Cue Smackmelon.

'This is why I'm constantly giving my money to con men and joining cults: it's my damnable sense of the romantic and the picturesque.' - Jacob

Saturday, 4:02 a.m.

The thing about being here?  Is that it's kind of terrifying, and gives you way too much time to think when fueled entirely by caffeine and processed foods.  I'm trying to stick to good stuff, to peppermint tea and VitaWeats and apple cake I made for us at home, but sooner or later the snackies kick in and the next thing you know you're eating packet 'cream' of 'chicken' soup with chocolate NutriGrain bars crumbled in like crackers and drinking rocket fuel.  Thanks at least in part to my effed-up body clock I'm wanting to nosh on something pretty much every hour, and I didn't bring a wide-enough variety of foodstuffs to sustain me without raiding the telescope's pantry for fakey-fake goodness.  Want to know how fakey-fake?  I'm craving McDonald's because I want real food.

I know.

I have to say that I kind of like the silence, much more than I expected that I would, though admittedly it's silence for a given value of silence: you can hear the Dish from all the way back outside the quarters, which is almost a full kilometre away.  It's only a faint hum then, and only when it's moving, but it's there just the same.  From here in the Control Room it's much louder, with all the creaks and cracks and mechanical whinging you'd expect from a 1,000-tonne telescope, and you've got lots of other ambient noise to contend with: the heating system, the notification noises on the computer (which are all set to be various bird calls, and in case you're wondering, the Bad Thing sound is a cockatoo), and the various alarms that you're always trying to avoid but sometimes forget about.  Like the Dead Man's Handle set-up, which requires resetting by the operator every 14 minutes and 40 seconds.  In theory, it's hard to miss: the primary panel with the countdown clock and the reset button is just above and to the right of the main computer (at which I am seated), and there are two accessory reset buttons at either end of the long desk on which the computers sit, as well as a motion detector that will reset the clock if it picks up any movement within the first four minutes of the count.  But the panel is just outside of my peripheral vision; the accessory buttons are far away from me; and the backs of the chairs come way over my head, so unless I stretch my arm up the motion detector doesn't register me.  All of which means that I have set the alarm off twice now, which is not a problem in that it buzzes for 10 minutes before it goes to the outside world, to give the operator a chance to wake up/finish making tea/come back inside/whatever before waking up innocent bystanders, but is a problem in that it scares the bejesus out of me.

That all having been said, though, I like having just those noises around me.  I'll probably raid Tim's Terabyte of Music later this morning when the sleep dep is really kicking in, but for now it's quite lovely and peaceful to have only the sounds of the Dish: the whirring and purring when the telescope is slewing; the blowing of the vents and the barely-audible electronic buzzing of the computers; the whipbirds and bell miners and magpies who keep watch over Tim's programs and let me know what I have to do.  I'm happy here.