You get used to the quiet, being in space. Perhaps that’s the first thing you notice once you’re up there: the world’s chatter, just…fading away. Like it never existed in the first place. It went from peaceful to strange, and later went back to peaceful as the hum of the engine and equipment faded into the background and you begin to become used to the overwhelming quiet. It’s really quite nice, in fact. Then I got back to Earth, and it’s just noise all the time. I couldn’t even sleep for the first night because of the possums in the trees, and the birds all chirping at some awful time. In my first week in this house I had to[…]