Daily Success July 3 managed to get to the minimum score for “Outstanding.” That score may have come with a high price as my left knee began acting up at about the 6 km (3.7 mile) mark of my outdoor evening hike with my 8 kg (18 pound) backpack. It wasn’t bad enough to make me limp, but it was enough to convince me to head directly home, bothersome for the rest of the day, and bad enough for me to ice it at bedtime and take a big ibuprofen before turning out the light.

The bad news is that it’s still tender this morning. The good news is that “tender” is not the same as “obviously seriously damaged.” Today’s exercises should have included leg strength. That has been deferred at least until tomorrow. Today’s general plan included a hoped-for last training hike on the Muddy Branch Trail before leaving for Spain on Thursday. That has been cancelled. There will be a little walking – barber and dinner with friends at Cinco de Mayo, a restaurant here in the neighborhood, with excellent Margaritas and good Happy Hour pricing – but that will total a kilometer or two (perhaps a mile) and will be done without a backpack.

Ice and rest for the knee today. Tomorrow may be the same. Avoiding injury is a lot more important now than a bit of walking. If I’m not ready now, there is little to be accomplished in the three days remaining before boarding the plane.

In other news, I shipped the revised SurveyorBot white paper, the very different mission called for a renaming, so the white paper now calls it “BombBot” and SurveyorBot is returned to its rightful place of a Moon robot. Why I get myself involved in stuff like this, these programs could run five to ten years before getting through the fun phase, when I believe I want to retire is beyond me. I’ll be in my ’80s before SurveyorBot could possibly launch; ditto for the “field testing” called for in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Broad Area Announcement (BAA) Autonomous Systems at Scale Open Topic that led to the BombBot white paper.