Rosie

Hey Rosie. I'm writing a letter on here because you wouldn't believe how much it costs to send letters back home to you. I saved some postage money, but it's not enough. Sweet irony. I hope you actually see this. It'd be pretty lame if you didn't.

I started to recognize constellations last week. There are more out here than you can see at home. They're pretty cool. A girl on board programmed one of our windows so that we could connect the dots between the stars and see why they're named the Hunter and the Dragon and Cassiopoeia.

How do you feel, being all major now since your birthday? (since you're not a minor, haha) Eighteen's a pretty big year. Smoke a cigar and buy lottery tickets. They've still got those, right? People say that cigars pollute the air, but they're made from plants, and people burn leaves and it's okay, right?

I saw a cool flower shop at the satellite on your birthday full of all these weird flowers that grow in different gravities. If sending a letter isn't cheap, sending flowers won't work either, but you could could fix them to grow in your backyard if you had some.

Interspace telephone conversations don't happen yet. It sucks. I haven't talked to you or the guys for six months. Remember me? I left to explore the galaxy.

When you never see your friends, do relationships just crumble, or do they stay half-alive and just never grow? Either way, it sucks.

-Terry

Getting paid

Hey ladies, haven't seen you in a while...

The plan for going to space was to get a job and get paid. You thought I was doing this for free? Hahaha.

The way all of us kids on board the Gallantine usually get paid is with cashsticks. Yeah, they still use those; funny, I thought we were in the world of future technology. Not so much. I've got to go to a bank and plug it in and download the funds to my account, and it's the best because I can't use the money until it's in my account. Cashsticks are awesome, right?

Thanks to Our Glorious Captain, they changed the rules a couple weeks back so that anyone's pay can get put straight into our accounts. The captain and Tricia used to get this anyways (duh) but now all of the lower crew can do it too, unless they're in love with cashsticks and their bank and can't wait for an excuse to visit.

Even though it was really rough to break up with my best friends the cashsticks, I switched over. Sounds easy, right? Ha, not on this ship.

Lena, the CFO (chief financial officer), gave me what was supposed to be my last cashstick (sad, right?) after I finished a mountain of paperwork to finish the cashstick breakup because they take forever to process it. Then I logged onto planetside wireless that night and checked out my bank records and saw that pay for two weeks was going through into my account from ship control.

Here's the problem: I think their awesome communication system failed and weren't supposed to give me the newest cashstick, cause I'm only supposed to be getting two weeks pay right now. Lena's planetside, so I can't talk to her, but I've gotta or else they're gonna sue me for stealing. Yeah, great, give me 150 extra dollars and then freak out. Smart idea, ship control.

-Terry S.