By John Holliman

After about month out of the public eye, Andy Thomas has come out to tell people how he's feeling after four and a half months on board the Mir space station. I talked to him Wednesday. I told him he sounded very tired, and he says its because NASA got him up at 4 AM to talk to me and other interviewers.

He told me some fascinating stuff in our interview. He says his neck muscles are still very sore because during his time on Mir they didn't have to do any work holding up his head. He says that the first few days of recovery were tough because his medical team did not want him to strain any muscles weakened by months in weightlessness.

He says he started his rehab by working out in a swimming pool, then gradually switched to jogging. His aerobic strength was taken away despite daily workouts on Mir's treadmill. Andy says he doesn't ever want to get back on a treadmill To do his running, despite the fact that Houston is hot as can be this summer.

Of the lessons he learned on Mir, the one I found most interesting was that you should have a bright cheery place to live, rather than a dark green gray space station. He's telling the painters of the new space station to make it bright -- maybe blue or green inside. In looking back at pictures of Andy on Mir, I noticed what he was saying about the drab -- now he has a beautiful picture of a forest with a waterfall up in his work space.

The next most important recommendation is to have a better way to talk to people on Earth than was available on Mir. Thomas complained several times about a failure of e-mail to get to him in orbit. Russian communications problems were to blame. He says he preferred e-mail to voice communication with the ground because when you talk to someone on Earth, you get transported back here, and that makes the stay on Mir more isolated and lonely. He also likes that you can read your e-mail again and again.

MIR'S Future

NASA has been told by the Russian Space Agency that Mir will be abandoned by this time next year and will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, perhaps as soon as next March. Jim Van Laak, the deputy program manager for the Shuttle-Mir program says the Russians will send two more crews to the space station before it's deserted. The current plan, as we reported on TV this week, is to keep Mir in orbit until next June, but Van Laak says the Russians have the option of leaving it and forcing it into the atmosphere above the Pacific ocean as early as next March.

Astronaut dreams

I asked Andy Thomas if he'd had any bizarre dreams while a Mir resident, and I got an interesting answer. He dreamed of his childhood in Australia and playing on the beach with friends. He says in the dreams the other kids were running and playing, but he was floating above them. Mike Foale and Dave Wolf also have stories of dreams from space. I've let some dream experts listen to the astronaut recollections and found that there is some emotional and psychological meaning to these dreams. I have a TV story coming up on this and will tell you more later this summer.

Amateur Night

We're planning a story for the next week involving amateur astronomers and the fun they have on a starry night. We're planning to travel to rural north Georgia, where an amateur has devoted 22 years and about 200 thousand dollars to build a major observatory. He was able to discover two supernova explosions of stars in the past month, and we'll take a look through his viewfinder coming up.

More John Glenn

CNN Interactive has spent the past six months working on a special section to bring you up close and personal to John Glenn as he gets ready for his second flight into space. It'll be a link from the main page soon, and I'm going to offer some thoughts about the pros and cons of sending a 77-year-old into orbit, based in large part on your comments to me before the Glenn interview two weeks ago. Also, you'll be able to listen to more of the interview which hasn't been on television or posted to the Web yet.

See you next week.