Rambling and being bored

Sadface! my logbook broke and I had to wait all the way until I got back to the space station to start logging again! And now of course I'm out of the habit and don't want to start again. Its like school ...except more fun I suppose. Im not sure what to talk about and Im bored but isn't that what all people put in their journals? "I dunno what to say", or "Im bored, what to do, what to do". I guess now I'm just starting to be more normal. Is normal good? Is babbling good? How about asking too many questions?
Anyway I'll stop babbling and boring myself and log some more after the next semester starts.
Note to self, that would be in a few days, don't be dumb and forget.
Teen out.

Repelling or rapelling ?

Well finally after what seemed like days, but was probably only like one maybe two, we stopped the training "for now" they said. Were doing something that fun and will strengthen us at the same time. deep-space repelling! I don't know about you but it sounds awesome. launching yourself down cliffs then racing back up sounds like the best thing evar. Speaking of "evar" thats a fun word that all the teens up here seem to be using. Not only does it have a rebellious spelling but they say it how it looks so it sounds different too. I don't know if its supposed to mean something different but I like it in place of the regular "ever".
If you have any thoughts on repelling, rappelling, whatever you wanna call it let me know... lifeless... cold... piece of machinery... you know what never mind that. Just beep if you know what Im typing and bloop if you don't ... fail, if it doesn't know what Im typing how would it respond at all... sigh. I really must be going crazy, Im asking for a response from my logbook.
Teen out.

Continuing the process of going crazy

Oh man, training has been so tough. These last two days I haven't wanted to even touch my log book for fear I would die from the wasted calories.
Since JET is considered a military branch even the juniors like us have to undergo basic training. And for that reason only we are dying out in the middle of nowhere, being drilled to death by our previously kind and gentle teachers. Ive been luckier than some though, I brought my gel so I haven't gotten blisters while getting used to the space suit. We've worn them before but never for this long, we literally do drills every hour.
Its making me continue to go crazy, the drilling, the dead quiet in-between drills and the lack of people to talk to in our rooms makes it depressing. Why don't I have any friends, even in this barren land with nowhere to go and limited people to meet everyone seems to purposefully ignore me... Im done typing, my hands are starting to get cold.
Teen out

Take KAIR when using sarcasm

Setting it up wasn't much fun, it was very difficult seeing as only the instructor in each rover had actually done it before. so there was six of them to be set up and one person who knew how to do it... maybe next time they should do training about these things.
I like them though, once you learn they are super easy. First you have to dig a trench just large enough to fit the package- about six inches by a foot. This part is the hardest and its not that hard in the dry uncompacted lunar soil. once you have the trench place the KAIR in it and make sure its right side up... I forgot to, don't do that ever.
Once you have confirmed its polarity (that means which way is up genius) turn the safety knob clockwise until you feel it click and pull the lever on the front end. This will trigger the compressed air and inflate the room.
Next is the most important but easiest part because it doesn't need any muscles. Simply pull the hose from the buggy to the unit and press the auto lock into the receiver (put the hose into the only hole on the whole thing darn it... the measures I'll go to just to make sure I can understand myself). Once you see the gauge attached to the hose go green you have a solid connection and you can move in!
*insert tiny print here about dangerous stuff and oxygen levels*
Teen out

There's music in the air... kinda

I got picked up a couple hours ago by a creepy goverment dude. The trip is really exciting but also really scary. And not for the reasons you think. The guys that transport you are so scary man, no joke. I should be writing this from the moon but we've been delayed apparently and so were sitting here in a boring blank room. After the first about fifteen minutes almost everyone pulled out their logs, what else can you do? There's no books or magazines to read here, no music and not even a picture. Who would make such an ugly room? Maybe an ugly person...
I can't believe we aren't even in prelaunch training yet. We can't even learn how to use our suits and stuff yet? I wish they would at least let us download the log file for the suit manual so we would have something to read. And then we wouldn't have to do that later, who made the schedule for this darn trip. They aren't very good I can tell you that.
Wouldn't it be wierd if this whole thing was really a elaborate alien plan to get young earthling samples? Wouldn't it be wierd if my brain stopped coming up with wierd thoughts. And also wouldn't it be nice if we could get out of this room sooner or later and do something? ...Someone just farted and I don't see any air vents so I hope it's sooner rather than later.
Teen out.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This post was originally from 7/11/11 or close to it, I had to find it and repost it. I'm sorry for any inconvenience this has caused

Take KAIR

Were off! I don't know what of, vacation or our feet but we're successfully off it. We left the station shortly before this and I almost forgot my logbook... You know, me always thinking of and writing in my logbook seems a lot like a ship captain. That makes me feel kinda cool, wonder if JET students can get ranks.
Glad I learned how to drive a rover well because we split into four teams, five students and a teacher to each rover. And all students are taking a half hour turn at the wheel- it's nice to have such big controls to drive. I had my turn first so now I get to watch the other four sweating bullets the rest of the way. While I'm sitting here maybe I should take inventory. Let's see... fish goop, Kevlar inflatable airtight room (aka KAIR), flashlight (reenforced), emergency oxygen mask, portable generator (I'm carrying it for the group), freeze dried food (I know how you feel veggies), logbook (reporting for duty captain) and a second spacepack of textbooks, notebooks and spencils (space pencils hehe). I think that's all I need so I'll just save the list to JET: important: list
Teen out

Super slimeballs

Even after just one day the reactions are noticeable. The skin around the wound looks natural instead of red and swollen, the itch is gone and by tommorow it should be almost better. How all the above is possible I don't know but I think these little slimeballs deserve better names than numbers. Since I know I'm being monitored through what I write I want to know if you have any ideas for names. JET is talking about doing an actual mission in a few days and so I'm going to save as much gel (slime is kind of a rude word to use for such a miraculous substance) as I can before then
Teen out

Actually awsome

Wow, these guys are awsome! I started wondering why the sides of the tank started sliming up after only about 30 hours but after reading the manual I'm amazed. I followed everything in the manual correctly so at first I was worried and almost got the supervisor. But then I remembered they had sent along a rough draft of an FaQ paper. And question number three was, "The sides of the tank are all slimy and I've done everything right, what's wrong?"
The answer was, "It's completely normal, the fish secrete a slime that has medical properties. It is yet to be thouroughly experimented with but it can be used for any open wound or rash. Please scrape the slime off every two days no sooner and a maximum of a week. If you don't want to/can't use the solution yourself give it to the supervisor. If you experience any abnormal symptoms please report to the medical office as you could be experiencing an allergic reaction."
I am very excited to try it and I only have to wait till tomorrow morning to try it, I have an annoying pressure rash on my forearm. I don't really care to explain their living conditions in detail so I'll just keep a copy of the file under misc; fish project; manual.
Teen out

I have friends... Kinda

Hey remember that creepy girl that I talked about a long time ago? Well absolutely nothing happened so stop holding your breath. JET is about to announce a special project though and I'm very excited. I dont know what you think but secret moon training groups that deal with rovers and deep freezing are generally pretty exciting.
Speaking of exciting I got some little friends today. The supervisors picked a few students with extra time and gave them charge over a test experiment. Unfortunately it's nothing really cool like a hostile plant or dangerous rock specimens but I guess mutated goldfish are pretty cool. All students involved were given 7 subjects. Mine are numbers 236 through 243 because quite a few died before they figured out the conditions to keep them alive. I don't personally know myself but they gave me their habitat, some supplies and an instruction manual so I'll keep you (me) updated
Teen out

Pleasant pauses and touchy training

Man, that zero gravity training is intense. The water training was kind of easy because i liked swimming on earth, here it isn't any different. The zero gravity thing though... I dunno it's pretty crazy. If you make the slightest move you'll gain momentum and won't stop moving until you make another move to contradict it. It's like being weightless... Probably because you are. It's not very easy to describe because there's nothing anything like it, besides swimming. If there's nothing to compare to I don't know if it's possible to describe it.
Since I'm clueless on how to tell myself what I just did, (which sounded a lot better in my head)I'm going to tell you about the work we did instead of the conditions.
We were working on a satellite look-alike to simulate a real situation. We had to repair a solar panel and do a checkup on the rest of the parts. If we didn't do it right we had to do it again because you can't mess up satellites, it costs the government millions (good thing it was a fake satellite). I wonder when JET is going to do something again, it's been a long time since we did anything. That could be good because it means less work...but it could be bad and mean we have to get back on schedule the hard way. I just love periods in groups of three, they add such pleasant pauses...
Teen out

Tight spaces and learning places

Well I learned what we need to continue, well that is I know what we need. I didn't learn it yet. What we still need is tool training. We need to learn how to use tools properly and safely, otherwise the weightless training would be useless any more advanced than we're learning.
Not only do we need to learn how to use the tools though. We have to learn to do it in a space suit... Then do it underwater. Then after we do it in low gravity we have to go to a machine similar to the one on earth and do it "zero gravity".
That doesn't sound fun to me, at least if you drops screw in low gravity you know it will go down, in zero gravity it could go anywhere.
If it's part of training though we have to deal with it,
Teen out

I don't need logs

Well it's true, in space we don't need logs. we build out of metals and plastics.
Just kidding, what I really mean is I don't need my log book apparently because I haven't used it for days. They say you'll go crazy but I have too much to do to go crazy.
Today we went swimming, it was training for weightless situations though and not pleasure. We have to get used to low gravity or no gravity so we went swimming in our space suits. It was very close to what the moons gravity felt like so I thought it was a great training technique. I hear were going to further our training in this area later though because first we need to learn other things to get better, what other things are there? We learned everything we need for that situation I'm pretty sure...
Teen out.

Studying jetpacks with JET

Well now that I have something besides rolling widgets I want to talk to myself some more (and to whoevers monitoring this, I know they wouldn't just let us have these and not use them as monitoring tools).
Today we studied jet packs, I know we already did that but that was just basics. Now were learning more than just how to operate them in an emergency situation. I'm learning basic repairs, advanced functions and how to handle real life situations. Such as; what do you do if your out of jet fuel and slowly floating out into space, you have no tether and only 10 minutes of oxgen left.
The answer apparently is to radio for another jetpacker because as students it's too risky to use the emergency fuel, it's more potent and if you use too much at once it can leak into your suit or explode... And personally I'd rather use the radio than potentially explode
Teen out.

Darn those... Things

It went pretty well... The extra testing that is.
A couple of "simulated" rovers almost got tipped but no one failed epicly or got kicked out of JET. tommorow comes testing on the rovers. Is there really anything I can talk about not related to rovers?
Let's see, solar power... No the rovers are solar powered.
Today's activities? Naw, they were all rover based as well.
Well since I'm sick and tired of... "them" and there's nothing else to talk about I'll end it here
Teen out.

Big screen > tiny screen

Now I can see why they made these remotes so crazy big and stuff. We used them to hook out to a simulation machine and we drove a virtual rover from the main rear view camera. Basically we got to sit in front of a screen and play a video game today... The moon is way better than my school.
Also as part of the JET program tomorrow with the rest of the group I'll be doing extra rover work. Since JET is more advanced we will be controlling our rover from just the angle detectors and tiny screen on the remote.
We won't have the main camera on so while before we just used the remotes camera to see what we got stuck on, with JET we'll be using only the secondary camera.
Note to self, rest eyes before taking tommorows course, that screen is tiny
Teen out.

Rovers and schematics

Awsome! Today we started our moon rover training, we can't drive for real yet but we all have our own remote. Were supposed to get used to the controller, memorize what each of the buttons and levers does and customize the customizable ones to our preferences. The remote is almost a unit of it's own, it has a tiny screen to see the rover veiw and it also has a mini computer inside it to calculate the angle and speed of the the land rover. If it's getting dangerously close to tipping or is tipped it will tell which direction it's tipping and such. I can see why they gave us each our own because we couldn't study it without one, it's too complexe.
Note to self, diagram and schematics of remote is under Training: Land rover: remote, in the log files,
Teen out.

Student stalker

Well after a few days of being stalked and a few days of training I can finally tell whoever the heck is going to read this (probably just me) whats happened.
First, that creepy fake-named dude that asked me to meet him over lunch was a teacher testing me. At first I was suspicious but I asked around and about a dozen students said that that same teacher had the same meeting with them, the topic? Junior Explorer training. He had selected a handful of students that had better scores in classes and showed promise in training to take this course. I was honored of course but once again skeptical so I started asking questions. Such as, what is this training for? Why were you stalking me? And, do you know anything about a girl messaging me?
He explained what JET (junior explorer training) was about then told me what I really wanted to know.
It was part of a test! All the students picked had to go through even more screening. All of them were exposed to creepy/scary situations and monitored to see how they would react.
Some broke under the pressure and never got invited or never showed up to the meeting. Apparently I was one of the dozen or so that got past ok.
JET hasn't started yet but I'm hoping it will start soon since I'm excited.
Oh and also he said he didn't know anything about the girl so... still creepy...
Teen out.

Even worse

Well I got another creepy message today. This time from an obviously fake name and a guy.
But it was about meeting for lunch to talk about a business proposition... What business is there on the moon? And this guy is definitely on the moon base since he doesn't know where I am and he just "told" me to meet him. Not ask if we "could".
I'm going to go now, I need to make sure that my room is secure.
Teen out.

I'm locking my door tonight

Hmm I'm thinking of turning this log into a blog, it would be pretty fun.
I would get to show the whole world my wacky point of veiw and totally different lifestyle, who wouldn't wantto do that?
The only disadvantage would probably be that my facebook would get even more attention.
My nickname is lonely astronaut and that interests girls somehow? Because I got a message today asking if I was interested in a long distance relationship... I was like, that would be a "far out" relationship (hehe, get it?) and then added her to blocked contacts. I don't ever want to get a creepy message like that again.
You know what would be even creepier? If the girl was on this moon base and messages me because she recognized me... Eeew! Someone potentially on this moon base asked if I was interested in a relationship?
Im going to lock my door tonight, that is kind of disturbing that someone would be stalking me on Facebook and not ask me in person.
True "she" might not be on the base but why else would a girl ask a guy all the way on the moon if he was interested in a relationship...

Freezer burn?

Today we had a test on cryo-freeze.
It was all about what to do and not do, such as how to recognize "freeze fail" where the subject is very "out of it".
The way to recognize it is if the subject doesn't respond to questions, appears to have memory loss or is unable to stand even after 20 minutes out of freeze.
If you think someone has cryo-freeze you have to get them back into the cryo chamber and freeze them for about a day while observing them and giving medical attention if needed.
It's usually permanent if not fixed after refreezed.
Another thing we were tested about was what to do after we are released from cryogenic-freezing.
When you are released from cryo treatment you should begin rubbing yor wrists and ankles gently to circulate blood faster while your "thawing".
Also do not eat for at least 4 hours after freezing no matter how hungry you are, it can cause serious organ damage since they might not have thawed yet.
That's the two main subjects we were tested on, I'm not sure how much more we have to go through but I assume they have to test us more to weed out the unsuitable astronauts.