Our paperwork is at the state. They think they might be done reviewing it (150pp, created out of the aether specifically for their benefit) by Friday. Then they schedule an inspection. Then they come visit. Then they approve us. Then we apply to fifteen insurance companies. Then we're in business.

I'm three drains away from having a plantable green wall. I suspect when it's actually up I'll be too burned out to care.

I have successfully crafted a 24-port CAT5E network. In order for it to do anything Comcast has to come trench through the parking lot to install half-inch hardline. Because apparently a 6,000sqft office building was never going to need more than 4 drops of RG6. Amazingly enough we tried to go with Frontier but they were unable to verify that they served the address. The wifi I'm using? Frontier. in the building. Our landlord has offered to let us plug into his router if I feel like running the CAT5. Since I have a Netgear router I can flash, I may install something called "advanced tomato" and run the thing load balancing/failover between Comcast and Frontier. Because both of them tend to fail a lot. By the way, business internet? 25Mb for $90 a month if you get the right discounts and sign up for 3 years. Which hey. If they've got to roll a ditch witch and scurf out 50 yards of parking lot to trench heliax, I guess they've got recoupable expenses. Their inspector told me "yeah I was out here about eight years ago trying to convince them to trench but the building was empty. Now it's got fourteen offices in it."

And we're going to have vaccines. Which means welcome to fucking thunderdome. Which means your thermometer now comes with bluetooth, a glycol bottle, a datalogger you have to download every week (at least) and an "audible alarm" if temperature wanders outside of range. But what do if you aren't there? Silly human. You're a hospital. Someone is always there. What's that? You're not a hospital? Well fuck you then we're the CDC.

Which means fucking fun'n'games. you need a fridge failure sensor from a company called "minotaur engineering" whose first product was apparently an X-10 controller for the Timex Sinclair 1000 (zx81 to you limeys). Then you need to run mic wire through the tegular grid to your cyberpower envirosensor which plugs into your UPS remote management card (thanks bfv) which plugs into your $400 rackmount UPS that you already own so that you get 90 minutes of backup paging when the power fails. So now you literally have a fridge that emails you when it's out of range because you're vaccinating kids.

Never mind the fact that your chosen demographic? Statistically the least likely group to vaccinate their kids. Thank god we're not in Eugene or Topanga.

I have a victory, though.

This is the Hubble.

This is also the hubble, made out of a single sheet of stainless steel by a Seattle company called Fascinations.

Long have we known that the KH-11 shares many components with the Hubble. The mirror is the same diameter, for example. We know that it has a similar (or identical) solar array. We know that it lacks the giant instrument bay of the Hubble because KH-11s are not interested in the deep sky stuff the Hubble is; they are primarily electro-optical. And when the NRO donated what might be KH-11s, might be FIA birds to NASA it was effectively confirmed that KH-11s are essentially "stubby Hubbles", the phrase that's been used for twenty years or more.

The donor NRO birds have a mirror with a different focal length than the Hubble. With francopoli's help I set out to do some tinsmithing.

On the left, a "stubby hubble." It lacks the instrumentation bay, scope shield and horizontal mount bosses of the Hubble (on the assumption that since the KH-11 has only ever been launched by rocket, while the HST had to sit the stupid way in the Shuttle payload bay). Its focal length has also been shortened to approximate the best guess of myself and francopoli.

So yeah. On the one hand I'm almost done with a quarter million dollar construction project that's been consuming between 20 and 80 hours a week since early 2014. But about what I can get stoked about is a carefully modified silver lipstick hanging from my ceiling.

That's my life.