My blackboard is filling up, but surprisingly only with things I'm looking forward to doing. School work thus far has been very fulfilling, even enjoyable to this point. It's surprising, for once I have nothing to complain about.

My push on the Halotis Moon Project has really begun to pickup steam. Today I had a round table discussion with two of my profs and a graduate student concerning robotic design, environmental design considerations, mining machinery and mining techniques. I think I have enough reading material for a month. I just can't allow myself to become bogged down with the billion distractions that surround me here.

On the note of distraction, I checked my email today, only to find a note from a long time friend sitting atop a huge list of unread mail. Seeing the name I thought to leave it till later but then, rethinking my level of hunger I opened it.

"Hi Colum,

I hope I'm not disturbing you. I just read your most recent post to the Relentless and was completely blown away. I was so leveled that I showed it later to some colleagues whom I had over for dinner. Having only an idea about the Relentless from what I've mentioned to them before they were equally impressed. You've written incredibly moving action and drama pieces before and this was no different, the only difference here is that Greg, a very close colleague of mine asked for a print-out of this post and several others. I obliged and then asked why. He told me that his wife's friend worked with TOR and that she had mentioned to his wife that if she came across any talent to forward it her way.

So Greg offered to pass this along to her and you know, see what happens. Figuring nothing much would happen, but feeling it would seem good to give it a shot I handed over several of our posts to him. You won't believe this.

TOR called me first thing this morning. I gave them your email, but they wanted your phone number, they wanted everything, I called Marty first thing, and had him setup a readers account on the forum for them. They want to read through all our posts and see, they apparently loved what they saw_


-Kes"

Who's leveled now?
I don't even know where I am anymore.