In Which I Hodge-Podge

So, I've got nothing for today. Yeah, I spent like hours yesterday (while I was doing chores and cooking and watching the snow fall (because we got a lot of snow here yesterday and that makes me HAPPY)) trying to think of what to write about today. But really, I got nothing big enough for a whole post.

Which means I guess it's time for another Hodge-Podge.

Remember Hannah? Of course you remember Hannah! She's awesome.
Anyhoo, Hannah is back in the blogosphere with a brand new blog. Check it out.

Guys, I am soooooo close to finishing the first draft of All That Remains. SO CLOSE. I'm going to try my damndest to finish it this week. I'm in a bit of a rush, because Twin has been reading a chapter a day, and I have all these big changes I want to make to the last 5-10 chapters before she gets to them, so the ending makes more sense and junk. I mean, it's not big deal if I don't, she'll read the MS more than once, but it would be nice to have more of it in place before she reads it. But I don't want to take the time to make the changes on, say, chapter 30, when I haven't written the last chapter. It seems kind of like cheating to me.
Right now, she's got like one more chapter to read before I have to start making some changes. So I
have to ZOOM.

Can you believe Christmas is like 2 weeks away? FREAK OUT. I need to start shopping ASAP (all I've got so far are 2 gifts for 2 of 4 dogs. Yeah. So behind)

we haven't even put up our Christmas Tree yet. Sigh

And that's about it!
How are things with you?

 

Wednesday Weird: The Baigong Pipes

Time to talk about some more Out Of Place Objects

In 2002, in an area of Qinghai Province, China not known to ever contain people, let alone industry,  three mysterious triangular openings were discovered on the top of a Mount Baigong. They were discovered by U.S. scientists on a trek looking for dinosaur fossils.

Inside the openings are hundreds of ancient rusty iron pipes of unknown origin. Some of the pipes go deep into the mountain. Some of them go into a nearby salt water lake. There are more pipes in the lake, some protruding above the surface, others buried in the lake bed, and more still running east-west along the lake shore. Some of the larger pipes are 16 inches in diameter, are of uniform size and are placed in what seems like purposeful patterns. The smallest in size are no bigger than toothpicks.

A piece of one of the pipes

So that alone, is pretty weird. But what makes it even weirder is that archaeologists have dated the pipes to around the time when humans were still learning how to cook food in fire, let alone casting metal.

The pipes are made mostly of iron, but are also about 30% silicon dioxide.

Baigong pipe

Another weird point: the pipes are clear of debris, even though they're craptacularly old, which suggests they were actually used for something. Oh, also, the mountain? Pretty much completely inhospitable to human life.

The landscape around Mount Baigong

Locals living in the southeast area of the province have known about the pipes for centuries and credit them to extraterrestials and have stories of alien visitors.
AND not to mention, there's a 200 foot pyramid near the mountain's summit.

There are, of course, records and other discoveries similar to the Baigong pipes around the world, but those, of course, are for another post.

Thoughts? Theories? Let's hear them in the comments!

In Which NaNo Is Over

Holy crap - this is my official 500th post. Cray cray!

(to be fair, there's got to be close to half a dozen "oops" posts in the history of this blog. But still. 500!)

Anyhoo, so here were are. December 3rd. NaNo is a few days behind us. You can see my Winner badge over to the right.

This was my fourth year competing and my fourth year winning. Though this is the first year it took me until the last day to hit the 50k.

Thanksgiving almost murdered me this year. I only had 10K left after the holiday, but man...a good 4K of that was like pulling teeth.

The good news is, I'm almost done with the first draft of my MS All That Remains (and this bugger is going to clock in at over 100k!)  The bad news is, it's going to need a lot of work. I had to pants the ending and even though I had a perfectly serviceable outline for the rest of it and THOUGHT I knew what the themes and conflicts were, things morphed more than usual during the drafting. So everything needs to be really smoothed out and linked together and junk.

But that's okay. I like revising. I'm excited to get to work on it once it's done.

How did you NaNo 2012 treat you?

Friday Fun

Woo hoo!! It's Friday, finally!

"*Gasp* It's Friday?!"

Which means we have reached the awesomeness of the weekend and the fun it brings.

Boosh!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday Weird: Phantom Cosmonauts

Shoutout to one of my best friends, Kim, for sending me the info for this post. I had never heard about lost or phantom cosmonauts until her email, but after I did the readings and research, it's clear this is definitely a Wednesday Weird post.

So. Phantom Cosmonauts.

There's a theory that Soviet cosmonauts entered space in secret, without their existence acknowledged by Soviet authorities.

First off, even proponents of the Phantom Cosmonauts theory agree that Yuri Gagarin was the first man to survive space travel (4/12/61) but there are claims that the Soviet Union attempted to launch two or more manned space flights before that, and that at least two cosmonauts died in the attempts.

Another cosmonaut, Vadimir Ilyushin is rumored to have landed and been held by the Chinese government. The Soviets supposedly hid this information, to prevent bad publicity during the the Cold War. Ilyushin died in 2010 and he never confirmed nor denied anything.

One of the main issues is, though, that the evidence supporting the Phantom Cosmonaut theory is generally not regarded as conclusive, and several cases have been confirmed as hoaxes. But what is known as fact is that the Soviet Union spent A LOT of time covering up a lot of stuff during the Cold War to make themselves look better. That's a proven fact, so really, covering up failed, manned spaceflights isn't at all outside the realm of possibility.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, tons of previously restricted info became available, including on Valentin Bondarenko, an early cosmonaut whose death on Earth the Soviet government covereup.

In 1960, Heinlein wrote in his article Pravda means 'Truth' that on May 15, 1960, while traveling in the Soviet Union, he was told by Red Army cadets that the Soviet Union had launched a man into orbit that day, but that later the same day it was denied by officials. Apparently, no issues of Pravda could be found Soviet cities for that date. Heinlein wrote that there was an orbital launch, later said to be unmanned, on that day, but that the retro-rockets had fired at the wrong altitude, making recovery efforts unsuccessful.

Now onto some of the more creepier evidence. Because you know what? Space is effing terrifying, even without aliens or other creepy stuff.

On May 19, 1961, the Torre Bert listening station in northern Italy said they picked up a transmission of a woman's voice, sounding confused and frightened as her craft began to break up upon reentry. Theorists state this may be the voice of Slavic Cosmonaut Ludmila Tokov who would have been the first woman in space (beating Valentina Tereshkova by 2 years and Sally Ride by more than 20).

I'm not going to lie, this recording creeped me the hell out. I don't know why, but it did. And usually I'm a rock about this kind of stuff. You have been warned (translation below the video)

 

 

Translation: five...four...three ...two...one...one
two...three...four...five...come in... come in... come in...
LISTEN...LISTEN! ...COME IN! COME IN... COME IN... TALK TO ME!
TALK TO ME!... I AM HOT!... I AM HOT!
WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... FIFTY?...
YES...YES...YES... BREATHING...BREATHING... OXYGEN...
OXYGEN... I AM HOT... (THIS) ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
YES...YES...YES... HOW IS THIS? WHAT?... TALK TO ME!...

HOW SHOULD I TRANSMIT? YES...YES...YES...
WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... YES... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... IT'S ALL... IT'S HOT...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... ... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... WHAT?...
I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I CAN SEE A FLAME!...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... THIRTYTWO... THIRTYTWO... FORTYONE... FORTYONE

AM I GOING TO CRASH?... YES...YES... I FEEL HOT!...
I FEEL HOT!... I WILL REENTER!... I WILL REENTER...
I AM LISTENING!... I FEEL HOT!...

Another recording from Torre Bert purports to be the sounds of labored breathing and a failing heartbeat. This combined with reports in the French and Italian press, claiming that Sputnik 7 was a manned mission, gave rise to claims that a cosmonaut named Gennady Mikhailov was the first man in orbit and died there due to heart failure.

The third Torre Bert recording claims to have heard a couple launched on February 17, 1961, aboard a spacecraft orbiting the earth, reporting "Everything is satisfactory, we are orbiting the earth" at regular intervals.
On February 24th, there were some garbled transmissions about something the couple could see outside their ship, that they urgently had to communicate to Earth. Apparently the communication was lost. Around the same time Torre Bert reportedly picked up an SOS signal from a craft in space. As the signal got weaker, it was assumed the craft disappeared into space.

Alexey Beokonev is supposedly one of three (two men and a woman) cosmonauts aboard a November 1962 flight. The Torre Bert tower allegedly picked up a frantic set of messages from the occupants. "Conditions growing worse why don't you answer? . . . we are going slower . . . the world will never know about us. . . "


 So. That's the Phantom Cosmonaut theory in a nutshell. What are your thoughts?

In Which We Bought A Cabin

So if you're friends with me on FB and as the title says, my family are now proud owners of our very own cabin!

A quick explanation. In MN, pretty much everything is referred to as a cabin unless it's your house. Have a camper on a plot of land? Cabin. Doublewide on a lake? Cabin. Lakehome? Mansion on acreage? Cabins all.

In this case, ours falls directly into the Lakehome category. The people who owned it before my parents bought it, lived there year round.

We've named it Bout Time, since we've been talking about owning pretty much our whole lives.

It's about 3 hours away from the cities, in Longville MN (which, fun fact, is the Turtle Race Capital of the World. They have turtle races in the summer. And just to prove that they didn't make that title up, I actually heard that as a question on Cash Cab once (and of course I got it right, because I've been there))

My uncle owns a cabin on the same lake, so we're familiar with the area. And I have to say, it's much nicer using your own cabin than using someone elses. We've been up twice now, which isn't bad since my parents only closed on it two weeks ago.

In the future: Writing Retreats.

Now for some pics!

Driveway, with the garage ahead

Cabin! (also pictured, George and Yvie)

View from the dining room

Back yard and Upper Trellipe Lake



 

So there you have it!

How about you? Does your family have a getaway place?

In Which I Holiday

Hey kids! I'm taking this week off from blogging, just due to the holiday and travel, mostly.

I will be spending my Thanksgiving here:

See you all on Monday!