So here's the deal:  I made plans two months ago to take a few days off from work, combined with the Labor Day weekend and go to visit Aki (aka mshollie) and relax.  Everything's going according to plan until the week I'm scheduled to leave.  That's when Mother Nature decided to throw a curve ball and spin up a tropical system just off the Louisiana ( Read more... )

[The blog is Achenblog, run by Joel Achenbach.  It's a very laid back area, no real political battles there but a nice social area to discuss science, life in general, movie quotes, bad jokes and bears.  Don't ask.]

I'm like you a lot, Joel, having grown up in 1968 and 1969 as a 9 year old kid dazzled by the live images from the moon (Apollo 8), ( Read more... )

Ever since moving to Houston, my emotional mood has swung around nearly 180 degrees.  In Fort Walton Beach, the job I was doing was pretty much a dead end, no opportunity to progress and expand my skills and abilities.  But now, here in Houston, I'm able to figuratively stretch my wings and get involved with new things and opportunities that didn't ( Read more... )

Whatever you can say about eBay (and there's a lot that can be said about eBay, just not things you can publish in a family journal), it does have some good purposes.  20 years ago, if you were looking for historical memorabilia you either had to have a store local to you that specialized in that sort of thing, or knew of sources through the mail ( Read more... )

Just had to giggle at this one...


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Hard to believe I've been here so short a time, yet it feels like I've been here for much longer than that.  All the misery and dreariness over working in Fort Walton Beach has totally evaporated, and being here working with the Space Exploration group has been both enjoyable and challenging.  From what I've been told by the person who hired me (he ( Read more... )

...I love tweaking folks in the forums.  Not the comic forums, but the national news and sports forums.  New York Times, Washington Post, other areas where I can occasionally cut loose with the kind of sideways thinking I can do.

Here's an example... this was from the ESPN forum on Wright Thompson's recent article about India's best known and most ( Read more... )

I stumbled across a bit of information at work today.  Seems that the Johnson Space Center is organizing a bus trip leaving Houston to go to the launch of Endeavour in late April.  Leave JSC on Thursday, get over to Orlando on Friday, see the launch on Saturday, and then back to Houston by Monday.  The cost of the trip isn't bad, considering... but ( Read more... )

So I get over to the HPSC (Houston Product Support Center) where the tour is going to be... and find out (along with the person who told me otherwise) that no, cameras would not be allowed.  Boo hiss.  And here I was so hoping to get a shot of folks in the mockup.  Ah well... it was still a fun time. looking at all the work they do (and the work ( Read more... )

Now *this* is the sort of stuff that is another reason I moved to Houston.  Tomorrow, our IT department (including my manager who is in from Kennedy Space Center) will be taking a tour of the facility where they are working on what is called the "Commercial Crew Development" program (CCDev for short).  This will include a visit to the actual mock- ( Read more... )