Thursday April 9^th 2009. Launch -27 days.

Blesséd sleep! Part of the problem is that I have been so wound up that I could not sleep properly even when I did not have to get up and work. Today I slept in late and had a long sleep on the sofa in the afternoon. Wonderful! Long periods of sleeping 5 or 6 hours a night are okay provided that one rests properly at the weekend or on days off and makes up for lost sleep then and can relax and bleed off stress. Normally I have been able to do that unless I become really overtired and overwhelmed and that is what has happened these last few weeks.

Another good sign is that when I stand up I am starting to get dizzy spells, sometimes so badly that after a few steps I have to stop and hold onto something for support. Low blood pressure: a good sign.

Now that we finally are certain or, at least, as certain as we can be that we will launch in early May and not, as could have happened, late July, everything is going to become more real and intense. Most of the team know the news that was finally confirmed in the afternoon, but quite a few do not know and are going to come back and suddenly find that we are going from idling the motor and wondering what will happen, to working flat out to very real deadlines. People have been getting resigned to the uncertainly and the feeling that the delay would be longer than we had been told.

With the poor weather forecast for the weekend it is an excuse to stay in and enjoy reading, resting, working with comets and getting some more work done on the book as a relaxant. Today I will finally finish “Islands in the Sky” and then back to World War II and “Armageddon” (not the film of the same name with Bruce Willis which I love as one of the worst science fiction films of all time).