One-derful

Today was our baby girl's first birthday. There has been a lot of learning and growing over the past year and oh yea Zara did some that too. Our little girl has gone from being that tiny curled up ball in our arms to a happy bundle of energy. She continues to amaze us each and every day and we look forward to year 2 and continuing to grow with her.

For her birthday, we had a big (mostly adults) party with some great barbecue from Bay Area Meat Market and wonderful cake and cupcakes from Erin. Zara held up really well and loved all the people that came to visit her. Not only was today her birthday, but she has been walking holding our hand well for several weeks and this afternoon near the end of the party we even coaxed her into taking her first few steps all by herself. I believe it is truly official, we have a "toddler" on our hands!

Opening Presents:


Our first bite of birthday cake:


Having our cake and eating it too:


It's not a good party unless you are so tired you lay down under the table to rest.

Ultra-cool Urban Living

Growing up in the wonderful Pacific NW means a lot of cultural icons, Space Needle (of course), Tacoma Dome (largest wooden dome stadium), and other things like ferry systems and totem poles. One of the other buildings in Seattle that is a landmark is Smith Tower. I looked this up, but it was one of the world's first skyscrapers built in 1914 and was 6th tallest when built. But I had no idea that a remodel in 1999, turned the pyramid atop the tower was a private residence that a family lives in. Apparently, it used to have a water tank in there as most tall buildings also used to double as water towers. I think this is probably the neatest place I've ever heard of to live, especially in an urban environment. Go to the link to see the slideshow of the residence.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/10/20/garden/21WHOss.html?ref=style

Small Fry

Today was the Booz company picnic which is actually pretty good. We have a small office, somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 people-ish, so we have a good time and it is pretty tight. The funny thing is that over the last year we have had a gazillion baby emails sent out for everyone's new arrival, ours being one of those. So in addition to older kids, there are A LOT of 6-18month olds. We are coming up on Zara's first birthday next week, but it is kinda funny to see her around all the kids. She is the same or older than many but easily smaller. But she is ridiculously cute, so who cares. Incidentally, I only got an Honorable Mention in the dessert baking contest at the picnic today. The "winners" were the single guys that made jello shots. LOL, next time apparently, we need rules, like "must actually be baked" or some better judges. I didn't get a picture at the picnic of Zara but here's a recent one of her helping with the laundry.

Hale-storm

One of the links on this blog, over there --> that has been here for awhile is that of Wayne Hale's NASA blog. Wayne was one of the longest serving Shuttle Flight Directors and moved into program leadership and has been a big influence around the agency for years. While at NASA the last few years he kept a public, official blog with great stories and philosophizing about the agency. He retired a couple months ago and now works for a small space consulting company, but I just found out he now has a personal blog out there to continue the storytelling as he promised.

Here is the link http://waynehale.wordpress.com/. I am very excited about this blog because no longer being an official government blog, he is ...umm... more at liberty to talk frank. He generally was before, but I think it is even better now to have the shackles off.

Tour d'Houston

Last weekend my sister Mona and her husband Shaun came down for a long weekend visit. Little slow getting pictures up, but it was great to have them down and we got to have a lot of fun all weekend. They got to play with their niece a bunch and she got her first 1st birthday present. And since Shaun had not previously been to Houston, all the "Texas" things were on the agenda. In order of accomplishment, this means cream gravy at breakfast, a NASA tour, true brisket barbecue, and a purchase of cowboy boots. I think we hit all the big ones. He also requested a fried twinkie, but we told him he'd have to come back on March during the rodeo to get one.

They did enjoy the NASA tour and here we are in the Apollo Flight Control Room. Don't tell Shaun the phone doesn't go anywhere anymore.


We also went to the shuttle simulator in building 5 soon after the days run was complete. It happened my friend Lia had been filling in as pilot for the day and she let them try some of the leftover astronaut food from the day. Mona and Shaun are now experts in space food service and are ready to fly.

Truth Model

There is a disturbance down in the gulf that will probably develop into a depression today and potentially continue on to a hurricane. When I peaked at the tracking predictions last night this is what it looked like. Did you really need fancy algorithms and computing power to come up with likely land strikes on Louisiana or Florida?

End of Story

This morning I had an old Betty Grable movie on while I was playing with Zara, Pin Up Girl. While I like old movies, sometimes they leave me completely baffled by the endings. Normally, I'd give you a spoiler alert here, but seriously you can tell exactly what the ending is so you might as well keep reading. That and the movie is from 1944, so if you haven't seen it then you likely weren't going to and who cares.

The plot is one of those super believable ones, where the guy is in love with a stage star whose daytime alter ego is as his mild mannered secretary to which he doesn't realize they are the same person. But getting past all that, the movie ends with a way too long and mostly irrelevant musical sequence in which he is in the audience for the big reveal. Which he only figures out because she goes on stage in the same clothes he just saw her in. I know the the guys is a genius!. And then that's it, nothing, "The End", credits roll. Most of the time old movies have very little resolution beyond the 'happily ever after ending'. But in this case it hardly even seems like an ending, more like they just ran out of film after the extraordinarily long music number. Anyone else find the lack of even a pretense of closure in movies annoying even it is supposed to be assumed they live happily ever after?

Big Bites

We've been introducing non-pureed foods to Zara for several weeks now and even the pureed foods I've been making chunkier and less smooth. We didn't have any issues with her continuing to eat what was served up... until last week on vacation. Zara has refused almost all spoon-fed pureed foods for a week now with a few exceptions like yogurt in the morning. She is apparently a big girl now and we have moved right along to regular(ish) foods either finger fed by herself or by us.

The only thing we aren't looking forward to about this is letting her have the spoon. Maybe one night this week we'll just strip her down and let her have at it and see how much food makes it into her mouth.

Yankee'Z

We are up in Connecticut visiting family this week and have been having a great time seeing everyone. But yesterday was our 8th Anniversary and we got tickets to the afternoon Yankees game to take Zara to her first game, see the new stadium, and John's uncle Rick also came. But we had awesome tickets to the Champions Suite, row 4, which includes a private area to get food (free/included) and restrooms and everything. It was an awesome way to see our first game in the new Yankee Stadium, great weather, and the Yanks won in a walk off two run shot by Swisher. Plus, since we were sitting right behind the ball boy we also got a ball from him when the game ended which will be going in Zara's room to commemorate her first Yankee's baseball game. Couldn't have asked for a better game or a better way to celebrate our anniversary.

Also snapped a picture of Zara with her great-grandfather Merancy, who seems to like his second great-grandchild a bunch. We've had a great time up here, but haven't been pulling out the camera a whole lot during the visiting. So I am a bit remiss and don't have a lot of other pictures to post other than one I got from playing outside with daddy.

Minority Report

This has been an interesting week (or couple weeks really) at work on Project Orion. Orion is supposed to be the vehicle that replaces the space shuttle and carries the crew in orbit after being launched on an Ares rocket (or potentially other rockets). The project has been run really well, however the budgets that were projected never materialized so it always "appeared" to be over budget when things got trimmed over the years for the smaller budgets. Don't be misled by people or companies that stand to gain by telling you otherwise because if Orion were to get cancelled they would 'get' that money, nice huh.

Anyway, the powers that be in the executive branch really, really hate Orion, Ares, and all of Constellation and tried to cancel it. Congress is pushing back, but now there is sort of a limbo where we will probably, not certainly continue but at significantly reduced, as in less than the already smaller, budget. The immediate effect of this has been a massive reduction in non-prime contractor staff (e.g. me and my coworkers) in the neighborhood of 60-70% reduction. This week was all the final decisions on the who stays and mostly the who goes. Thankfully, I am staying for now, at least until the NASA budget is approved and Orion either continues to exist with this or more budget. If Orion gets cut again, I doubt very much the project will even be functional.

So the short story is, I am still working on Orion but most of my colleagues are not starting October 1. Which means it has been a tense week, to be followed by several more especially for those more much more dramatically affected than me. Oh, and the first major round of Shuttle layoffs also occur in October given the only 2 maybe 3 flights left and the reduced amount of staff needed to support these and retirement. Anyone looking to invest in cheap real estate may want to check out Clear Lake, TX.