July of 2015 when New Horizons passed Pluto I was in my car driving from TN to NY. I had just moved and was returning to take another car load of stuff from our old house to mine in TN so we could sell the house in Levittown. As I drove I was listening to a variety of stations but tuned into an NPR station to hear the early reports of the flyby. And as I drove the NPR broadcasters described the images and Pluto's giant heart. Well fired up by the discovery I went home and made a change.org petition urging for the re-evaluation of Pluto's status as dwarf planet so that it would be reclassified as a Planet. And because I am bad at promoting things and social media I only got six signatures. I know it isn't because no one agreed because I have spoken with a lot of people and they do agree. In honor of New Horizons's continued exploration I am re-opening the petition and hoping for at least another six signatures before it gets closed again by change.org. Pluto is a Planet Petition

Anyway back to New Horizons: the entire reason for this post. I can't stop thinking about it. I am so excited for New Year's Day to see what new discoveries it will make. I mean it has already done so much since being launched from Cape Canaveral back in 2006: an encounter with an asteroid, capturing photos of a volcano plume on Io, gravity assist from Jupiter, crossing the orbit of Saturn and Uranus, and the 2015 flyby of Pluto. Here is a summary photo of what New Horizons accomplished with the 2015 flyby:

Pluto before and after New Horizons

On the left is a 1992 space exploration stamp of a fuzzy image of Pluto. On the right is the 2016 Pluto stamp with one of New Horizons' early photos. A picture is worth a 1000 words and this was worth way more!

In preparation for the New Year's Day flyby of Ultima Thule I purchased and read the book Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon. Here is a link to the book on Amazon (Chasing New Horizons.) Also a link to my review of the book Amazon Chasing New Horizons review. The book covers the entire project from when it was first suggested to go to Pluto, the process of getting funding and designing the space craft, and finally the flyby itself. Even though I obviously know the flyby happened I still felt anticipation with every setback and difficulty they ran into during the almost two decade long project. It certainly opened my eyes to all that goes on behind the scenes and it presented the information in an engaging way. I felt like there was a perfect amount of scientific background info and explanation as well as the administrative information to give a full understanding of the project. And it certainly bettered my appreciation for what it took to get New Horizons to basically pass Pluto at the rough distance of New York to Mumbai, 7750 miles. I can't recommend this book enough! Also after seeing someone who happened to be reading the book when he recognized Alan Stern on a plane and then got it signed I will forever carry this book with me just in case I recognize Dr. Stern anywhere.

Speaking of New Horizons's PI, Principal Investigator, as I sit here writing this (December 26th) I just saw the tweet from Alan Stern that says:

"Breaking . . . Signal has just been received at mission control, New Horizons has successfully started its flyby program of stored commands and the exploration of Ultima Thule 4 billion miles away! THIS IS IT FOLKS, FLYBY HAS BEGUN! Go New Horizons!!"

Alan Stern twitter

Actually that is another pretty awesome fact about Alan Stern, he is very active on social media and frequently likes and retweets and interacts with other people's tweets. For as much as people complain about social media Dr. Stern is another example of social media gone right. His interactions with others on social media certainly makes him a great advocate for spreading awareness of space exploration and an interest in astronomy.

Back to New Horizons, though, here is one of the coolest pictures to return to Earth from New Horizons of Pluto's blueish haze caused by sun interacting with atmosphere.

Photo from New Horizons and NASA

Once New Horizons reaches Ultima and has its flyby it will be over 18 months before all the data and information collected returns to Earth. As the flyby date and time approaches I have been tracking New Horizons using a website set up by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, home of New Horizons. Where is New Horizons?

Photo from JHUAPL

Another cool thing I did while waiting with great anticipation for the flyby was to send a message to New Horizons and Ultima Thule though JHU APL. People could type in their names and select a message that will be sent to New Horizons for the Flyby, again another way of extending our reach and inviting people to feel part of this great accomplishment in space exploration.




If you are wondering when exactly we will see initial images from the the Flyby here is a helpful image:

Now after I first saw this image I set my phone's world clock to show me time in UTC which is six hours ahead of my time (central). But then while reading a blog by Emily Lakdawalla about the upcoming Fly by on the Planetary Society's page, a non-profit organization to advocate and spread awareness of space exploration, she made a great point. The time for information to be sent from New Horizons to Earth is six hours. Which is the same as my time difference to UTC. So basically if you are in central time, as I am, those times represent perfectly when the information would be reaching the New Horizons mission control. Emily Lakdawalla blog.

As the flyby occurs New Horizons will stop transmitting info back to earth so that it can focus on collecting data then at around 10:30am eastern time  New Horizons's mission control, located in Maryland, will receive a quick update on New Horizons before the first 4 hour long transmission of scientific data begins. By mid afternoon on January 1st that first transmission will be received but I'm not sure how long it will be before that information starts finding its way to news sites.  I assume pretty quick.

At its closest approach to Ultima New Horizons will be just over 2,000 miles away that is equivalent to the distance of Nashville, TN to Los Angeles, CA! Remember how at the beginning of this post I said Ultima was discovered in 2014, that also means New Horizons will be sending back scientific information about a world we didn't even know existed back in 2006 when it launched. That is mind blowing.

And to add to the event Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist and Queen guitarist, will be premiering his new single "New Horizons" in honor of the spacecraft's 12 year journey from NASA's Mission Control during the flyby. So far he has released two teasers on his Instagram account with a promise of a third.

Teaser one

Teaser two

To quote Brian May:

"I was inspired by the idea that this is the furthest that the Hand of Man has ever reached - it will be by far the most distant object we have ever seen at close quarters, through the images which the spacecraft will beam back to Earth. To me, it epitomizes the human spirit's unceasing desire to understand the Universe we inhabit." 

Brain May discusses new single bringing together his love of music and space

And that "unceasing desire to understand" brings me full circle to the beginning of the post. It is something I love about space, it is something Alan Stern talks about in the book, and it is what Brian May will be singing about on New Years Day as New Horizons once again finds and passes another new horizon.

Merry Christmas 2018

Amazingly enough this is the sixth Christmas since I bought my house! So just 24 more years of debt and then I will own it :-)

Growing up in NY Christmas traditions for us involved going into Manhattan and seeing the decorated store windows of large department stores like Macy's and Saks 5th Avenue. I saw on the news that this year was Lord and Taylor's last Christmas season and the building will be taken over by some kind of staffing company.

At Macy's when we were little we would visit Santa and see the amazing workshop that was designed every year featuring elves working and a large train display. That would be followed up by a puppet show in a small theater. I know the display has changed a lot since I was a child; much of the old display has been swapped out for tv screens that kids can interact with instead of just looking around I suppose. I don't know if the puppet show is still there but I hope it is.

We would also fight the city crowds to see the tree at Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and the famed toy store FAO Schwartz.

Each year even though we did the same thing there were changes in the decorations and it was always different. The city is a pretty awesome place to be around Christmas time. The smell of chestnuts and roasted peanuts fills the air and sometimes if you are lucky you will get a flurry of snow, the perfect amount to make it pretty but not stick and cause a mess. I mean also be prepared to be buried in a sea of humanity balancing between people who are in way too much of a hurry and other people who are going way too slow. You will be crammed on to sidewalks where there is no space to move side to side and you have to let the crowd take you.

This yearly tradition was so important to us that the year Meg was in a car accident we rented a wheel chair for her to use so we could go into Manhattan together. It was a struggle for sure. While most of the streets have handicapped ramps a lot of those ramps are in bad shape ( I accidentally almost dumped Meg at least twice) also that sea of humanity I mentioned earlier. They were standing in front of the ramps waiting to cross in the opposite direction so even finding space to get back on the sidewalk was challenging. But this year also lead to one of my favorite memories of all at Christmas and certainly on the Long Island Rail Road, LIRR. We were getting on the train to come home. Certain train cars  have reserved seats for handicapped. The seat bottom can flip up to allow space for wheelchairs, walkers, and carriages. We finally found a train car that 1. had enough room for us to get on and 2. was a handicapped train car. We got on and the people sitting in the handicapped seats did not get up. Which we were not fighting with them on because we had room to be in and Meg was sitting in the chair it just meant we were in open area where the doors were. Well these two boys (and by boys I mean probably my age at the time so mid/early 20s) got on and looked around. They saw Meg in the wheelchair in the doorway where there is standing room and the people all sitting in the handicap seats. Now these boys were apparently at the perfect level of intoxication for the moment. Any more intoxicated and they may not have noticed any less and they may have just gone about their night like we had accepted. But not them. They were drunk enough to lose that inhibition of just keeping ones mouth shut and minding their own business. So they looked from Meg to the handicapped seats and said (paraphrase) "Those seats are handicapped seats what is wrong with you. Move. She is in a f-----g wheel chair. You can stand." And the people got up, we pushed Meg into the space now clear because we could raise the seats, and the boys wished us a Merry Christmas and went on to find themselves some place to sit.

Not every year but several times we also went to Dyker Heights in Brooklyn to see some of the most amazing decorations as an entire neighborhood works to out decorate their neighbor.

Now that we are in TN a trip to Manhattan would be a bit far so we have new yearly traditions. We drove out to Lynchburg to see the Jack Daniel's distillery and the "Barrel Tree" and then spent half the day walking around the town looking in small craft and antique shops.

We drove back to Nashville and walked around the Gaylord Omni Hotel and Convention Center to see the beautiful light displays in the Delta, Cascades, and Magnolia lobby. And then we went to the Wilson County Fairgrounds to see the Dancing Lights of Christmas. If you are near Nashville this is so worth it! Dancing Lights The Dancing Lights are over an hour of music that plays over the radio while you are completely immersed in a synchronized light show. It is beautiful. 

Then I came home to my house and got to enjoy my own Christmas decorations. Which take a really really long time to put up so that on one day I can have family over to enjoy the decorations :-) Well accept for outside lots of people could see that as they drive by and there is part of me that thinks back to years of seeing the windows in New York City or the decorations on the houses in Dyker Heights Brooklyn and this is my mini version of their work. 

I do want to add more outside and I think I slowly will. 

My goal is also to eventually have decorations in every room of my first floor. In my living room I have a display around the fireplace.

I also have Meghan's Nutcrackers, Meghan's Santa collection, and a variety of snow globes that my Mom has collected over the years, my Russian Nesting doll collection, a variety of Penguins cause they are awesome, and a beautiful angel display with a Church and Noel and Peace, and our Nativity display from Naples, Italy.

Each piece was handmade and has amazing detail on them.

I know some people set the Nativity up immediately with the complete Holy Family but we have always left out Jesus until Christmas Day.

In my sitting room I have my tree and Christmas Village. Now my village is a lot of pieces that I have bought at Good Will or as end of season displays. As a result many don't have boxes and some had little delicate pieces that have broken off. So I set up myself a work station of amazing awesome loctite and multiple sizes of batteries (at the end of each season I take batteries out). Tip tried to help, and by help I mean got in my way at every step and knocked the batteries and glue off my table whenever I put them down. 

It took me two days to get everything out of storage, set up, batteries, glued, and plugged in and I think it came out well.

And of course our Christmas Tree.

Thank you for checking out my Christmas decorations and have a Merry Christmas I wish anyone reading this a joyous holiday season and a healthy and Happy New Year. I know this is a fun post about decorations but the most important thing about these decorations or the traditions that we have had or still continue is that they are spent with loved ones- friends and family. Whether it was going into the city or spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Days surrounded by people who loved us the holidays are best spent with others. 

Merry Christmas!

Roma AKA Romabear AKA Romeo our pur machine cat

I've waited to write this because even right now I feel like everything could change.

A few months ago Meg and I went out for dinner not suspecting anything was wrong. It was a good dinner and a normal drive home. When we opened the door to come in everything changed. We could hear one of our cats meowing loudly and in obvious distress and pain. We thought at first it was Tipperary because she sometimes has a deeper meow. But she quickly appeared running to us by the door, and then walked further into the house, then looked at us, and then walked further into the house. She was clearly trying to lead us to whoever was crying.

We turned the corner into the hall to see Roma lying on his side against a wall meowing. His brother, Napoli, was circling and sniffing him. Now we have always had cats and we have always had cats who love each other. In the past we had another pair of brothers as well. I have never seen cats show the fear and concern Tip and Napoli were showing and I think that made us even more nervous. It was late at night so we scooped him up and called the emergency vet where we had taken Schultzy (our German Shepherd who passed away Best Bad Dog Ever.) Once we got there and took him out of his carrier we noticed he was also spasming, neither of us noticed him spasming when we were at home but we got him up and in the carrier really fast.

 

 Looking at the way he was crying and spasming the vet thought he had suffered some kind of back injury and prescribed us medication for him. We took him home that night and got him his own little set up of food, water, and litter box in the laundry room so we could limit his movement and keep a better eye on how he was doing. We realized that because we have three cats and we free feed we had no idea if he was eating or drinking. The next morning when it came to try and give him medicine we couldn't get him to take the pill with anything. We tried cat food, treats, tuna, and chicken. Now of course I could have tried to put it in his mouth and make him swallow it but with a possible back injury I didn't want him to twist and fight. So we took him to our vet the next day for a check up and to help with the medicine. They had us crush the pills and mix them in water so that we could give him it with a syringe. We all thought that the pain was causing him not to eat and once he got some more medicine he would be feeling better after all the spasming had stopped so he seemed to be doing better. But he was still acting very lethargic. They told us to watch for signs of jaundice and we took him home.

However the next day he ate maybe one piece of food and the following day was just as dismal in the eating department. A dog can go a few days without eating but cats can slip into organ failure very quickly and so we were concerned. We knew he hadn't eaten since we found him and we had no way of knowing if he had eaten at all that day. I looked at him carefully for any sign of jaundice but here is the thing.... he is an orange cat. So I am looking for signs of yellowing on an orange cat.

I didn't know. Maybe he was yellow maybe he wasn't. We decided to be cautious and return him to the emergency vet, it was a holiday and our vet was closed. We got there and the vet tech knowing this was our third vet visit in four days offered to take a look at him and see if he was jaundice and send us on our way if he wasn't there jaundice we would avoid a vet bill. Out of an abundance of caution we decided it would be worth the $90 standard visit fee and waited in a room for the vet.

When the vet came in there was no sign of jaundice but they did decide to run some blood tests. And this is where the mystery begins.

Our pretty Roma-Bear had an elevated white blood cell count of over 4,300. His platelets were next to nothing. For further testing they had us take him to a specialty animal hospital in Franklin, TN Blue Pearl.

We drove over there with him unsure of what this was going to mean. They began more tests and hospitalized him. The first goal was to get him eating again and then figure out what exactly was going on. He had two numbers that were just so very off but then his other blood work showed normal liver, kidney, and pancreatic functions.

They would run tests to try and narrow down the cause and we went from one to the other methodically. First thought was a tick disease however he is an indoor cat. Other than a 72 hour adventure almost three years ago he never left the house unless it was in a carrier going to the vet. It was possible that a tick had gotten into the house and bit him but we never saw one, he didn't have one on him then, and he was wearing a flea and tick collar that was suppsoed to last three months and he had been wearing it for a month already.

Next we thought it might be feline infectious peritonitis because the symptoms matched however again it was very unlikely because he is almost eleven years old and that generally effects young cats and kittens. Of course it wasn't out of the realm of possibilities and they tried to do some tests to rule it out. But it is very hard to get confirmation on it especially since generally the cat has passed away before tests are analyzed.

While the vets were doing their tests for our part we were visiting Roma every day after work and bringing him anything we could to try and get him to eat: cat treats, tuna, chicken, and moist cat food. He didn't want anything. We got him to eat maybe two treats and then he would lose interest.

Every possibility was bad. We were basically waiting for confirmation that he had days, weeks, or months. One test showed liquid in two cavities and they began to suspect cancer - and I was sitting at home thinking, "it would be good news if he had cancer because that meant months." Test after test was inconclusive he had some numbers that were so off the chart bad but then again his organ functioning was normal. And he still wasn't eating.

I am lucky to have a friend who is a vet and she was an amazing resource to talk and text with throughout this time as well. I really think she kept me sane and she was a great second opinion on everything that was going on with Roma. I really owe her for being so patient and helping to make sure I understood test results and guiding me with questions to ask the vets and answering ones that I thought of at all hours.

The staff at Blue Pearl were so wonderful. I mean we really got the sense that they loved and cared for him. The overnight staff would be sure to check on him and give him some pets and attention. And one morning the vet told me they came in to a large note on the board:

"Roma ate!"

Unfortunately he didn't keep that up. There was no point in diagnosing if we couldn't get food in him. We had talked about a feeding tube but were trying to avoid it but then the day came when the decision had to be made. Roma was given a feeding tube but we also got to take him home.

Now we had a new challenge of feeding a cat through a tube. It actually wasn't that bad. We had a blue towel that we wrapped him in and sit on the couch with him petting him and feeding him. He would start purring, which he always did. Even when he was sick at the hospital he would start purring at us. Actually he had us laughing one day. One night when we were visiting him he was purring as we pet him. Then the vet tec opened the door to check on us and he immediately stopped purring. As soon as they closed the door he started purring again. It was so obvious we couldn't help but laugh at him. But feeding time became a nice cuddle time with him.

The food we were giving him was a high calorie moist food that we mixed further with water to make it easier to feed with the tube. I have to say it actually made giving him medicine much easier too. And slowly he started to begin exploring the house, well the part we allowed him in, and showing that he was feeling stronger. We kept using the feeding tube and taking him for repeat blood tests to see if his numbers were improving. And they were. The steroid antibiotic was doing it's job and fighting whatever it was that had sent him into this crisis. But he still wasn't eating.

Then one day I tried his food again as he sat on the couch.

And he ate it piece by piece as I put it in front of him he would eat it. He ate several pieces. This was the first step we had been waiting for.

Then a couple days later he went to his food bowl on his own.

Finally real progress! Roma was eating and he never looked back. We started feeding him less and less with the tube, though we still had a daily cuddle time as we flushed the tube. He also began grooming himself again. These were signs that Roma had re-found his "will to live." Something that  had been being doubted as the days of not eating went past.

Even looking at these photos I can see how much better he looks. As he started feeling better he became more active. He began meowing and talking back to us when we spoke to him, we have learned orange cats are very chatty. We also started getting what we call "happy tail wags" which is when a cat vibrates the tail very quickly, which indicates he is very happy or excited. We switched to giving him his medicine in cat treats which he enjoyed. He also built a habit of jumping on my chair every time I got up to try and get treats.

And then after a check in with the vet we got great news. They were confident enough to take the feeding tube out. He had developed a slight fever that they suspected could be due to the tube, even though the site looked good and clean. He was getting more and more active and was starting to try and pull at the cuff. While he needed anesthesia to get the tube put in taking it out was a simple five minute procedure because it basically stitched itself up.

Now we had a new challenge. Roma had been separated from our other two cats for over a month. We had kept them separate to better monitor his eating and drinking. Then we kept them separate while he had the feeding tube so that no one pulled it or bothered it. The first interaction did not go well. Tip hissed and swiped at him and Napoli ran away. Poor Roma watched them go looking so confused. I began researching this online and learned that cats recognize each other by scent. So Roma being at the vet multiple times including a week long stay and being separate from the others so long probably was throwing them off. The question was how long would that last?

The answer it turns out was just over two weeks. We let them alone to try and get them to come around on their own. Then we began luring them together with treats to get them closer to each other. And then it happened. It was a warm day so we opened the front door to allow a breeze into the house. Now they love the front door and apparently it was just what we needed. Roma went to the door to look outside and then a little while later Tip came over to enjoy the fresh air. The two of them hung out together for a little bit before Tip lost interest and came inside.

Roma stayed at the door and a little while later Napoli came to check out the door and give his brother a little sniff.

This was a first step and there were a few more hisses and swipes but it was a good beginning. We wondered how long it would take for the three of them to get back to their normal close relationship. I mean the three of them are usually together curled up or playing. They were really very close. As you can see in these photos taken awhile ago.

When we brought Roma and Napoli home over eleven years ago they were such tiny little kittens we were worried that Tip would not adjust to no longer being an only cat. We showed her the two little orange furballs and she hissed and ran away. We tried to lure her back to them and told her they were her babies, which she rightfully gave us a sideways look for but we stuck with it. And eventually she accepted them as her own.

A few days later we came in to find Tip and Roma on the couch together, opposite ends but at least together. Slowly but surely Napoli began walking normally past Roma, instead of running past him like a threat. And then:

All three curled up and sleeping without a care in the world. Roma our big kitty back at his normal sixteen pounds lying with his head right at Tip tightly curled in a ball and his paw reaching out to Napoli.

We still don't know what caused the attack that sent him into crisis. We slowly weaned him off the steroids and haven't seen any sign of problems. But then we also had no warning before we came home to find him crying. There is still a chance it could have been some kind of auto immune disease and that he could return into crisis. However with each passing day I am thinking it may have been something else. Roma had been wearing a flea collar. He has worn them before, all three of them have before and were that day. The one he had been wearing was a three month collar that he had been wearing for over a month. If it were an allergic reaction I would expect him to have had them before or right when we put the collar on him. I can't be sure but reports that I have read online of other people seems to describe exactly what he went through. So I'm not sure but I think I will no longer use flea collars on any of them because it isn't worth the risk.