In memoriam, Opportunity rover, 2004-2018

NASA has pulled the plug on the Mars rover Opportunity, several months after it was last heard from. That rover did a lot of science (as did its sister rover Spirit, which "only" managed six years of their original 90-sol mission. Landing on Mars is difficult, but JPL builds good hardware: the Voyager space probes are still functional and doing science after more than forty years.

social: visit from Elizabeth

Elizabeth is someone cattitude and I know from Yale Story Reading and then hadn't seen for many years while we were living in New York and she was in Boston. Cattitude went to dim sum with herh and a whole bunch of other people on Christmas Day. I didn't get to talk to her at length, but I mentioned the planned eye surgery and she offered to give me a lift to the surgery.

At the beginning of February I sent her a message with the subject line "touching base," to ask if that still looked doable, and saying that also, I'd like to just hang out soon. So, she came over here yesterday afternoon to spend a few hours with me, Cattitude, and the cats. A good time was had by all; the conversation included a bunch of catching up, and chatting about our cats. Elizabeth praised Molly's fluffy tail and general long-haired-cat good looks, as well as scritching both cats.