Thank you!

I've had a rough day and this made me laugh. Thanks Greg.

I use Botswana agate for Jupiter, honey tigereye for Saturn, and different shades of aquamarine for Uranus and Neptune. Each encounter had a short lookback period; I use different, darker beads for those. At each end, a swirly blue and white sodalite for Earth -- home planet and Pale Blue Dot.

The smallest planet beads are for the Voyagers' "observatory phase," when they took movies of spinny planets and moons. Medium are for "far encounter," when they could watch storms develop on giant planets. Large bead is for "near encounter," the few days around closest approach.

I want to go to masc. Jealous. Best wishes.

Yeah, my up front costs are going to be about $7k. I believe I can make the trip worth it but a lot depends on how much stuff I can crank out between now and then.

Thank you.

I'm not an investigative journalist. I don't have training or skills required to get people who don't feel like talking to open up to me. Moreover, I don't want to. I understand their fear. I don't have any interest in adding to anyone's risk. So that's why I'm not writing. And why I'm depressed.

But everybody's scared now. Even if their missions are going well and still funded, they're terrified that sticking their necks out to talk about good news will invite decapitation. Never mind bad news or mission challenges. That former generous openness to happily chat about missions -- it's gone.

One of the unique and lovely things about planetary science has always been just how invested everyone is in telling their stories to the public. Everyone involved in space exploration is conscious of a great debt owed to taxpayers who foot the bills for fantastically expensive missions. 3/n

I've always seen myself as more of an interpreter than a journalist. I usually don't originate stories about space; the stories are out there, publicly told through press releases and papers and people, scientists and engineers, chattering about their work. At most, I call and chat with a friend 2/n

I don't joke when I say the financial incentive of poly is beginning to outweigh my social anxiety caused by having to explain to my family I'm poly