Penelope is settling down somewhat. We went through a bit of a rough stretch for a week or so where we were learning her temperament and she was learning to let herself be soothed. She sleeps in her own room now at night and will take a bottle, which last night allowed me to get up, feed her and put her back down without waking Diane. She sent me a picture of her today with a triple chin. Ah, baby fat.<\/p>\n
It’s hard to make room in your life for someone else. But never out of complacency or lack of desire–it’s just difficult, any given day, to apportion everyone the time you want to give them. There is a very real sense of expansion of our lives; I told Diane a week or two ago that my capacity to be flexible under the old view of our family life, which had carried me through the birth and the first week or so, by His grace, was expiring. What I needed–what we all need–is the “new normal,” and once that is in place flexibility will grow from there. And we’re reaching it, praise God… Although there are certainly things out of place (the broken dryer being the principal one), stability is returning to our day-to-day. I can see the new baseline emerge in the near future even as I try to keep a vision for the long-term mixed with a focus on the immediate. It’s a delicate balancing act, and I would be incapable of having a proper concept of any part of the future without a grounding knowledge of His sovereignty and character. And He gives me the grace to rest my mind on that knowledge.<\/p>\n
For whatever reason, I’ve been very interested lately in all things having to do with space exploration. I’m something of an amateur astronomer and haul my telescope out in the front yard once every month or two, but my renewed interest in space vehicles, exploration and astronauts goes back farther than that, farther, almost to where Luke is now–one of my very earliest memories is going to the mall to buy a prize for some achievement as a young boy, possibly being potty trained. The prize, as it turned out, was a plastic model of the Space Shuttle, then (early ’80s) very new and exciting. And my brothers and I loved to shoot off model rockets almost every Saturday at a big park with my dad. So space exploration has been an interest for, well, almost forever.<\/p>\n
I’m excited about NASA’s latest plans<\/a> to keep the manned space program going, even if there was a stretch there where it seemed every promising program got axed: the NASP<\/a>, DC-X<\/a>, Hermes<\/a>, among many others. Even the Shuttle has its issues<\/a>. The most disappointing cancellation (and I’ve written about this before), although it was conceived far before my time, was undoubtedly Project Orion<\/a>. So exciting, so feasible with existing technology and yet, so…unrealized. One day, maybe.<\/p>\n I’ve been very interested particularly in the former Soviet space program. The technology used for space exploration is so exotic anyway that the addition of the foreign-ness of the regime and their status for so many years as the “bad guys” gives the history of the program quite a mystique. Add to that the secrecy surrounding it, and the draw is definitely there. The Soviet attempts at a moon shot<\/a> are fascinating, as are their attempts to rebuild their lead lost in the space race by concentrating on developing space stations. And even their early achievements, like the first spacewalk<\/a>, are interesting given their rudimentary, almost crude manner relative to the American space program.<\/p>\n Needless to say I’m very keen on seeing the recent film The Astronaut Farmer<\/i>. Don’t know why I haven’t yet, actually. Oh well; it’s on the queue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Penelope is settling down somewhat. We went through a bit of a rough stretch for a week or so where we were learning her temperament and she was learning to let herself be soothed. She sleeps in her own room now at night and will take a bottle, which last night allowed me to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}