Go, Space!

I felt sick all afternoon and evening last night. I think maybe there was some bad bacon in my Wendy's hamburger. It did give me the perfect excuse not to do anything after work, though. Instead I watched TV all evening. I actually had a dilema on what to watch. Friends was on TBS (the last season reruns). Next Action Star was on NBC, and I was checking it out for the first time. I was not all that great. For a show about people filming a scene of a commando rescue, there was disappointingly little shooting or blowing up of things. Some, but less than ideal. The Wimbledon women's quaterfinals were also on. What a quandery!

I also watched baseball tonight. I didn't stay up long enough to see Randy Johnson get his 4,000th strike out, though (the Diamondbacks still lost). I did stay up long enough to see Carlos Beltran hit his first home run as an Astro, and to see the Astros give all the runs up again. :P I wish that had been in the other order.

It's an exciting day in space today. This afternoon, the ISS crew is going to try again to do an EVA to fix the gyroscopes. Tonight at 9:30PM central, Cassini will fire its engines to capture into orbit around Saturn. I've been very interested in the Cassini mission since I was given a chance to work on it as a co-op. I didn't go on that tour, but I've been following it since. Cassini could very well be the last of the big planetary explorers. It has a probe (Huygens) that will enter Titan's atmosphere around Christmas time and try to detect the composition of the atmosphere and the surface. We spent part of the morning at work trying to reconstruct the relative size of the Cassini engines and the Shuttle attitude jets. :) I work in a dorky place.

Bad acting

I was supposed to have a sim tomorrow, but it got cancelled due to the ISS EVA (spacewalk) that got rescheduled to tomorrow after one of the Russian spacesuits developed a leak during the attempt last week. So now, I have nothing to do tomorrow. Nothing! Plus, I was sort of counting on the extra hours I get on days when I work sims. We left work early yesterday to go to get another new cable modem (might be fixed - the jury is still out). I didn't worry about leaving early because I figured I'd be working about 10 hours on Wed.

Last night I tried to do my stairstepper. After a couple hundred, it broke. Well, really it didn't break. But a couple screws are loose and it wasn't holding together too well. I would have just fixed it and moved on, but the screws require a really big allen wrench, which I don't have. So instead, I took the dogs out for a walk. I let them run in the drainage ditch and they were happy. (wag, wag) Then we went out to dinner at Mely's. We're getting into a really bad habit of eating out all the time. Cooking just seems to be too much effort. Actually, it's not the cooking so much as the shopping for the cooking. And the planning for the shopping for the cooking. What can I say? We are a take-out family.

Gavin is really excited for Spiderman 2. I really can't work up any enthusiasm. I thought the first movie was only OK, and then even that little bit of praise was totally ruined by the ending. I mean come on:


MJ: "Oh, Peter. Even though I've been totally oblivious to/uninterested in your obvious crush on me for the whole movie, now I realize that you're the only one for me." (Bad acting, bad acting, bad acting.)

PP: "Well, MJ, even though I've been in love with you forever and don't want to see you end up with my 'best friend', I really can't see confessing my feelings to you. Especially since you obviously picked my geeky secret identity over my ultra-cool superhero form. See 'ya later, chica."


:P

It's my aeroplane

I had a good weekend. I cleaned (not so fun), read books, did jigsaw puzzles, fixed the radio fence for the dogs, and bought plane tickets for Peru. :) Continental was offering Houston to Lima for $625, which is pretty darn good. The only problem is that the flight back is a red-eye. It leaves Lima at 11:55PM and returns to Houston at 11AM the next day. Oh, well. For a savings of almost $200 on the going rate, I'm OK with it. Whoohoo, go Peru! We got our itineraries from the guide company on Friday, so it's really starting to seem like it's coming soon.

I also spent some frequent flyer miles this weekend on a ticket to Denver on July 10th. This one isn't for hiking - I'm going to drive from there to Casper for Jessica's baby shower. I got first class both ways for 45,000 miles plus fees. First class was actually cheaper than coach, ?? Anyway, I'm really excited because I was bummed before that I wasn't going to see her while she was still pregnant. Now I can. :)

Time Warner came out to check the cable modem again. This guy says that the company has been putting out bum "refurbished" (read: recycled, with no repair) modems on the service call trucks for a while. He suggested going to the local payment center and getting a new one from them. If this turns out to be the problem, you can bet the complaints department is getting a call. I swear, if our area could get DSL I so would have jumped ship by now.

Idea People

I will never understand "idea people". Mainly because it seems to me that "idea people" often don't really have many ideas that translate to any kind of reality. They are, and I'm genrealizing here, very good at taking about things that are what I would consider common sense and then billing those things as "visionary" or "innovative". Or saying something like this: "We are a good organization because of XXXX. We have made some mistakes, but our core values of XXXX are great. But we need to transform (because someone told us to). So we will transform so that we are XXXX." How is that a transformation? And how many highly-paid think tank type people did it take to come up with this "visionary" plan?

Jailbird Gavin

Over a year ago, my husband got a speeding ticket. He was going so fast, that he couldn't take the drivers safety course to get off. Since he was only over by 1mph, he decided to go to court to try to talk the judge into letting him take the course. While he was gone, Sarah drew a picture on the whiteboard in his office that I found very amusing. She recently recreated it in electronic format.


It is storming again here, which caused the cancellation of our (Becca) parking garage hiking night. So, I did my little stair climber instead. I did 1200 steps in about 1/2 hour, which isn't bad for me. I haven't been keeping to the program well, though, so I need to pick it up. I think I should be up to 2000 steps (not necessarily in 1/2 hour) by the time we go to Colorado to do Long's Peak. If I increase by 100 steps every week, that gets me up to 1700. I guess I'll have to go up by 150 steps a week instead. By the way, if you're wondering I have no sound reason for the 2000 number. It's about double what I started doing, so I figure that's good improvement. It'll probably take be about an hour to do, too, so I should be working up some aerobic stamina.

Slow like a roadrunner

I called Time Warner again last night to set up another appointment to try to get our cable modem fixed. I'm learning their system well enough that I can get through the front line of technical (ahem) "support" people to the people in the local office without having to unhook all my computers and ruin all my home networking settings. I still got put on hold for 30 minutes waiting for the local office to answer. The internet was in a medium way last night. Running well enough that I could get to web sites, but running slow enough that the people I was talking to could really tell something was wrong. When I went to do a speed test, I was getting 64.1 kbps. She's like "Wow, that's really terrible!" I know! That's why I'm calling, duh.

We are going to get dumped on this afternoon. A solid block of red and yellow rain is coming this way. Poor doggies! I didn't realize it was going to be stormy today, so they're outside. :( At least Gavin got the grass in back mowed last night.

Trip Report

Wow, third update today. Must be a Monday. :)

I've got a trip report for our trip to Lost Creek Wilderness up here. (Thanks, Sarah!)

Men with T-shirts on their heads

I've been watching these two workmen on the roof of the building across the parking lot from me. They both have T-shirts tied to their heads. Every once in a while, one of them looks down this pipe and the T-shirt blows up in the air. I have no idea what they're doing. One of my coworkers has some mini binoculars in his desk that he periofically uses to "spy" on people in the parking lot. I tried to use them to see what these men are doing, but I couldn't tell. Then one of them looked at my building and it seemed like he was looking right at me. Weird.

Private ride to orbit

The first privately-funded spacecraft reached space today. Scaled Composite's SpaceShip One reached 100 km earlier today. Some people have asked me what I and my coworkers think about such endeavors. For myself, I am excited about it and hope that they have great success. If any of these ventures ever gets to the point where it can begin to take over access to low Earth orbit (LEO in space vernacular), that should free the government up to persue more cutting edge exploration goals. That is my hope, anyway. I've been trying to read the news as today goes on, but it is hard to get the web sites to load. I always find it encouraging when big space events overload the servers for news providers.

I forgot to close the gate to the backyard yesterday. Gavin thought to ask at lunch, and we called the neighbors to ask if the dogs were out. Apparently, they were sitting right at the gate looking out. Halley distracted them and Jim shut the gate. I guess we should be glad that the dogs are good about protecting the property, but I'd be a bit happier if they didn't scare the neighbors so badly. Roxy acts like she's going to eat little kids that run by the front of the house. This is funny because she is actually kind of scared of little kids. I wish she didn't scare them so much because of it, though.

Sleepy

I just hit a major wall. I was chugging along fine; I was even peppy. About 10 minutes ago, my body realized I've been up since 5:30AM. I could go home, but Jo still has my keys from sitting the dogs last weekend. I can't find Gavin. So, I couldn't get into the house if I went home. Of course, now I can't actually do any work either since I'm about to fall flat on my face. So.

I could really use a nap before going to Becca's tonight. Her friend Irwin is in town, and we're going to play Settlers and some weird card game called Guillotine tonight. I am informed that you actually collect heads in said game. And also that it's "fun". Given the state of the world today, I am less than amused at the idea of collecting heads. I really don't understand how people can be so horrible. Call me innocent, naive, whatever. I don't want to understand. I think if I did, it would be to my detriment.

Wow, that started out to be a cheerful paragraph. I think my tiredness is affecting my temper. Maybe Matt is ready to go home early tonight and let me in to sleep. I think I'll call him and ask.

Bad Hair Day

I think I need to get my hair cut again. This is really annoying because I just got it cut on Memorial Day weekend. It is getting unmanagable, though. I guess I should have told her to cut it shorter. What I really need is to find a hair dresser in League City that I can go to consistently so that they know what I want. Maybe I'll try that soon.

It has finally stopped raining. (I think.) At least, the lawn should be able to get mowed today. I keep expecting a letter from the homeowners association. Our yard is not the only overgrown one in the neighborhood, but I think it is the worst. Especially the back yard.

The weekend has filled up quite quickly. Volleyball tournament, baby shower, Father's Day... Maybe next weekend will be less crazy.

Blah

Blah is how I feel today. When I lived in Seattle, where it rains like all the time, I never got depressed by a rainy day. Maybe that's because I didn't have to come to work and sit at a computer pretending to be productive all day then. My office feels different when the clouds are thick outside. For one, it is really cold. The cold is even worse this morning because I left my umbrella in my office last night (even though I knew it was supposed to rain today), so I had to come in from my car without any cover. So I am wet. Well, I'm actually dry now, but I just got that way. For two, the flourescent lighting seems more intrusive, somehow, when the sun is not out. It's like I realize that there is more light inside than outside and that fact disturbs me. It doesn't disturb me at night, though, just when it's cloudy. I don't know why.

This rain is also causing my yard not to get mowed. Becca arranged for a yard service to come and mow our extremely overgrown lawn. Why did she do this? Well, it's kind of giving away part of the story of our hike last weekend, but Gavin basically did a speed run back to the car Sunday so that he could drive around and she didn't have to climb the last 1000 ft pass between us and the car. Anyway, I promise I'll tell the whole story soon. With pictures.

I talked to my sister last night. She had her second ultra-sound not long ago, and they could see the baby's face. That's so cool! I was at Target right before she called, and I went past the baby clothes and couldn't help myself. The little Pooh clothes are so cute. So, I bought some. :) Green, since they still aren't entirely sure of the sex of the baby. Actually, the technician said that she ws 90% sure that it's a girl, but the baby still had its legs crossed. Besides, I don't agree with foisting pink on a baby. Even if it is the "in" color this season.

Rain, Rain Go Away

Actually, at the moment it is not raining. Still, it was raining very heavily when I was coming in to work this morning. I had to stop at the gas station, bank, and pharmacy on my way in, and the credit card machines were not very reliable. Plus, several stop lights were out. And the gaurds at the front gate only had one lane open for incoming cars. I don't see how that could be because of the rain, but that's what they were doing. The radar maps actually show the areas of rain swirlling around Houston. It looks like a tropical storm, but it's not. Very wierd.

There is a tropical wave east of the Windward Islands. This is what I do all summer. I come in to work, clear out my Inbox, and then go the the National Hurricane Center website and look at all the satellite pictures. I get excited when there's a tropical wave that the forecaster thinks may develop into an organized system. I run all the loops looking for circulation. I try to predict whether it will get in to the gulf or not.

I watched Runaway Bride on TBS last night. I had never seen it before. I think that's one of those movies that I always assumed I'd see one day, so I never made an effort to see it. And I did see it one day - yesterday. It prevented me from going and getting groceries and other things we need. After the movie was over, I tried to read, but I got sleepy after about one paragraph. It was about 11PM. I think I'm still on the camping sleep schedule, except that I don't get up at dawn. Of course, there wasn't much of a dawn this morning, what with the rain. It just went from dark to murky.

Oh, to Live Elsewhere

People that live in Colorado are so lucky. So are people that live in Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico... Basically, people that live within 4 hours drive of real, honest-to-God mountains are lucky. We had a blast in Colorado this weekend. We went to Lost Creek Wilderness, which is about an hour or two drive from Denver, depending on where in the Wilderness you decide to enter. I will work on a trip report, but until I can get that finished here are some pictures.

The end of the weekend was not quite so great. Apparently the floodgates opened in Houston last night, and the plane that was supposed to come to Denver to pick us up was grounded for about three hours. We were supposed to leave Denver at 5:55PM. We boarded the plane at 8:15PM. I'm not sure exactly when we left, but it was 12:10AM when we got off the plane. I got to bed at about 2AM, and I'm feeling it this morning. This was after getting up at 5AM with Gavin to hike over a 1000 ft ridge. Why did we get up that early? Well, it's a bit of a story and you're going to have to wait for the trip report. Suffice to say, I'm tired.

The class I was supposed to take on JAVA at work all week got cancelled. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to work on all that stuff they told me I needed to improve in my Interim sim last week. More studying...

PS

Great quote from Sarah's blog:

"Ta daa. I am Footprint Girl. All ye bow down to my knowledge of deadly pieces of spacecraft."

Lost Creek Wilderness

My sim yesterday went fairly well. The feedback I got today was basically "You did pretty good. You've got the basics down. You need to work on some of the details." That's pretty much what I expected. We had some things happen that made it harder on me that weren't planned. Nothing you can do about that. It just goes to show you that you can never think of everything!

I'm getting (more) excited to jet off to Colorado tonight. I think we're going to go to Lost Creek Wilderness. It's a bit lower and the park service says the snow is essentially gone. The other areas are basically reporting the snow melted to about 10,500 ft or so. In a lot of the parks, it's hard to find a trail that stays below that altitude for an entire loop.

I feel sorry for our dogs. We always have to leave them at home when we go do the really cool camping trips. Of course, they get excited when I take them on a walk around the block. They probably wouldn't appreciate the difference between Bastrop State Park in Texas and Lost Creek Wilderness in Colorado. They do give us hurt looks, though, when we come back with backpacks that smell like camping and they didn't get to go.

On and Off

So the last week and a half have been really busy for me at work. There's a big meeting of senior NASA people this week and we were told that the entry public risk topic would be introduced as an FYI for these people, so when we have a final answer in a few months they will be ready for it. Last Friday morning at 8am we had a tag-up scheduled for noon. Then at 8:30am it was moved to 3pm. Then at 8:45am it was moved to 12:30pm and another tag-up added at 3pm. Then at 9:00am it was all scrubbed because we heard we weren't on the agenda after all.

While this was amusing on our end, every time we had a change I called my supervisor who was out on vacation in California since he was planning to telephone in for the tag-up. By the third or fourth call I think he was ready to say he couldn't make it for some reason or another...

Now this morning we may be back on. ;) We'll find out tomorrow, when the meeting actually occurs. My supervisor is going so he can talk on the side with those who need to know, and if he needs to talk in front of all he'll be ready. Despite how this looks, 98% of our meetings aren't usually this unorganized the day before it happens.

Fortunately I won't have to worry about people phoning me on Friday while we're on vacation because it's a federal holiday. I don't remember if there was a similar day off when Nixon died ten years ago. I liked Reagan. He was the first president I remember, I was four when he was elected. I remember listening to one of his state of the union addresses where he talked about the evil empire and the space station. I remember as a kid thinking, "is there really a people so evil that we'd call them evil?" I thought evil was a thing for stories; that in real life real people weren't that evil. Having studied history, I know a little better now. In college twenty years later as I read up on the space policy, the defense build-up Reagan kicked off, and the end of the Cold War, I grew to appreciate some of his policies.

Anyways, time for laser tag. ZAAP

Colorado yea, yea

So, we just decided to go to Colorado this weekend. :) We are going to honor President Regan's life by taking our day off to do what we like most. I think it is a great memorial, personally. Nevermind that this is going to cause some serious hurry up and get the gear ready. Nevermind that it will probably be pretty snowy in some areas of the high country still. We will hike where we can and enjoy it.

I am so excited, I'm pretty much jumping out of my skin. I want to concentrate of studying for my sim tomorrow, but I'm not sure how possible that will be.

Zap

The nature show last night was a bit disappointing. Most of the storms missed us to the north. We do have a 100% chance of rain today, though. I want fireworks!

I'm playing Laser Tag tonight for the work tournament thing we have going. Gavin will no doubt kick my ass, but I hope to do better than last year. This basically means I don't want to come in dead last again.

Tomorrow is the big day. My midpoint sim for Orbit FDO. I'm basically excited, but a bit nervous. The guy who scripted it has been walking around laughing evily since last week. I've been trying to play "what if", but I'm not coming up with very much that I haven't seen, or seen somebody else handle. I suppose I just need to take my old college attitude - if I don't know it by now...

Just Relax

I had a great day yesterday. After weeks of pretty much running myself ragged on the kitchen and getting ready for company, I had a day to just relax. We went to brunch at about 11AM, and then my parents took off for the airport. I read for about an hour and then fell asleep. At about 4:30, I got up and took the dogs on a short jaunt. We then went to see Harry Potter and the Prisinor of Azkaban (which is excellent!!!). Came home and read some more, took a long bath, played solitare and went to bed. I enjoyed it SO much. I remember waking up once when I was snoozing and thinking how wonderful it was that I had time to snooze some more. I then proceeded to snooze some more.

We are getting an unexpected 3-day weekend this week. The President declared a federal holiday in memory of President Regan. I might have been tempted to sneak out of town, but we have our flight controller certification party Friday. I'm on the list of honorees for my Traj cert, so I guess I should go. :) Plus, it's been too hot to contemplate camping. Maybe we can take the dogs to the beach or something before the party.

Rains coming

The internet is sort of working from home today, so I may be able to post this from home. We ate dinner in last night, which turned out to be a good thing because there was this fantastic thunderstorm that came through at about 7pm. It looks like we’re going to get another one in a few minutes. I’m sure that it’s going to hail soon and kill all my flowers. I should probably just give up, since I’m really not into gardening enough to take care of flowers well. But I really like them!

Mom and Dad’s tours went pretty well yesterday. I was originally scheduled for my midpoint cert sim on Wednesday. Then it moved to Friday, and I had to reschedule so that I could spend the day with my family. As it turns out, they’d scripted the sim for me before I moved it, so the guy that worked it for me got to work a really interesting sim. First time I’ve ever heard myself mentioned in the control center when I wasn’t there (I was listening from my desk after the folks went to Space Center Houston). The trainers assured the guy that worked the sim that they still had plenty of tricks left for me. I’m not sure how to feel about that.

I’m off to dinner now at the Canyon Café. I’ve neve been there before, but it’s supposed to be really good. Tomorrow, maybe Harry Potter.

Africa hot

Well, I think I just hiked about 2 miles in the process of giving my family a tour this morning. I never appreciate how big this place is until I walk around it all morning. The simulator tour was pretty cool, but we couldn't get onto the floor of Building 9. I guess they have changed the policy since last year when I took Jessica and Pat in there. We walked the catwalk above the high bay instead.

It's hot here. Damn hot. Africa hot. It was 80 deg by 9AM. It's 91 deg now with a heat index of 105. I'm ready to melt. And summer is just beginning.

Everybody is going to see Harry Potter tomorrow. We are going to dinner with the fam (his side and mine). Oh, well. At least Gavin will still need to see it next week. I went out and bought the soundtrack last week. (Funny story: Gavin bought it the same afternoon. I guess great minds think alike. He got the better deal, though, so I took mine back.) The first half is quite different than the other Harry Potter music. I really like the boys choir singing "Double Double Toil and Trouble", and the big band style song.

Thursdays

This week has been fairly busy at work, trying to get some slides ready for our management to present to others on one of the important return-to-flight tasks we've been working. It's coming together pretty well.

Meanwhile we've finished prepping the house for Jen's parents and brother to arrive. They should be here any minute. :) The kitchen looks great, Jen did a fabulous job picking colors and curtains and stuff. The house is clean for the first time in a month.

Today during a break at work I told Sarah about the Discovery channel special I saw on hypernova. It's like a supernova, but bigger! Apparently they're responsible for some of the gamma ray bursts we've been detecting since the 1960s. Astronomers were able to locate the source of one burst and place it over 9 million light years away -- several galaxies -- away. The amount of energy needed to make a burst that strong that we'd detect this far away is immense. They went into some of the modelling details, sorta nifty. BUT, the scary part that freaked Sarah out was the fact that a hypernova will render sterile just about everything within 50 light years of it! Fortunately there aren't any stars big enough to hypernova within our immediate neighborhood, but one astronomer noted this sort of phenomenon has disturbing implications. All it takes is for several of these scattered throughout the galaxy to go off every billion years and sterilize much of it.

Meaning, the odds of sentient life may be longer than I hope.

C'est la vie, we'll figure out more some day. Sarah and I had fun imagining what humans can do in 1000 years. I think we might be able to prevent supernovae by that time.

Anyways, I should go take the sheets out of the dryer.

Memories

Mom, Dad, and Jason are going to be here tonight. I got a friend of mine in training to agree to show us the motion-base simulator tomorrow when there here for tours. She thinks it won't be in use, so we can take a look in the flight deck. So that will be pretty cool for them to see.

I really messed up part of our newly plastered wall last night trying to hang curtain rods. There must be something hard in there because I was putting in screws and all of a sudden I was stripping the drywall. So, touch-up tonight.

It is now hurricane season. I have put the satellite loops onto my daily web surfing list. There doesn't seem to be anything tropical yet, but I guess the weather in Dallas has been pretty nasty the last couple days. A friend's parents live in Nachodoches and they had a tornado go through their yard! That's crazy. The closest I've ever been to one is probably one I saw on the plains northwest of Casper once. We were at drum corps practice. It was moving away from us, and didn't last long. I also saw a tornado on the day that we had to hike 25 miles out of the Deer Creek area in Wyoming after we got the truck stuck in a bog. That was an adventure. If I ever write memoirs, that is definately going into them! Here's the story if you haven't heard it:

We were on a Sunday drive out on the back roads. We came on a pretty nasty creek fording, so Dad tried to go around and drive up this hill. We noticed afterward that other people had fallen into the same trap. The whole hillside was boggy - yes, boggy. So, we sunk in up past the hubcaps. Now, we had a winch on the Suburban (got us out of a lot of other scrapes!), but there was nothing to hook on to. No trees, no rocks, just sagebrush. So we spent all afternoon and evening trying to get out. No luck. That night we slept in the car (I remember being pretty cold at night). When it got light, we decided to try to walk back to the gravel road; the one we were on when we got stuck was just a dirt track. We didn't think that we'd actually told anyone exactly where we were going to be (big no-no), so we didn't think that they'd know where to look for us. We carried the cooler with us back to the gravel road, which was about 4 1/2 miles. We had lunch, but didn't see any other cars. We were on a ridge and could see the town of Medicine Bow about 7-8 miles across the prarrie, but we'd have to go cross country to get there. We decided to stick to the road. Surely someone would come along before we got to the highway. Nope. We walked all day. A thunderstorm came over, and we hid in a rain culvert from the hail. After that was when we saw the tornado. Once, we saw a car coming the other way on the road - probably 2-3 miles ahead of us. But, they turned off before we got to them. We started getting close to where we thought the freeway should be, and the road got hilly. Every time we crested a hill, we thought we'd see the highway ahead of us. We never did. A sherrif's deputy picked us up at around 9pm when we were about 4 1/2 miles from the highway. We had walked 24 1/2 miles with very little water, and nothing to eat since noon. It turns out that Dad had mentioned where we were going to his golfing buddies, and when he didn't show up for work Monday, his secertary traced him that far and sent the Sheriff's department out to look for us. He'd found our truck in the early afternoon, but couldn't find us until late. I was about 9 or 10 years old when this happened. My brother was 5. It was a very, very long walk.

Well, that was an interesting trip down memory lane. And to think, I didn't know what I was going to write about today! :)

Houston hiking

So Gavin finally decided that he should jump onboard with the blog thing. He wrote his first post yesterday: see below. He then proceeded to brag about how he had posted more words than me on the new system. Never mind that I have been writing for two months on a different site and just rehosted with Blogger because it's a lot easier and cooler than my pathetic html skills. We'll see how long that lasts, buster.

Becca and I summited the Kemah parking garage yesterday. Four times. Actually, it's kind of a nice place to train for CO (as nice as we're likely to find in Clear Lake anyway). The stairs for the garage are exposed on three sides and go around an elevator, so you're out in the air and you can watch the water and the rides while you're climbing up and down them. The down side is that the garage is only four stories, and the actual ramps are pretty flat with actual flat places between them. Next week, we'll try the Oceaneering garage near work. That has a few more floors, but the stairs are inside.

I know that people rarely appreciate things fully until they're gone. I couldn't wait to move out of Casper after high school. But I would much rather move back there rather than stay in Houston (except for the whole career issue). I never could have imagined it growing up, but we're trying to get in shape to hike in the mountains, and we're reduced to a parking garage! There is literally not a hill within 2 hours of my house. The closest thing we have is freeway overpasses, and you take your life into your hands traveling on the roads here inside a car. Forget about walking with the crazy people zipping by.

I put up one of the new kitchen curtains last night. They're really cute! I'm very proud of myself. After we get the room cleaned up, I'll post pictures.

I'm a Blogger too...

So Sarah had a blog. Then Becca. Then other people. Then my wife. I had no choice, but to become a Blogger too. We'll see how well it goes.

Did a lot at the house this weekend, getting ready for Jen's family to visit next weekend. Had a nice dinner Monday night at Becca's where Jo cooked us up some good lasanga. And an oreo cream pie that was quite scrumptious.

Our new housemate who's staying for the summer, Matt, is settled in now. He brought along a few boxes of Legos, with the robotic components and motors and computers and switches and axels and wheels and... well, a lot of things that I can't name but look quite useful in trying to create a self-propelled car. It looks pretty cool. I remember when I used to play with legos growing up -- I still fiddled with them through junior high. I mentioned to Matt yesterday that maybe we could create a gondala for a remote-controlled blimp! And then I picked up the Legos computer, it's about half the size of a brick and weighs like one when it has the batteries in it. So the blimp idea is on hold. But we'll think of something new soon, I imagine.

Last week I finally found "Knights of the Old Republic" for $30. It's a computer game that came out over a year ago to rave reviews, got the game of the year award, etc. And it's Star Wars! And it's done by the company that did another game I like. So I've been leading a ragtag band of Jedi, droids, Wookiees, and the odd orphan or two to try to stop the Dark Jedi Sith from conquering the galaxy centuries before anyone hears of some kid named Anakin Skywalker -- it's very cool and fun.

Hmm. So that was about ten minutes of reflection. And a surprisingly long first post -- all I had planned to say was hey, I'm here, I had a good weekend.

Blast. Looks like I'm hooked.

Almost Done

Well, thanks to the 3-day weekend, the kitchen is almost done. We still have to sand down 1 wall, and do touch-up. I'm about half done with the curtains. They are really abominably cute. And they weren't exactly the easiest things I've ever made. I'm pretty proud of myself. The stove is now free of plastic, so I'm not going to be able to use that excuse not to cook anymore.

I actually got a lot done this weekend. I got my hair cut, which was about a month overdue. I used the steam vac on a couple rugs that desperately needed it. Actually, the whole house needs it, but that just isn't going to happen. Of course, Zoya threw up on the rug in the dining room almost as soon as she was allowed back in there. So, I'll have to do that spot again. That's why I got the thing, though.

We went to Becca's last night for lasagna. The dogs had fun, although I think Zoya is somewhat disturbed by the directness of Bennett's attentions sometimes. She gave him her one-fanged snarl a couple times.

If you're reading this, you obviously found your way to my new site. It took me a while to figure out how to set it up. We had internet access at home this weekend for about 24 hours. That was just enough time for me to get everything moved around. It was back down again by yesterday.