Weekend Report

The weekend started off nicely with several happy hours at Boondoggles with the peeps. As always it was fun, if not hot and sticky out on the old deck. The rest of the weekend was pretty chill. Soccer game Saturday afternoon we lost, boo. But note to all others, if you want to stay on Nujoud's good side in a game, don't be a tool and shoot a goal when the keeper is lying on the ground with a twisted knee for a good long time before you get the ball. Also after shooting said lame goal on an empty net, DO NOT celebrate right over said keeper still lying on the ground in pain. In fact don't celebrate at all because you should have showed some class and kicked the ball out instead. WTF people??

I also tried to go flying Sat evening only to be denied by high winds. Will try again Tuesday morning before the weather has a chance to suck for the day.

As for Sunday, I went for a run and was terribly tired afterwards (see note on humidity above) and the pups got to go for a walk with me after the run. They do love the walk, maybe next time we'll hit the doggie parkie. Sunday afternoon however, I went to see Get Smart with Brent and Alicia. Good Movie!! I watched the show on Nick at Nite as a kid and I thought this movie did a great job updating the show. The comedy was good and not dumb spoof, so for managing to accomplish that, they get big props. We also went back to my place and attempted to make spinach and cheese ravioli with the new pasta machine. So far I have only managed to produce tasty "rustic" ravioli. Which means they look a sight and I will have to continue trying to get something that resembles a ravioli as an end product. Ravioli status must continue.

The Cigarette Smoking Man

Speaking of consipiracies, you don't perhaps think this guy might have anything to do with it? Check out the list of boards he is a member of.

For the record BA stock has dropped $10 (13%) in a matter of 3 days because of this, which means our bonus has dropped almost 50%. There are a lot of unhappy campers.

Bonus Conspiracy

Mulder and Scully sure would be useful around The Boeing Company this week. Every two years employees get a stock award bonus based on the trading price of the stock on June 30th of the year. It is supposed to make us want to "execute more flawlessly" and get a reward for performance as reflected on Wall Street. Whatever, most of us are so far down in the weeds unless I go steal several boxes of Lockheed proposal data I don't think there is anything I can do to actually affect our stock price.

But this morning a massive selloff of Boeing stock started on this Goldman Sachs sell recommendation. This comes exactly 5 days before our award and is especialyl puzzling on the rationale seeing how only good news has come from the 787 program lately, high gas prices are actually a good thing for Boeing since airlines want more fuel efficient planes, the weak dollar means planes are far CHEAPER for foreign companies, and the tanker protest was upheld, all very good news in Boeing-land. Two years ago Boeing announced a half a billion dollar write-off on the doomed Connexion program the day before our award was determined also tanking the stock price.

Conspiracy? Maybe. Awfully sucky timing at a minimum? Definately.

Rain is for Rainbows

Saturday afternoon my soccer game got called early due to lightning in the area. Not a big deal since we were up 3-0, of which I contributed a smashing good header to the upper corner of the net on a cross by Erin, 2 pts for being a girl. Why does no one have a camera to catch the stuff when you do something right? That header goal would have been at least a 5 on the Sportscenter top ten.

Anywho- that lightning eventually turned into a raging thunderstorm in the area. After the storm passed and I was headed to a friends house, I caught this view from the car and had to pull over to get a couple pictures. There was a full double rainbow, although the reflected double was too faint to really pick up. It was too big for one frame, so I stictched the two together to get this.

Another pilot amoung us

Jen Mendeck passed her FAA Private Pilot checkride yesterday. Congrats Jen!

I like my spaceship...

Doggie Kiddie-Door

My cousin Melanie and the family drove down from Arkansas so they could get a tour of NASA for their 1st-grader Lindsey who was super-excited about it. Monday night while at my house, little bro Aaron found a use for the doggie door himself.



We also had a good time on the tour and they seemed to enjoy it. Lindsey was all prepared with questions for me, but I think NASA overwhelmed her a bit and she ended up not asking me many. As she put it, she was too busy trying to "keep it all in her head" to ask me questions. But even I got sight of something for the first time on the tour, in Bldg 9 I noticed that the new moon rover prototype was being worked on.

John Weekend Update

John was also in town this weekend and it sure was good to have him home for a bit even if he did leave shoes in the path for me to trip on. We went to the Yankees-Astros baseball game Friday night to watch the Yankees beat them (which they did and eventually swept the poor 'stros). Alas, he is just about to get on a plane and go back to West Palm... single once again. :(

S&TC Girl's Night

Saturday night the girl's got together in our finest couture-like outfits for food, fun, and conversation followed by an outing to see the Sex & The City movie. Nothing but good times were had and the gift exchange was highly entertaining. I made out with a cute pink clutch which will be gracing many outfits in the future. For a complete set of pictures from the evening, check out Jaime's blog. But the few I snapped are here:

And the Top Chef is....

Stephanie!!!

HOORAY for Stephanie who was the Season 4 and first female top chef winner. She rocks as a chef and has made some excellent looking dishes which I can only assume are super tasty and wish our TV was a scratch-and-taste model. Stephanie also deserved to win for being a super classy girl even when things didn't go right for her, unlike fan nemesis Lisa.

Record Gasaholic

Filled up the tank this morning and set a new record, breaking the $70 mark. Ouch. Makes me want to fill up at half a tank just so it doesn't seem as painful. At least my commute is roughly 1 mile and I don't have to do this very often.

1J Mission Wrap-up

I am shortly to leave the MER, having completed my last shift on console. The summary of what I accomplised:

Emails answered: ~50
Questions from ADCO: 3, maybe 4
Crosswords completed: 4
Barnes and Noble Orders placed: 1
Banana Splits topped with crushed almonds, whipped cream, and cherries: 1

Nobody is Greener than ISS

Josh suggested I calculate the miles per gallon efficiency of the ISS over the the period of the stats posted below. After having to actually do some math, which I so rarely do as an engineer (seriously), I converted the prop use to gallons based on the average of the density between the hypergolic prop used by the RS. For non-spacecraft engineers this means there are two fluids used in the combustion chamber which ignite on contact. So assuming the prop use was 50/50 prop and oxidizer which is probably close that is a density of 11.225 lb/gal. For the 1312 orbits at our altitude, we cover approxiamently 26,058.3 miles per orbit. So, drumroll please, the average fuel efficiancy of the ISS is...

107,850 miles per gallon!!

Take that all you Prius drivers.

Note: This is an updated number at 1:45pm. I realized there was a units problem in the last number posted. People should label if things are meters or KM on our plots.

Console-a-go-go

Tonight is my first shift on console for the 1J (STS-124) mission, the very same one I watched launch live from FL. So in a small way its pretty cool to go from watching to working the flight.

But I also realized that it was during the last mission, 1J/A, I started this blog. Do you sense a trend on how busy we are on-console if here I am again making blog entries? But in this business, especially in the MER, not busy = good, busy = bad, very busy/not sleeping = OMG. Just to pass the milestones between flights some quick ISS (mostly GNC) statistics since this blog started 77 days ago:

-ISS has completed 1,312 orbits of the earth
-Each CMG has made approximately 731,808,000 revolutions for a total of 2,927,232,000 by all four (they don't appear so frail when you look it it like this)
-The mass of the ISS has increased by 14,187kg (the Japanese Experiment Module), or 26,768kg if you count the JEM and the Autonomous Transfer Vehicle (which will depart in Sept)
-We have lost attitude control zero times.
-The RS has burned through 1614.7kg of propellant, of which, 544kg was used just for 29P docking.
-Peggy Whitson (Expedition 16 Commander) broke the record for cumulative time in space for ANY American (not just a woman) with 377 days when she returned home on April 16th. She was also the first female ISS commander, to much the...umm... we'll call it good "humour" by our Russian colleagues who don't find that quite as neat as me.

BAAC-ination

Today I was notified that I have been "accepted" for membership to the Bay Area Aero Club. Guess those personal references didn't come up with anything super fun like a rap sheet or drug habits to keep me from getting in. But next week, I'll get an orientation, pay my dues, and then be able to rent out the club planes. It's almost like I'm a real pilot, almost but not quite yet.

Another FL Picture

I'm back in Houston now and was going through the other pictures from the trip. Thought I'd add on of me and John when he's actually looking at the camera. The pictuer doesn't really show it but he has developed a very distinct tan line across his face from working outside. He wears sunglasses and a hard hat, so the bottom half of his face is well tanned and the top half, not so much. I didn't know my man could tan this much but that's what happens being outside for 3 months with 3 more to go.

Phlo-rita Weekend

This was the weekend I planned to come out to Florida to visit my man. I got in to West Palm Thursday late night. With John working Friday, that left me free to run some errands for him and hit the beach. It was a nice day and I got some rays, a few too many in places there wasn't enough suncscreen too. Oops. Here is the beach though...

Then this weekend was picked to come out here because it just so happens to also be the 1J (STS-124) shuttle launch. John and I drove up Saturday morning. We were there a LONG TIME waiting but we were highly entertained discussing politics, imported british television shows, and sports cars with a Brit on vacation. He was really quite nice here for a couple weeks with his family enjoying the most excellent exchange rate (for him, not us). Eventually the shuttle did launch and it was amazing. I'm glad I finaly got over here to see one, since we are running out of these events.



We also found a very not british person and snapped a pic sureptitiously. I do believe we have a very avid hockey fan here. I think many of us could take hair styling advice from this fellow.

That's all for now, back in Houston in the morning. John will be gracing the H-town crew with his presence in two weeks as well for a weekend.