January 29, 2017:

So hello, my fellow Earthlings – or Earthicans, if you prefer. I know I have been incommunicado for a little over a month now as I have been traveling with family to our new home in Bransonville, American Mars! That’s right, in case you missed the big news, NASA chose me to participate in their BLOOM (Blogging Out Of Mars) program in order to promote off-world colonization efforts, to help ease the burden of our population on Mother Earth‘s resources.

The trip went fairly well; the wife and kids and I boarded a rocket with our meager belongings, after having sold practically everything we owned in a massive rummage sale – what didn’t sell was either given away, recycled, or taken to the landfill. The rocket rode atop a plane which carried it into the upper atmosphere, where it detached and shot into space.

Not the smoothest part of the trip.

We docked at the international space station and were able to take a tour and spend the night before we boarded a second spacecraft which got us to the Martian One Station, along with ninety-something other colonists and a twelve-person crew. From there, families waited for their turn to ride the new cable car down to the surface of the “red planet”. The entire trip took six days.

So why the delay? Well that’s a good question. There was a snag in getting the Internet up right away, and as you know, no Internet means no WordPress; but stay tuned, because I have a notebook full of articles, topics, and ideas. As one of the first wave of Martian bloggers, I have a responsibility to get content out there, and I’m finally getting paid to do it! And to supplement that income I have taken a part-time job working at a hydroponic produce farm, because stuff sure ain’t cheap around here!

Of course, due to the facts that most of my readership is still on earth and that I haven’t gotten used to using UTC yet, my posts will likely be published on an erratic schedule, but more or less every day.

Although this post is coming to an end, I will leave you with a fun little fact about the place where we have made our home: Bransonville is built on top of a massive asteroid crater that they say was caused around the same time as the extinction of the dinosaurs. Pretty cool, right?

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This post was prompted by this week’s What If? Writing Challenge. What if you gave it a go?

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