Hey, I'm in vacation and wanted to try translating 2 or 3 chapters in English. This is the first time I try something like this, I hope I did a not too horrible job of translation.
This one is the sixth chapter of Cartoline da Mars: six months after Charley's arrival on Mars.

They hadn't heard from Stoker since he pressed the transporter switch and sent the three mice and Charley back on Mars, he choosing to stay back, on Earth, with his daughter.

It wasn't like they were too seriously anxious for him: in the end the old timer has never been, how to put it…the kind of guy inclined to share his projects and plans. He was a lone wolf kind of mouse. But not even receive, in all that time, a postcard with the proverbial "All ok, we're having fun!"? That wasn't nice bro.
Moreover Charlene left him with the keys to her garage and in that building there was everything you needed to contact Mars: you just had to sit at the console, in the truck their terrestrial friend, and type the accessing code the mice used to communicate with Carbine during their second stay on Earth.
But there had not been all that machinery already ready for use, Stoker amply demonstrated (with their great surprise) to possess quite the scientific genius: for how they saw it, he could easily build an interplanetary radio, or a robotic space-homing pigeon, or a message in a jet-propulsion glass bottle, right?
He did see E.T. on cable, didn't he?! If that sort of naked, deformed cat did it, then Stoker could do it too. So, hell, why didn't he call them yet?!
Among them all, perhaps it was Carbine the least worried about her ex-general: it wasn't the first time he disappeared and certainly it wouldn't have been the last. On top of that, he already did well on the alien planet, in other occasions, under well less favorable conditions and on his own; now what was the greater risk that Stoker was running? Indigestion of burgers while watching a football game? Please.

"You chased him for a year, you know the guy: he'll show up when he'll feel like it... " she exclaimed when Vinnie, for the umpteenth time, in his own way expressed a bit of concern for his old mentor.

"And he is with his daughter" Throttle added "He would never dive head first in dangerous situations with her with him".
But underneath, Throttle himself wasn't really, completely convinced of his own statement: he had to deal with Stoker for way too long to seriously believe that, with age, he had become less reckless. But Spitfire seemed a levelheaded girl to him, maybe she was having a good influence on her father. Maybe she would have kept her father out of trouble ...

"But you met her, right?" Charlene asked him in mild disbelief and amusement "Spitfire is a spitting image of Stoker. And I'm not speaking just of her looks"

It took another four months for them to have any news from father and daughter, but when he decided to reconnect with his freedom fighters, the ex-general did it with style: he obviously enjoyed special effects and to enter the scene in the most spectacular way, at least that last one was made very clear.

It was in the dead of the night when suddenly someone started knocking frantically at the door of Carbine's house. Throttle was the one that went to open.
The person on the other side of the door, which was still storming of shots to draw the house owners' attention, stopped with his fist in the midair when the door was opened, revealing the figure of Throttle: the glasses were a little crooked and low on the honey colored furred mouse's muzzle, he had mattress-matted hair, wore an old XL shirt with the writing "I'm not a ninja turtle" and a pair of chenille pants, of a bright, electric blue, rather worn and loose. He had been clearly just woken up.
The other stood there for a moment, just watching him silently, from head to foot, with a vaguely disgusted look. Then he spoke:
"Do you really wear this stuff to sleep?" he asked to Throttle first.

"Vinnie, do you have some other smart comment for me before I punch you for throwing me out of my bed at this time of the night?"

"No, seriously: I'm kinda ashamed for you right now... " his friend replied. Then the white mouse's gaze slipped from him to Carbine, who had reached her mate in the hallway and was now standing behind him " ... and you share your bed with Santa?!" Vinnie added greatly amused.

The general, still a bit dazed, was clutching at the red dressing gown she was tightly wrapped in and from under which only her bare feet could be seen. She was watching the white mouse as if trying to remember who exactly he was and then, in a voice thick with sleep, she turned to Throttle:
"I've just decided that from tonight on, idiocy is punishable by court-martial and I authorize you to kill him" Carbine didn't look particularly happy at the idea of being woken up just to receive insults on her nightwear. And from Vinnie, moreover.

Throttle grumbled her a "I wish it was that easy..." and then, after a huge yawn, he asked again to his friend what the hell he wanted from them.
Vinnie didn't answer directly, nor he expected to be formally invited to come in, but he quickly slipped through the door and Throttle and entered the house.

"This is something you have to see!" he exclaimed, going further inside without too many pleasantries, heading toward the hall where the couple kept their video-computer and, dragging a chair from the hallway, he sat in front of it.

"No, please, make yourself comfortable. Do as if you were in your own house ... " Carbine commented in a caustic tone of voice.

"Thanks Carb! Would you be a doll and give me something to drink? I've run here and now I'm so very thirsty!" Vinnie replied cheerfully, lighting up their computer screen in the meantime.

At that point Throttle quickly rested a hand on his mate's shoulder (to stop her before she pounced his friend) and gave her a look that, translated into words, would have probably sounded like something along the line of: please, don't…try to be patient, if I didn't bump him off myself in almost twenty years of friendship, there is a reason. Now I don't remember it, but it must be very good!
At that Carbine dropped her arms to her sides and snorted loudly rolling her eyes.

Vinnie didn't notice the couple's nonverbal exchange and, highly excited, was still messing with the satellite controls, searching for some particular frequency.

"Tonight I wasn't sleepy so I turned the TV on to see if there was something interesting and ..."

"Vin, if it's AGAIN some stupid replica of some stupid bike race you won, I swear to the Gods of Mars that I'll kick you out and to you house!"

"It's not! Look!" the mouse exclaimed, pointing to the video: it was tuned in to an advertising channel, that kind of channels touting the same blenders and shaping underwear for 20 hours straight. At the moment, the transmissions were interrupted (even in the United States it was to be the middle of the night): you couldn't see anything, except for a black screen accompanied by a monotonous background buzz.

"Fascinating ..." was Carbine's dry comment.

"Wait just a minute," Vinnie blurted impatiently.

"I'm sleepy and tired. This thing you want to show us, can't it wait until tomorrow? "

"One minute, I said!"

They stayed in contemplative silence for more than a minute, staring at a blank screen and, in Carbine's case, getting progressively irritated at each more second lost. Throttle had instead slumped on the armchair of the sofa and seemed perfectly ready to fall asleep again exactly where he was.
Vinnie was impassible, but suddenly the sound of an intense electrostatic discharge crept in the air and his ears instinctively oriented towards the loudspeakers.
"Here we are!" the white mouse exclaimed excitedly.

*Shhhhhhhhhhh …uys? Can you he… *Shhhh*…me? *Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh* …itfire, the right knob, the calibrat… *Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh* ...ould pick up the sign … *Shhhhhhhhh* …oker to Mars. Stoker to Mars. Can you…*Shhhssssssssshhhhhhh* … 14.00 EDT. Repeat, I … *Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh* …at 41°55'5…*Shhhhhhhh* …5'55.1"N and 87°42'44… *Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh* …ell to Charl…*Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh*

"Stoker ?!" Throttle and Carbine shouted in unison, leaning forward and pushing Vinnie aside to get closer to the screen.

"This message has been sent in loop for at least an hour now, on every terrestrial wavelength " Vinnie explained "the old man must have cracked the signals from the Earth"

The motorcyclist then pressed another button, tuning to a different frequency, a channel of old black and white classics. Instead of music, as a soundtrack to an elegant couple dancing a lively foxtrot, there was Stoker's voice.

"It's everywhere!"

"Huh?"

"It's in every single Earth channel!" Vinnie grinned, looking upward and spreading his arms as if indicating everything around him "And the whole Mars is listening! Damn, probably the whole solar system is listening to Stoker, right now! "

Few minutes later Carbine was contacted from the martial headquarters. They waited before calling her, to be sure, but now they were all quite alarmed there. There was a problem, something big: someone was trying to infiltrate the communication frequencies of Mars from outside the planet!
They had, yes, tried to square the signal source, but other than identify the Earth as the origin point of the signal, it was impossible to define the exact spot from which it was forwarded: one moment it was a large city in Eastern Europe, a second later a small town South Africa, shortly after was a ship in the exact middle of the Indian Ocean.
"Yes, I am informed" was Carabine's dry answer. With the communicator in her hand, she moved into the bedroom to get quickly dressed as she continued talking to her direct subordinate.
"Do not give any alarm for the moment. I don't think there is any imminent danger, but I'm on my way. I'll see you in my office in forty minutes"
After closing the connection, Carbine moaned tiredly "How is it possible for that mouse to be able to stir apocalyptic chaos even when he is on a different planet?" she asked to nobody in particular.

The short message was transmitted for a total of 2 hours, looped, with 5-minute intervals, but then, suddenly, the signal was simply stopped at the source .

The old general's message was cause of a great deal of agitation among Martian 'powers that be' and upper echelons. What the provisional government initially feared the most was that Stoker could have led Earth to discover Mars' little secret; having your favorite movie interrupted by a voiceover made crackled due to a badly set microphone can ruin your evening , but having your favorite movie interrupted by a voiceover made crackled due to a badly set microphone AND discover that the above-mentioned voice belongs to a compatriot of yours that endangers the whole "let Earth continuing to believe that Mars is an inhabited planet" thing… well, that can seriously piss you off . Especially if you're in the security council.

To strike a blow for him, we have to say Stoker hadn't been so stupid to actually put the secrecy of his people existence in danger: his signal was relayed so many times and by so many repeaters , bouncing from one continent to another , that no one on Earth ever managed to figure out who really was behind it and to who, exactly, it was actually destined .

Then, the fact that the language used in it wasn't exactly known , helped things .

All the Strategic and Security Intelligence of Europe, Asia, Africa and America thought of encrypted codes and searched in their blacklists, looking for a possible enemy culprit or suspect, but no one in their right mind would have ever thought of it as a voice message addressed to another planet! Later , a couple of UFO-conspiracy believers timidly proposed that hypothesis, in a new-age blog, but it was obviously let to die with a general laughter by the internet community. If they only knew...

However, in the meanwhile, even on his own home planet, to figure out what exactly Stocker was trying to say in that damn message, wasn't exactly an easy task: clearly he had transmitted indications of a time and partial coordinates, but other than that, nada: the rest of the sound was too much distorted for them to be able to recover something more. In the immediate aftermath an emergency task force was quickly organized, which had seen involved, despite herself, even the most recent human guest of Mars: Charlene had been very puzzled by the summoning and, even more, by the questions she got asked:
- Of course, she knew Stoker very well.
- Hey, no! Not so well. What were they trying to insinuate? He was almost twice her age!
- Sure, they were friend.
- Yes, they collaborated in the past.
- No, she didn't know exactly what he was doing on Earth, but accordingly to what he said, before they left, he wanted to clean up the mess made by the regenerator. And, she supposed, he was going to have fun, while he was at it.
- No, she didn't know either what the meaning was behind Stok's strange message (in fact she didn't even hear it!). Mainly because she – as she kept repeating countless time - had not yet learned the language used by Stocker. He ... Martian. She… Earthling ... did they get this? Different planets? Different languages? The night before Stoker could as well have declaimed a Shakespearean sonnet and to her it would have been pretty much the same.
- For Real? No, she didn't know. But were they really sure he said her name?
- Coordinates to what? Northeast, American Continent?
- Could they show it to her, on a map?

... "Hey, but that's my house!"

If the question "where" found an answer (even if it raised few other questions for them to mull over, such as what Stoker was doing in the old and now abandoned garage the Last Stand), for the "when" the situation was just a tiny bit more complicated: 14:00 terrestrial time, he said, ok, but of what day exactly? That part of the communication was lost in the cosmic interferences.
Eventually they discovered that 14.00 belonged to a Thursday of August (August 21th for Earth. The middle of dust storms season for Mars) and it corresponded to the moment in which the two planets were closer in their circle around the sun, with the North America well oriented toward the red planet.

It is not like in the meantime there was been another clarifier message, nor they understood it by themselves, but at some point of August 21th the Martians guessed that maybe, just maybe, that one was the day chosen by Stoker when, in the exact center of the military base where Carbine and the boys were allocated, there was a violent fluorescent flash that momentarily blinded everyone and suddenly a huge wooden and metal crate, completely sealed, appeared from nowhere. Pinned on it there was a little note: "with love, Stoker!".

The box contained a number of a machinery parts and precise directions to how to assemble what appeared to be the largest translator ever conceived. And of course there were also two cases of beer, with the compliments of the house.
Carbine immediately confiscated the beers and gave order to use an old, disused hangar to work on the machine and, in the meantime, to also try figuring out what Stoker wanted to make of it.

The machine soon proved to be exactly what they imagined, aka a translator able of handling unusually high volumes of information.

They built it faithfully to the enclosed IKEA-style handbook sent by Stoker, who, incidentally, had a horrendous calligraphy that made the task quite a feat for the base engineers, including Charlene.

At its completion, civilians were temporarily evacuated, army bigwigs were summoned, half a dozen of well armed soldiers were deployed along the perimeter with guns diligently aimed at the machine and a scientist, with the expression of who was expecting that it will explode in his face, turned on Stoker's transportator.

It did not explode.

It made a nice "beep" and a recorded voice (the same voice that had been heard two months before, for just about two hours, on all of the Earth channels) cheerfully announced:

"Hello rookies and thank you for choosing Stok Transports Enterprise, your call has been forwarded! Hi rookies and thank you for choosing Stok Transports Enterprise, your call has been forwarded! Hello rookies and thanks for ... " Elevator music played softly in the background.

Now they were all quite confused. Lot. And also vaguely offended by that "rookies".

Suddenly, however, as it begun, even the new recording was interrupted, but this time it was replaced by a female voice, in live:

"Wait ... How do I answer? Do I have to press it before speaking?" It was a girl. Charlene recognized her immediately: their speaker was Spitfire.

"No, you are already on line" someone else commented in response, in the background, this time a male. Stoker.

"Ah, ok ... Hoi, do you hear me? Mars, here Chicago, do you copy? "

The scientist came forward "Here Mars. We receive you loud and clear "

Spitfire seemed impressed "Really? Hey, this thing is really working! Dad, come here, we have them! "

"Did you doubted your old man's abilities? Stand aside pumpkin, please, let me sit down. Ah, and do me a little favor too: call the guy and put him in connection with us "

There was a little buzz while the two of them were obviously exchanging seat and microphone.

"And here I am! Wow guys, surely you there took your sweet time to rebuild my ... Hey, by the way, who am I speaking with? "

The scientist had just taken a breath to answer him when Carbine grabbed him by the collar of his lab coat and unceremoniously snatched the microphone away:

"Stoker, what the hell are you doing ?!" she roared into it.

"Are my little ears wrong or this is the sweet, sweet voice of my favorite general?" the mature soldier mocked her.

There was an amused murmur among the soldiers: very few could afford such a casual tone with their leader and it was always a sight to assist to how aggressively she normally reacted. Unfortunately for them, this time Carbine chose to ignore it.

"Stoker, right now we are in conference with the high colonels of the Martian infantry, air force and army. Do you understand? There are all of them! And they are very curious to know what you're doing" This was one of those cases in which the word euphemism was no longer sufficient to describe a statement. There was also a pretty clear subtext: "Don't say something stupid, something we all repent. Me in particular. "

"Woa, the big guns moved for me? I am so honored "

"Stoker!"

"Ok, ok rookie, don't heat up!" he laughed, "Is Charley there with you?"

"And what about her now?"

"Everything. So, is she there?"

"One moment, she is coming. In the meantime, while we are waiting for her, would you be so kind to expand the concept? " Carbine asked, while turning and beckoning to Charlene to come closer.

"Actually she is the one I wanted to speak with from the beginning. But you're such a nice bonus, I am always happy to have these little chats with you. All right there at home? Throttle? "

"Ehhm ... Stoker this isn't the right moment to go personal" Carbine replied mechanically. The last thing she wanted was to discuss her private business with her bosses and her subordinates in attentive listening.

In the meantime the human girl quickly reached Carbine, with a curious expression on her face: without the psychic link the mice unconsciously used to connect to each other and to any other sentient being in the proximity of their antennae, she could understand only Carbine's part of the dialog, the rest was out of her linguistics skills. She really had to start studying the native language of her three beloved rodents, she reasoned: half of the fun was lost when they decided to use Martian and communicated by radio.

"Hello Stoker" exclaimed when she reached the console, next to Carbine.

"Hey, beautiful!" He replied cheerfully, in English "How are you? Do you like Mars? "

"Yeah, not bad. But it is the company that matters anyway, not the place "

"True, true ..."

"So, you know that I am always happy to talk to you, but could you tell me why you need me?" She asked the man.

"Can't a mouse chat with a pretty girl without having ulterior motives in mind?" But then he paused "Or rather, perhaps it would be more correct to say: can't a mouse chat with a pretty girl exactly because he really has ulterior motives ... you know, the kind of motivations inappropriate for children?" the former general was in full playful courtship mode, rich of not too concealed allusions. Charlene grinned, waiting the inevitable continuation. She didn't have to wait:

"And tell Vincent that ..."

"Look, you can spare us this little show of yours, Vinnie is not even here right now!" She stopped him, giggling.

"Ah! Too bad..." he said, sounding a bit disappointed and immediately returning to his usual tone of voice "His reactions are always so funny when it comes to someone flirting with you that ... "

"Stoker, do you think you'll manage to say what we want to know before sunset?" Carbine intervened "You know, we all have better things to do!"

"Yes, yes. Ok ... a mouse doesn't report for seven months and this is the welcome back?" he grumbled back.
"So, back to business. First of all: do you like the gift I sent you? "

"Nice, but Christmas is still far away, you know" the general replied.

"Witty. What you have before your eyes is, I guess you have understood, a transporter "

"Yes, dumb as we are, we got that" Carbine said ironically.

"Good boys. It's a ... No, actually it is "the" transporter. The first Martian, operating and not hackable. A gem, let me tell you: our old enemies' ones in comparison were vintage stuff. But what probably you still don't know is that in fact it is also a bridge, it not only works by input of signal, such as the Plutarchian transporter, but by a continuous transmission, bidirectional and with unlimited mass range" his voice leaked a whisper of pride.

"Oh!" Charlene let slip from his lips a sound of surprise, amazed and admired, as she was now watching the machine once more time: maybe the others had not yet grasped what Stoker just said implied, but she did.

"Exactly Charley. It's a bridge. Earth and Mars are officially connected without alignment barrier. Oh, by the way, the other half of it is here, in your basement! "

"Stoker, I'm happy, but ... you can't do it, you have to find another place. Sooner or later the authorities will come to check for me. With me here on Mars my garage will be auctioned by the bank. Do not ... "

"And here, Charley, you are wrong" another voiceover intervened. A third person was added to the conversation, along with Stoker and Spitfire "Is always good to hear your voice. I'm glad to know you're okay"

"... Jack ?!" she breathlessly exclaimed, when she recognized him "Jack, is it you?"

"Yes, in the flesh. Hello Charley! "

"Jack! Oh my God, what are you doing there?"

"Well, "there" just metaphorically speaking, of course. In fact I'm in my office in San Francisco "

"We are in audio conference. Very professional, isn't it? " laughed Spitfire.

"Hey, my friend, you disappear without notice and you think no one notices? You know, you've left a lot of people worried for you down here!" Jack affectionately scolded Charlene.

The woman blushed violently at the sudden burst of guilt: obviously she thought about it, but when she realized it was too late: by then she was on Mars and there was no way to contact anyone or reassure old friends. How could she?
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry" Charley tried to justify, apologizing "Really, it was a decision made on the fly, I do not ..."

"Don't worry Charley, your friend Stoker already explained everything"

"But how? ..."

"Five months ago I was in Chicago for a conference and I went to see you. Imagine my surprise when I find your garage closed and -again- an enormous mouse pointing a gun to my head as I try to enter, using the spare key, you know, the one hidden in the frame of the window on the back!"

"In my defense, the kid here could have very well been a thief!" Stoker said.

"Thieves don't politely knock at the door. Anyway, long story short, he told me what was going on and ... "

"And now you're in society with Jack!" Spitfire exclaimed in the background, beating the human in an explanatory rush.

"Eh?!" Charlene asked automatically, taken quite by surprise and just as much confused by the adolescent Martian's statement.

"Let me explain" Stoker intervened "You already received two notifications for unpaid taxes and the mortgage on your property. We had to intervene, or you would have been expropriated of the garage. But with you unreachable and me ... well I that don't exactly have the look of your average human being who can safely go in a bank, we had to be imaginative: you're a junior associate of a new McCyber's startup in Chicago and, as of your partner, he was able to arrange the payment while you're ... uh ... in a business trip abroad. You are officially stationed in Europe now, just for future references. Then, tell us about Paris: are you enjoying the Eternal City? "

By the time Stoker ended his explanatory monologue, Charlene was speechless with a dazed expression on her face. she didn't know what to say. In fact, she didn't even know what to think!

"You get confuse with Rome ..." she tried to joke, but her brain was too busy processing all of what Stoker said.

"Since we were at it, we also thought to buy the properties next to your garage: you are currently in negotiations for purchasing half of the block, here in Chicago" added Jack "You know, for our society"

"This should ensure a minimum of tranquility in the years ahead. None will appear to pry into your stuff "

"But how ... what ..." she tried to say. Too much information here: she doesn't understand anything! What the hell were those three doing? "Guys, I can't afford it, you know that in my account there is barely of what to pay the heating! The only thing I possess on earth, apart from the garage, is my truck and it's not like it has a great value!"

"Ah, yeah, for that ..." Stoker answered, his voice suddenly nervous. Charley immediately pricked her antennae (so to say): the giant rodent's embarrassed tone did not promise anything good.

"You know, there was a small problem and ... well ... your truck had a little mishap ..."

"A ... mishap? And my truck had this mishap all by itself ?!" Charlene's tone of voice by then had inadvertently changed, revealing a hint of involuntary aggressiveness and sarcasm. Stoker could not see her, but he could very well imagine the woman's eyebrows begin to rise above two quite miffed green eyes.

"It didn't. It was helped" Spitfire retorted before her father could find some excuse "And to define a truck that goes into spontaneous combustion a small problem, to me it seems like minimizing the issue, dad"

"But on whose side are you? Don't add fuel to the fire! "

"This is what I told you, just after that we ended up in the ditch, when there was that strange short circuit in the truck!"

"Anyway" Jack said hoping to stop the silly bickering between father and daughter "for the money, you don't have to worry. Obviously we are taking care of it "

Charlene needed a few seconds to record the last statement of her friend. It was justifiable, her mind was a bit occupied in mourning for his poor - and practically new - truck, innocent victim of Martians without a license and without scruples..."What? No! Jack, I can't let you spend that kind money to ..."

"Look, I haven't paid a penny" Jack replied laughing "In fact, to be perfectly honest, I actually had a little profit"

"Uh?"

"The idea was mine" the one speaking was now Spitfire again "We were watching a movie. Something about a flying alien with a human look -what scarce fantasy- in blue spandex and red pants -but who is so dumb to wear pants above stocking, I guess- that, at one point, turned coal into a diamond. And I thought, why don't we do the same? You know, with the regenerator and everything ... "

"We paid off your mortgage. Your garage will be yours forever: in the future it will be your lawyer to handle the relations with banks and the taxes payment" Jack said at that point.

"Why? Do I also have a lawyer now?"

"Didn't we tell you? The owner of the land on which the first Martian outpost and secret embassy of Mars on Earth will be built, must have a lawyer " Stoker happily concluded, as matter of fact.

"Ah, right ..." Charlene at that point had to sit down.

Later, only a few hours later, Charlene found herself sitting again, this time around a table, with Carbine at her side, Throttle reassuringly standing behind her and an indefinite number of Martian authorities, military and non, sitting in front of her, to discuss her positions regarding the "bomb" dropped by Stoker that afternoon.
They seemed very intrigued by all the opportunities and countless possibilities that this project opened for the planet. Charlene would have never wished something horrible to someone before, but in that moment, if she were to find Stoker anytime soon, she would probably have strangled him with bare hands for the troubles he was putting her through!

Secret outpost? Yeah, right! Martian mice were so famous for their secrecy, discretion and moderation ... how much long would it have remained secret? 20 minutes ?! No. Probably 10 seconds would have already been a success ...
Back in 1996 there were already rumors about three very strange motorcyclists, vigilantes that rode in its street, moving with the grace of an armored panzer. And now the Martians were expecting to be able to make a whole section of mice like Vinnie, Throttle or Modo pass unnoticed? Ha, ha, ha! That was hilarious!
Earth was about to be invaded by a mass of showy furry aliens, benevolent and full of good intentions, of course, but also highly destructive, noisy and excitable. And all that would have started from her poor, poor, poor little garage ... Charlene shook her head, not sure she really wanted to have something to do with it and, really, now she was even so much happier than before at the idea of being on Mars, well away from Chicago!