Quick Update

The movers came monday and dropped everything off.  A few important boxes had to be dug out of the second bedroom, and one glass panel from the curio cabinet lost a corner, but so far things seem to be intact.  However, it’s keeping us very busy.
Today comcast came to install cable and internet.  Except they didn’t get internet to install, even though both of our computers aren’t having any other troubles, they are trying to claim it’s our computers.  Both of which are erroring out in the same way.  The chances of that?  hmm…so yeah, comcast is not making me happy, especially since the tech support people were completely useless and they can’t send a new technician until next tuesday.  So I’m going to call them tomorrow again and talk to someone else.

So, basically, we’re doing ok.  The apartment is working out better than we expected, which is good.  I’ll update more later.  Very tired and as always have to get up in the morning.  I hope everyone is doing well.  I feel like I haven’t talked to anyone for a long time.  It’s not necessarily true, just feels that way.  But it’s alright, I’m fine.  :-)  Sleep calls!

Catching up

I’m not sure where the time went, to be honest.  I worked a little late each day to make up for the time I missed to go pick up the car.  But who knows.  I did some reading and such, just didn’t get around to blogging.

So, the car is pissing me off.  Carmax clearly didn’t inspect it.  It has no windshield fluid.  Today I put a full gallon in and I still can’t see it in the tank, so this thing had to be empty.  I can’t see the coolant, which is a much bigger deal.  That means it’s very low, and they are going to get a piece of my mind tomorrow.  There is something not right with the starter.  It takes far too long to kick over, especially for a car with only 25,000 miles.  How were they storing this car? So yeah, I’m just a little pissed off at this shoddy work.

Work, however, is going well.  I’m a bit ahead of schedule, though I’m not sure I’m retaining enough yet, so I’m going to spend more time studying when I’m not in class this week.  I know I need to get the different communication bands better so I don’t screw that up when talking to people.  I also want to spend more time going over my systems so I’m able to follow things in meetings and emails.  It’s nice to have the video lessons to learn from though, as it’s easier to stay awake and pay attention to that than the manuals.

What’s been interesting this week is I have dreamed about work related stuff every night.  I’ve never had a single space dream before that I know of, and now it’s present all the time.  They aren’t stressful or anxiety filled dream.  Instead I have this sense of training or preparing in my dreams, which is interesting.  I’m so fully dedicated to this job, even though it’ll be a while before I’m doing much more than studying.

Thursday I took part in an interesting team building/communication exercise.  I’m thinking it would be good to try for the Jedi community online because it actually requires that the participants are in different locations.  So we’ll see if it’s useful or not.

On the home front, we discovered that the piano is a really great way for Carrie to process and communicate what her subconscious is dealing with.  I’m quite glad I bought it, it’s already been a great help.

I guess that’s it for now.  We’re waiting on housekeeping since we have to be here with the cats around.  Then we’ll drop off the rent and head to Galveston for some water de-stress time.  It’ll be fun. 

The end of the week

So many things.  First, my car decided gas was not important, causing me to come up with multiple ways to get to work thursday.  I got rides, so it all worked out, and I managed to rent a car thursday night after I deposited my check.  They gave us a free upgrade to a Toyota Highlander, which is badass!  lol  Too expensive for us anytime soon, but it’s a nice vehicle.  So, that night we went to Olive Garden and picked up a few things.  Carrie got her own Nintendo DS since we have so many games that we both want to play.

Thursday we got to visit the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, which is neat.  The water is so blue, I couldn’t get over it.  We got to watch two astronauts train a bit, though it’s hard to see much without being in the water.  It’s pretty neat to see the scale of the trusses for the station though.  You can only fit half within the length of the pool.  It’d be pretty neat to get in there some day.  This is motivation to get scuba certified. 

Friday we got to tour the crew support areas - suits, food, that sort of stuff.  It was interesting, but being quite tired it wasn’t quite as exciting as I wished.  But it was still worthwhile.  We also got to tour the other simulator areas, including the working toilet.  That was certainly interesting.

Friday we also got to meet our boss, the head of MOD.  That was pretty cool.  The most useful perhaps was realizing that other people view MOD as being arrogant because of how passionate we are about our jobs, and then how confident we can be.  I also learned that the various centers don’t really work together, due to the way the government set up NASA.  All important things to learn.  Plus, it’s good to know who your boss is!

Today I got the car towed to the mechanic.  They later told me the gas tank has to be replaced, and a new one is $600.   Total for everything I needed was around a grand.  I realized that  I would rather spend that money on a down payment for a new car, so I decided to look around.  I found a 2007 Corolla S for under 15 grand and decided to try for it.  And they gave me the loan!  So monday I’m getting my car towed to Carmax and giving it to them because I don’t have the ability to get rid of it any other way with short notice.  Then I get to take home a nice shiny car!  Yay!  I’m so happy.  I figure in a few months I’ll try to refinance the loan once I’m showing good payment history and cleaning up my credit at the same time.  I’m sure I’m getting screwed on the interest, but it’s just temporary.

I’ve also been on a quest for pants, which has failed.  It’s so hard to find decent fitting pants that are also somewhat cheap.  It doesn’t help that I’ve gained just enough weight that I’m in between sizes.  I need to get my ass in gear and start dropping it!

Oh, our other fun thing is a new keyboard!  It wasn’t very much money and it’s an easy thing to just play around with.  It’s cool because it’s helping Carrie open up to her hidden musical abilities.  We’ve both been feeling a draw to the piano for months now, so I felt it was time.
And now, it’s time for bed.  I’m sleeping like crap still, so I’m exhausted.  Plus, I don’t need to screw up my sleep schedule any more.

And one last thing.  In case it isn’t clear, I love my job!

Training Day 3

It’s interesting to start the day trying to learn what went wrong with our shuttle disasters so we don’t make the same mistakes.  Thankfully the culture of NASA has shifted a lot to safety first.  But it’s always tricky to balance risk.  Hopefully I’ll make the right call in the future.

The fun part of the day was touring the rocket park and building 9.  The rocket park is basically the Saturn V inside.   It’s interesting to look at things with the new eyes of being part of the space program.  Building 9 was the best part.  We got to climb around in the shuttle mockup.  I took a bunch of pictures.  We got to look at lots of other mockups from the outside, but we did get to walk in the payload bay of the shuttle, which was neat.  We got to go into a few station modules.  The main JEM module is kinda neat.  Low fi but with amusing models of animal experiments.  I wonder if they’re really putting fish on orbit.  The idea just blows me away, though apparently small animals don’t do so well on orbit.  I guess we’ll find out.

We got to see the MPLM from the inside, which also got us a closer look at some of the other modules, though we couldn’t see the US LAB because the prime crew was training in the airlock and they obviously get priority.  I’m also glad we got to see the Soyuz.  I didn’t realize how crowded it was in the commanding area, but the living area isn’t that bad above it.  And the Russians certainly had some good solutions to engineering problems.  If we could just use the best ideas from everyone. But it’s not easy to get people on board for that sometimes.

So today was a good day at work.  Unfortunately, my car decided it was done.  The gas leak greatly increased tonight for an unknown reason and is undriveable.  Thankfully I am paid tomorrow and can put it in the shop over the weekend.  Yay rental car!  I worked out 3 contingency plans for tomorrow.  First I had emailed my group hoping someone would check their email at home.  While I waited I realized I could walk the 3 miles, but that would leave me very hot and sweaty.  I looked into the bus, which only goes to the center at 8:52, which is an hour late.  And then I realized there is a shuttle van that runs between the various USA centers at some interval.  The nearest center is only a block and a half away or so, which was my best option.  At 10 or so, my mentor called offering me a ride, so I didn’t need any of them.  Hooray!  Tomorrow I’m going to find a way home, and hopefully get someone to drive me to the bank right away so I can then rent a car and be good to go.

And now, it’s quite late and time for bed.  I’ve had a very full day.

Full day

Where to begin…well, to start the day off, Carrie had a seizure while I was at breakfast and hit her head, twice I’m guessing.  First she hit her eyebrow on the counter, giving herself a bone bruise and goose egg.  Then she hit her head on the floor.  She has a nice concussion now.  The hotel was quite nice and paid for her cab to the ER though, since it happened on their property.  It wasn’t their fault, but it was still nice.  We have no idea why she’s having seizures, as her medicine level is where it belongs.  Hopefully the epilepsy center will see her and figure it out.

Today was another day of training academy.  We learned a bit about space physiology and then station stuff.  Even though I’ve made it through much of my fam (familiarization) manual I found it more interesting than the other stuff because it’s helping me learn the multitude of things expected of me.  We got to ask a lot of questions, and learned how few answers there are. lol

In the afternoon we watched the discovery channel’s special on the Columbia disaster.  There’s something a bit eerie seeing and hearing the last communications we had with them before they broke up.  Tomorrow morning we’ll go over it more in depth with someone who trained the crew.  I don’t expect that to be the easiest class.

The last part of the day was a tour of mission control.  We got to go into the Apollo mission control and sit down.  It was funny because a tour was in the tourist area in the back.  I bet they were jealous. ;-)  I took a few pictures of the console.  It’s a trip to be in there.  We also got to visit the bat cave, which is the projection room.  After that we visited FCR 1, which is the ISS mission control.  There I saw Shannon Lucid signing off her role as CAPCOM as the ISS crew had started their sleep cycle.  So that was cool, even if I wasn’t close enough to say hello.  We also stopped by the other flight control rooms being used for shuttle/hubble sims for the upcoming mission.  All in all, an interesting tour.

I don’t remember what we’re doing tomorrow honestly.  Too tired.  I’ve been refreshing my memory regarding my graduate thesis so I could rerun some points for my advisor.  He’s writing the paper for publication.  I hope I am giving him the right numbers.  I’ll have to ask him if he wants a graph or not.  But I have to get to bed asap so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

You know, I’m super busy, and I’m in tons of classes, but I love my job!  And I figured out I will be training astronauts always or the majority of the time because the class I’m assigned to is for crew only, at least on the upcoming schedule.  Everyone else takes it online.  How awesome/intimidating!  lol