Tag: spontaneity is go!

  • WordCamp Philly: Dev Day! (Part 2)

    I wasn’t planning on attending the second day of WordCamp Philly, since it’s focus is developers, of which I am not one (yet). I’m gradually sliding deeper down the rabbit hole, and was certainly helped along by the main event yesterday, but still not at a level at which I would consider myself a developer, even a wimpy amateur one.

    But, a couple people said I should come anyway, and today’s event was even more conveniently located for me, so once again, I figured Why not? and headed on down! And once again, I’m oh-so-glad I did!

    Dev Day is more free-form and hands-on than the main event, and a smaller group, so everybody’s in one [really sweet] room, hanging out and working on things and enjoying cookies as big as my face, punctuated by some informal presentations. Much to my surprise, this included a Q&A time with freaking Matt Mullenweg (co-founder/creator of WordPress (among other things), and occupant of the coolest domain name I know of, ma.tt), which tended toward the future of WordPress and the internet in general. Also, silliness.


    https://twitter.com/HTMLbyJoe/status/260102904046825472


    https://twitter.com/jcasabona/status/260106170159734784


    https://twitter.com/melchoyce/status/260109060307812352
    https://twitter.com/jcasabona/status/260107984888283140


    https://twitter.com/jcasabona/status/260112705409667072
    (Poor guy must have like 100 @ mentions from today!)

    Jason’s hidden talent was also revealed:

    And I even found a collaborator to work with on that calendar of nerdy events idea!

    When the official day wrapped up, we migrated across town to Barcade, “a hybrid craft beer bar and—yep, you called it—video arcade,” (Inc.) ← (the article I mentioned a couple times tonight, by the way!) which boasts a lovely selection of beers and 80’s arcade games, as well as a really unique and tasty assortment of sandwiches and such!

    The evening flew by in a constant stream of great conversations. I got to chat with Matt for a while about a variety of things, including libraries and NASAtweetups/socials (by which he seemed quite intrigued!), so he gets my seal of approval! Talked for a bit with a couple from Lancaster, and Robert from North Carolina, and at times all the separate conversations sort of merged… occasionally taking odd turns… at some point the “fun fact” I learned on the radio this morning — that if you spin a monkey at higher than 145rpm its brainstem separates from its spinal cord D= — was actually relevant (re: Felix Baumgartner’s jump)! Towards the end of the night, I discovered that the guy I’d been sitting next to lives a 10 minute walk from my house! It’s that sort of small, crazy world!



    Heading out, I gave Chris (who wore the awesome penguin costume yesterday) a ride to the train station. Unfortunately, there were some issues with the roads we were on suddenly veering off unannounced or disappearing altogether, resulting in a depressingly impressive number of wrong turns and wild guesses, a surprise detour to New Jersey, and the “scenic tour” of far too much of Philadelphia!

    Thank goodness, we had plenty of time, so managed to still get him to his train and home! He said he’d owe me a beer next time he’s in town, but really I owe him one or three for how absurdly long it took to get there! (I promise I actually have a decent sense of direction! Just not tonight apparently!) But hey, we had a fun little adventure?! All’s well that ends well!

  • So, WordCamp Philly! (Part 1)

    Last night, thinking about my previous post, I wondered if there was some sort of consolidated calendar or website listing all the conferences, conventions, concerts, tweetups, meetups, and other random events and gatherings which draw the geeky masses, and for lack of a better search term, googled “nerdy events” (true story).

    I haven’t found such a listing yet (let me know if you know of one), at least as I had imagined it (maybe I’ll make one myself?), but in the clicking around, I discovered that WordCamp Philly was:

      a) a thing that exists! (a conference about WordPress!)

      b) tomorrow! (by which I mean today, since I made the discovery of it happening “tomorrow” yesterday — it happened today. Though technically, now it’s tomorrow so it really was yesterday… (ow.))

    My job is largely working in WordPress, and this blog is WordPress, so a conference all about WordPress is clearly relevant for me both professionally and for fun. I suspected, and soon confirmed, that this was something Jason, of Stranger Studios, (who built the WordPress-powered websites I live in at work) would be involved in, too. Since by some crazy random happenstance I happened to discover WordCamp Philly’s existence just in time, I decided to go check it out…

    And boy am I glad I did! I accidentally overslept this morning and wasn’t sure if it would be worth going clear across the city for an event I’d miss the first two hours of, but the lovely chica manning the twitter account assured me I’d still be able to register whenever I got there, and it would be worth showing up, even late, and it only cost $20, so I figured, what the heck?, and went!

    I missed the opening remarks and the first two sessions, but that still left me with five to attend (with four good options in each time slot!) chock full of great, useful, and often immediately applicable info and instruction! The presenters in the sessions I attended (and sounds like the rest of them, too) not only really knew their shit, but were pretty much hilarious — a delightful blend of snarky and silly and professional — and some of them were in Halloween costumes!

    I learned how to create basic WordPress themes from scratch — in rhyme from The Cat In The Hat. Day = made.

    (That session was also “penguinbombed”…) 😀

    The attendees were a pretty top-notch crowd, too! I had expected it would be mostly Philly-area folks — you know, being “WordCamp Philly” and all, and since there are apparently WordCamps all over the country and in a bunch of others too — but there were tons of out-of-state-ers, including guys from California and a surprising contingent of folks who live or have lived in Hawaii, and even Amber from Amsterdam!

    There was even after party, which I wasn’t really planning on going to… and then was planning on just checking out briefly… and then was planning on leaving at a reasonably early hour… but it surprised me with how enjoyable it was (being as I’m really not a crowded party person), both due to being my kind of crowd (I like these people! Even en masse!), and excellent planning (rented out the sizable upper room of a pretty nice bar, with darts and shuffleboard and pool to play, and provided plenty of tasty food and a couple drink tickets). Kudos to the organizers, on the afterparty and the whole event! (Yes, even my reaction to parties is nerdy!) I will definitely be back next year!

    Now, sleep.

  • How I Accidentally Out-Introverted Myself. (And am undoing it…?)

    It’s kind of nuts how it seems like everything happens all at once, or nothing happens at all. For most of the last few months, it’s been the latter. But last week was all crazy social, and it was weird.

    For the full picture, allow me to backtrack a bit. Up until junior year of college, it wasn’t obvious, even to me, that I was an introvert — but that fall absolutely broke my brain (and maybe my soul?) to the point where I couldn’t stand my apartment or the people in it so hard that I basically moved out without having anywhere else to live. I just… left. (I slept on couches in deserted lounges or on friends’ dorm room floors for almost 2 weeks, until the housing lady hooked me up with an empty room for the last month or so of school, so I retrieved the remainder of my belongings and lugged them across campus, and proceeded to pretty much hibernate, except for classes.)

    Senior year was not nearly so drastic/traumatizing, but I got roped into living in an overcrowded apartment again, when I had desperately wanted to just stay in a comfy dorm room with one good friend. The roommates were all people I liked this time, and I made good use of the kitchen and living room in the fall and was reasonably social, but there were just too many of us in not enough space, and there were almost always people who didn’t actually live there hanging around, so it was not particularly conducive to de-stressing this frazzled introvert.

    I loved my friends (now that I had fine-tuned the selection of humans I was willing to spend time with) and really enjoyed my classes, but I was absolutely thrilled to graduate and move back home and have a whole room all to myself! Between my church friends (a handful of whom I consider close friends), three jobs (including Borders and a temporary office gig), and a whirlwind of NASAtweetups and such, I had plenty of human interaction, and was happy to retreat to (/ hide in) the bat-cave in whatever time remained.

    However, eventually, my contract at the office job — and Borders entire existence — ended, there are lulls in between NASA adventures, and my friends are busy people. The third job stuck around, ramped up to pretty much full time, and moved to an actual office, but most days it’s just me and my boss. I’d see church friends at church and occasionally manage to hang out otherwise, and NASA funs do pop up now and then, but after a while, I realized that the vast majority of days, I don’t see anyone but my boss and my parents.

    I gradually realized I had pared-down my social life a little too well.

    As I embraced my introvert-y-ness, I had given up on maintaining friendships that weren’t worth it. I sort of released myself from feeling obligated to spend time with people I just didn’t really like, but had put up with because of mutual friends or because I used to enjoy their company — and I stopped clinging to old friendships with people who didn’t seem to reciprocate.

    This was good. Like weeding the friendship garden. (Holy pants, that was corny!) But, to continue this slightly terrible metaphor, having weeded and pruned, I did not plant anything new, so once a few other things were removed, it was just a little too empty.

    And at that point, I realized I didn’t really know where to go to find new [plants]. The friends I have and have had in the past, I met through school, or church, or work, or some church-or-school-related trip/event. Now that I’m not in school, the folks at church in my age group are both limited and remarkably constant, and there aren’t exactly hordes of new faces at work… well, that’s not particularly helpful.

    I asked my handy dandy internet, and the consensus was basically, “Go do/to things your interested in, and you’ll meet people who share that interest!” Good advice, but as far as I knew, all that fit the bill were NASAtweetups, and at those I mostly befriend people who live far away. Awesome people, but not particularly helpful when you want to hang out at the spur of the moment. I didn’t have any other things to go to to make friends, so not so helpful. So, I remained a bit befuddled.

    But then I wasn’t anymore.

    It occurred to me that the problem probably wasn’t that there weren’t other events/gatherings relevant to my interests, but just that:

      a) I didn’t know what/when/where they were
      and
      b) I had only ever really gone to things that I had some connection to– either it was affiliated with my school or church or something, or I knew someone else there.

    I was used to incrementally expanding my social circles, not randomly jumping into new ones.

    So I decided to just go to things. Do things. ALL THE THINGS.

    Between finding a few random things to go to, and plans with existing friends coming together, last week was the most ridiculously social week in probably at least a year! (Minus NASAtweetup trips, of course!)

    On the way to work the other Friday, I saw a sign announcing a church coffeehouse concert thing that night. So on the way home, I decided to stop, and heard some good music, and ran into some folks I knew from helping with kids’ musicals a few years ago (apparently longer ago than I thought, as their teeny children are now basically grown men… weeeeeeeeird! o_O).

    An email from Bethlehem Brew Works informed me there was a knitting club called “Pints ‘n’ Purls” which meets there on Monday nights, and sounded mighty intriguing. Turned out my boss was going away on Tuesday, so I didn’t have to go into the office, creating the perfect opportunity for a later night in which I could drive up and check it out. I did, and it was quite fun! A little far to be a regular thing for me, but I met some cool people and was sort of inspired by the phenomenon!

    When Marian Call was here the week before, she highly recommended I attend the upcoming Ladies of Ragnarok concert in Norristown on Wednesday, so I thought I’d check that out. I did, and it was awesome! Molly Lewis and The Doubleclicks are awesome, talented, nerdy musicians (instant fan!), who draw a pretty cool and geeky crowd! (Who happened to mention some sort of game gathering at the bar/restaurant I pass going to/from work, that I look forward to checking out soon!)

    Note the cat keyboard. <3[/caption]

    I got to hang out with Rachel and sweet little Gwenny on Thursday afternoon, which happens semi-regularly and is always delightful.

    …As well as Lisa on Saturday, which has been a gorram long time coming!

    And then Sunday, I went to see Looper with a random guy I befriended at the Marian Call show! See? The plan is working already! A new friend! Victory.

    Of course, my reward for all this socializing? A cold. Figures.

  • MarsRoadtrip Part 1: Mars or Bust!

    Two tweetups in one week? Yes please! 😀

    Okay, so technically one was a “Social” – NASA decided to start letting Facebook and Google+ followers in on the #NASAtweetup awesomeness, so they changed the name to #NASASocial – but Canada’s was still #CSAtweetup!

    Two days after Thanksgiving, NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) “Curiosity” rover on an 8.5 month journey to our dusty red neighbor – a journey we knew would end, one way or the other, around quarter after 1am (EDT) Sunday night/Monday morning. In June, as we spacetweeps suspected/hoped, they announced there would be a NASAsocial for the Mars landing, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (where Curiosity was built)! I registered, of course, but didn’t get selected.

    I don’t know if it was the plan all along, or if they were just overwhelmed by the response, but a couple days later they added 5 more NASAsocials, all at the same time (Friday, August 3rd) at different NASA centers! (The first multi-center NASAsocial!) Soon, the Canadian Space Agency announced they’d have a tweetup too, during the landing and the following day.

    I, of course, registered for everything, figuring I’d probably worn out my welcome/luck by now and wouldn’t get in to any official events, but was fine too since there were epic #RogueTweetup plans in the works…

    But then I got one of those lovely confirmation notices… from Canada! So the question was if I could get my passport renewed in time! …and then, I got ANOTHER confirmation notice, this one from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio!

    Cue a moment of panic as I tried to decide which I’d rather go to – be part of the first multi-center social, or be in a space agency for the landing itself? (Surely I couldn’t go to both… two tweetups for the same landing?!)

    But then the “Why the heck not?!” sector of my brain kicked in with the realization that this wasn’t exactly trying to be in two places at once (there’s a whole Saturday in between!), and neither NASA nor CSA had said anything to the contrary, so theoretically, I could do both… It was just a matter of sorting the logistics.

    Sorting the logistics

    I looked at flights, but then remembered I’m not quite old enough to make rental cars a viable option, and the thought of trying to mooch rides between airports and hotels and space centers in two different cities (countries!) when I wasn’t sure who I’d know where, plus getting home from the Philly airport at the end (since my family’d be on vacation by the time I got back)… well, it sounded like it would be less exhausting/stressful to just drive!

    A quick consultation with the GoogleyMaps confirmed each leg of the journey would be a full-but-reasonable-day’s drive (about 8/10/8 hours, respectively), and I like driving and traveling alone… plus, I mean, what’s the difference between my typical work day, in which I spend 8 or 9 hours sitting in a chair staring at a screen, and spending those hours sitting in my car staring out the windshield?!

    So I declared it a plan, and surprisingly, though they didn’t see the appeal, neither parent tried very hard to dissuade me. My dad informed me that my uncle’s house is within a reasonable commute to NASA Glenn, so I called him up and made plans to crash there for the first stop, and thanks to recommendations from CSAtweetup’s lovely organizer, Magalie, I found a nice and very reasonably priced hotel near CSA HQ, so I had the “somewhere to sleep” thing covered.

    The only other question mark in this nutty plan was whether I could get my passport renewed in time for Canada to let me in at all, much less to a secure government building… an extra $60 and applying in person will get you a passport pretty quickly, but the earliest available appointment was Monday morning the week I’d be leaving, so I was a bit nervous, but it turns out, the Philadelphia Passport Agency is seriously on their game!

    I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get there, park, find it, and get through security, so I left plenty of cushion time… and ended up arriving at 9:05, when my appointment wasn’t until 10. Despite warnings that they wouldn’t let you in more than 15 minutes early, and you could be waiting several hours regardless of your appointment time, they let me in right away, checked to make sure I had everything I needed and gave me a number, I waited about half an hour, had my “appointment” (through a bullet-proof ticket window), and was walking back to my car before my scheduled appointment time, assured my passport would be ready to pick up on Wednesday morning! (which it was, and the return visit took all of 3 minutes.) Solidly impressive for government bureaucracy!

    Passport in hand, I *finally* felt free to get excited! I loaded up the iThing with music and audiobooks, threw some clothes and my toothbrush in the car, and roadtripped the heck out of Thursday!

  • A Tale Told in Tweets – featuring Lisa and John Scalzi

    A day that did not start out particularly well:

    • I was bummed that clouds had kept me from being able to catch a glimpse of the Transit of Venus in person Tuesday night.
    • I was extra upset because I didn’t realize it was the day Enterprise was to be brought by barge to her new home on the Intrepid, and so couldn’t make it up to New York in time to watch!
    • Enterprise was damaged in transit and that made me sad.
    • When our office intern came back with lunch, mine was not what I ordered/wanted, and kind of lame.

    It was just one of those days… but they I saw this tweet:


    https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/210429187503296512

    …One of my favorite authors heading for my city (and terrorizing fellow train-goers)? That has potential. 🙂 So I asked what was bringing him to Philly…


    https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/210430530502664192
    and, of course


    Lisa saw this exchange and expressed envy, which was followed by the following sequence of tweets:

    Me: Cooooome to me! I will bring you to @scalzi!

    Lisa: [this one mysteriously disappeared, but was something along the lines of “Waaah work til 5.”]

    Me: Screw work, leave at 4! Plenty of time then!

    Lisa: …do you think I could make it? With the traffic?

    Me: Yes, the sooner the better, but if you leave by 4, you’ll make it.

    Lisa: I’m in, let’s do this thing.

    !!! *gasp* I seriously never expected her to agree. We play this game a lot. But she’s “responsible” and busy, so she hardly ever goes along with my crazy drop-everything-and-come-hang-out-with-me-schemes! But this time…


    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210462664634286080

    And she did! We both bailed out of work early and converged on a random shopping center parking lot not too far out of the way for either of us, joined forces, and headed downtown! While I drove, she tweeted:


    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210491275626029059

    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210492024036655105

    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210492371673153536

    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210495668387721218

    We found our way to a parking spot, the bookstore, and the little corner of the 3rd floor where Mr. Scalzi was reading a new secret short story. Which was awesome. But secret, so that’s all you get to know about that.

    Then he read an excerpt from Redshirts, which is not secret, because you can buy and read it, but I’m not going to tell you about it, because you should buy and read it!

    The scene he chose to read was chock-full of witty banter, so rather than read the back-and-forth himself, he brought out a surprise special guest!


    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210507538091868160

    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210508265606492162

    This was followed by some seriously entertaining Q&A time, during which he mentioned that there will probably be more books in the Old Man’s War series, which makes me ridiculously happy!

    He talked a bit about his writing process and style, which are both devoid of superfluous details. I hadn’t really noticed as I read his books, but thinking back, you do realize that there’s not a whole lot of description, whether of the characters appearance or their surroundings or whatever, unless its actually relevant to the story. It works for him style-wise, keeping the plot moving rather than lingering amid pages of endless adjectives, but it’s not like he’s leaving things out – it’s not even in his mind. He tends to figure out the particulars only as he needs them, rather than planning everything out in advance.


    He hung around a bit to meet folks and sign books… the bookstore gave half of us panic attacks when they apparently ran out of copies of Redshirts – they thought they had more than that, but couldn’t find them for the longest time! Finally one of them found the other box of books so the rest of us could buy ours and get them signed. Though I had been one of the first few people to get down to the register, I was one spot too far back in line and had to wait for the second batch, so by the time I got my copy and got back upstairs, we ended up being just about the last people to get our books signed. But that was actually okay, because we didn’t feel quite so rushed as those sorts of lines tend to be.


    https://twitter.com/PetEditor/status/210534597111459841

    Scalzi’s good people. (By the way, he blogged this too!)

    So, yay random awesome things happening!


  • Enterprise over NYC

    I drove home from DC on Saturday evening, and Enterprise was scheduled to fly (via SCA) from DC to New York on Wednesday morning, so since I hadn’t really gotten any work done (or even seen my boss in over a week, I figured I should actually go to work for a few days before taking off on another random adventure, and thus figured I’d miss this one…

    But then there was weather, and the ferry flight was pushed to Friday. Still wasn’t planning on going…
    And then, all of a sudden, I was.

    Thursday night, whatever scrap of sanity/restraint I had left snapped, and I bought a bus ticket. @CraftLass was getting a group together to watch the flyby from a pier in Hoboken, so the backdrop would be the New York skyline… and I figured out that I could take the train to the bus station in Philly, the bus to Newark, another train or two to Hoboken, meet up with the spacetweeps, watch the flyby, catch the train(s) back to Newark, bus back to Philly, train home(ish), and drive to the office by 2pm, still getting a solid couple of hours work in.

    It sounded kind of nuts, but apparently I am completely unable to resist once-in-a-lifetime views. So Friday, at the buttcrack of dawn, I was up and off!

    Of course, my brain wasn’t quite functional at that hour, so I was waiting on the wrong side of the train tracks until it was too late and thus missed my train, had to drive like a lunatic to 69th Street Station to get the subway to 30th Street just in time to run to my bus, but I made it!

    The bus even had pretty decent WiFi, so I got to watch the Soyuz landing on NASAtv on my iPad! I figured out the train to Hoboken, which dumped me out right by the pier I was aiming for, found the crew, and waited for Enterprise!

    SpaceTweeps waiting for Enterprise (Photo credit: Scott Orshan)

    And she was definitely worth the trip!

    DSC_0163

    DSC_0164
    Once again, we happened to be perfectly positioned and she flew right over our heads!
    DSC_0165
    This is how close she actually was! Not zoomed in at all!

    DSC_0166

    DSC_0170
    The flew much further on the New Jersey side than we expected, playing peek-a-boo through Hoboken!
    DSC_0174
    Never did line up with the NY skyline… this was as close as we got!

    Another gorgeous flyby! <3 (They'll be bringing her over to the Intrepid by barge sometime over the summer... hope I can make it back up to see that!) It looked like I had a decent amount of time before I needed to head back in the general direction of my bus homeward, so we went to grab some quick food, but between folks getting distracted talking to other shuttlespotters, and slightly misjudging how long it would take me to get back to Newark, I didn't get there in time, and had to daisy-chain transit systems all the way home! Two different PATH trains, NJTransit, SEPTA Regional Rail, SEPTA subway, and a 15 minute drive later, I was home. Unfortunately, it took a couple hours longer than the bus would have, so the still-working-a-half-day plan didn't quite pan out, but I regret nothing! :P :D

    *The STS-134 tweetup began one year ago today! Happy tweetupversary, 134ers!

  • CSTS Philly

    Kicking off what promises to be a fairly epic month of smaller-yet-geektastic adventures in between space shuttles (yes, that’s a valid notation of time in my life lately!) was CSTS Philly last night.

    For those who may not know, CSTS = Can’t Stop The Serenity, in which browncoats from all over the world gather in their respective cities to watch the movie, generally goof around, and raise money for Equality Now, a charity Firefly/Serenity creator Joss Whedon supports.

    It’s been happening and growing every year since 2006, and I tried to go the last few years, but never could, for one reason or another.

    Finally, a year arrived when I knew about it well in advance, yet remembered when it got closer, and had no other obligations that night! Of course, when the day actually arrived, I didn’t feel like going anywhere, but Marian Call (who made an awesome album inspired by Firefly and BSG) was coming to play in the area a couple of weeks later, and I had told her I’d take some flyers to put up/pass out there, so that filled in the missing motivation my inner lazy introvert ate, and it turned out to be a really fun night!

    There were refreshments, trivia, raffles, and live music by Sean Faust. At one point he asked if anybody in the crowd could sing, and nobody volunteered, so after a minute I did, and ended up singing “The Hero of Canton” (also known as Jayne’s song) with him, though I didn’t know all the words to the verses, and once folks realized that was what they were being asked to sing, others quickly picked up the slack!

    The main organizer, Matt, called me back up on stage a little later to announce the Marian Call show, which was awesome, and a bunch of people took flyers. We watched Serenity then, as a “Special Hell” screening, in which the audience is encouraged to talk in the theater, adding emphasis and snark a la MST3K, which definitely added an interesting layer to the always wonderful ‘verse. Definitely glad I went! I even won a couple of the raffles, coming home with the book finding Serenity (edited by Jane Espenson) and a copy of the “Done the Impossible” DVD!

  • 134 TweetUp, Take 2!

    On the Monday the 9th, they announced the new launch date would be Monday the 16th, around 3 in the afternoon. Daddy said he had to help the sistercreature move home from school right around then, so wouldn’t be able to go. (Somebody got their priorities on wrong! 😛 )

    I still wanted to drive back down so I’d be able to get around without begging my aunt/uncle or the tweeps for rides, but the parents were none too keen on me roadtripping with other tweeps, (even though I had been talking to them for ages, spent a few days with them in person now, and everyone had to pass a Federal Government background check to get into the tweetup!) and even less amenable to me driving alone, and no friends from home were available for a random vacation that week, so I talked my aunt into letting me borrow their extra minivan once I got down there, and started scrounging for cheap flights.
    "Baby Party" Invitation

    The plan was to fly down either Sunday evening (or super early Monday morning if it was significantly cheaper), since I’d been co-planning a “baby party” for Rachel and Elliott, to be held Sunday right after church, so wanted to stick around for that. (You’re not hallucinating, the last post did say I rushed home from the first one for Rachel’s baby shower, and now I’m talking about another one… sort of. That was a small family-and-close-friends sort of shower, this one was a bigger church-wide celebration for almostMama AND futureDad.)

    This is the invitation I drew (pretty adorable, if I do say so myself!), which we snuck into church bulletins on a Sunday we knew they wouldn’t be there:

    Conflict! D=

    Then, we tweeps were informed that we might be able to have another shot at seeing the RSS retraction (well, re-retraction!)… which was scheduled for noonish the day before launch – AKA, exactly when the party was happening! The real trick was “might”. Being there for RSS retraction and getting to be that close to a shuttle on the launch pad would be an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, if it turned out we could, especially since there will literally only be one other space shuttle on a launch pad ever again… but did I want to miss a party I helped plan for my best friends for a maybe? A long-shot, even? Dilemma! (And we didn’t even know when we would find out if we could go, to at least decide if I could wait to find out before finalizing plans!)

    The more I thought about it, the more I was leaning towards taking the chance that the maybe would pan out, skipping out on the party to get to Florida in time to make the RSS retraction if we were allowed to go. I mean, logically, seeing RSS retraction up close and unobstructed would be a literal once in a lifetime opportunity, while baby showers are clearly not, and in this case, not even limited to once for this baby! And I did technically fly a thousand miles to make it to that one…

    Besides, Rachel is almost as excited about all my crazy NASAtweetup adventures as I am!

    BABY SHOWER vs. SPACESHIP

    Ultimately, no matter how awesome the friends and anti-cheese the shower, that right there should have made it a no-brainer. But, after all, I am the master of making simple decisions way more epic and convoluted than they have any right to be… and then the maybe did solidify into a yes, I saw a picture from a previous tweet-up of how close we would actually be, and I was sold. I found a super cheap flight on Spirit airlines for early Sunday morning, arranged a ride straight from the airport to Kennedy, and told my fellow party planners I wasn’t actually going to be present at said party.

    Meanwhile, it occurred to me that I was going to get a new camera. Not so much a decision as a realization – I’d wanted a nice digital SLR for a couple years, but my inner cheapskate would always slap me upside the head, point at the price tag, point at my bank account, and laugh. “Someday…” I’d think, wistfully. And then, an epiphany of sorts:

    If you are EVER going to spend THAT much money on a camera,
    it BETTER happen in time to take some pictures of that frakking space shuttle.

    Instinct had always said wait until I was a “grown up” with an income I could actually survive off of outside my parents house… but honestly, the value of a camera is not in the camera, it’s in the pictures. What makes it worth the money is how you use it, and I did want to get a nice camera eventually, so in a sense, I would be being a bad steward of the hypothetical future camera if I missed my chance to photograph one of the last space shuttle launches and a ton of other cool stuff, just because I waited too long to buy the camera.

    I thought about going with one of those in-between sort of cameras, with a decent optical zoom and more manual functions than a point-and-shoot, but without interchangeable lenses, but then my mom agreed to chip in a couple hundred bucks as my slightly-early birthday present, so entry-level legit dSLRs were a bit more doable. So I perused the interwebs a bit, asked twitterfolk for their opinions, and ran around to every store I thought might have a decent camera trying to figure out which to get. It would have been nice to get another Canon, so I could use the lenses on my film camera too, but I was ultimately wooed by the Nikon D3100 (plus 55-200mm lens for some nice zoom), which seemed like a better camera than the Canons in the same range – and then was on sale at Best Buy for a hundred dollars less than that!

    And then there was panic.

    Spirit Airlines is cheap, in every sense of the word. The ticket price is very reasonable, comparatively, but/because they charge you extra for everything other than getting your arse from Point A to Point B. For a hopefully 2 day trip, with access to a washer dryer if needed, I didn’t need a lot of stuff, and Spirit wanted at least $28 for even a carry-on, so I figured I’d try to avoid that, and just cram everything in my purse, but I needed to clarify that I could have both my rather large purse and camera bag without paying anything. Spirit’s website was not helpful, so I tried calling them, which was less helpful. (Automated menu was broken, no matter which button you pushed, when you finally got a human, it seemed to be the same guy who barely spoke English and couldn’t understand my question!)

    So I turned to the rest of the internet… which just made it worse. Not only could I not find an answer to my question, I could not find a single positive review of Spirit Airlines. Besides complaints about nickel-and-dimeing, which I was okay with because the total still ended up cheaper than any other ticket, last minute anyway, there were horror stories about planes getting delayed for days because of weather or mechanical problems and Spirit refusing to put passengers on alternate flights or refund/compensate or do anything to help, cabins being horrendously dirty, seats being even more crammed and uncomfortable than usual, and the staff being generally unpleasant.

    Also, in the midst of this, I discovered I didn’t know where my drivers license was, which I’d need both to get on the plane at all, and to get into KSC. Spent the better part of the day before I’d leave looking for it, getting yelled at for not having it with me at all times (it’s not like I need to see it regularly, so I just hadn’t noticed it wasn’t in my bag), trying to pack, and generally freaking out. Eventually my dad found it under a seat in my car, where I had looked, but apparently not well enough.

    Getting there: AKA, more panic.

    The flight was to leave at 6am, from the Atlantic City airport, so I figured we should leave around 3am to have time to get there and get through the airport… and since I rarely get to sleep before then, just didn’t plan to. That evening, I went over to church to help set up for the baby party I wouldn’t be at, and then came home to finish packing (and conceded to maybe having to pay for a carry-on backpack, if they wouldn’t count that as the personal item in addition to purse and camera bag… the rules were really confusing!)

    I knew I had told my dad when and where I had to leave from, so when I went to wake him up and he said we didn’t have to leave for an hour yet, I figured he knew what he was talking about… but when we were getting in the car close to 4:30 and I asked him if he knew how to get there or needed the GPS, and he looked at me like I was a moron, I realized he thought I meant Philly, and had forgotten the flight was from AC, and I had been right with my original time estimate, so now it was going to be a miracle if we got there before the plane left at all.

    Thankfully, traffic at that hour is pretty non-existant, the airport was slightly closer than Dad thought (he was thinking of a different one another side of the city, apparently), and I was able to call the airport itself, who had no way of getting in touch with the Spirit people at the gate (???) but did assure me our ETA would leave me enough time to get through security and to the plane in time, which I did. *phew*

    Spirit’s lines were confusing as crap, and the lady directing traffic was bitchy and condescending about it, but I had ditched even more of my stuff in the car so I could get through faster, so with just the purse full of clothes and camera bag, 1 Days to LaunchI got through security pretty quickly, and ran frantically through the airport, only to discover there was still a frakking line at the gate! >.<

    The plane wasn’t nice, by any stretch, but it wasn’t disgusting or noticeably more uncomfortable than other coach seats, and did manage to leave on time and arrive in Orlando in one piece and on schedule. My ride’s flight was not, and rental car confusion added further delays, so I had a nice long while to sit in the parking garage waiting to leave, but we still made it to KSC and the press site a few minutes before we needed to be on the bus to the launch pad!

  • Intermission

    This post may make more sense if you read the #NASAtweetup posts first. (Part 1 & Part 2)

    So launch was delayed until Monday at the earliest, and the tweeps were all scrambling to see if they could stay. For most folks, it was a matter of seeing if they could get another day or two off work and rearranging flight/hotel reservations to accommodate a few extra days on the space coast to see the launch.

    For me, however, there was no question of if I could/would stay to see the launch. There is absolutely no way I’m missing a chance to see the space shuttle launch from this amazingly close! With a portable job and relatives to crash with, I’d stay til Christmas if I had to.

    No, the question was, “Hmm… not launching til at least Monday, eh? Well, it’s Friday, and I’d like to be in Philly for Saturday afternoon… that’s enough time to fly home and back, right?”

    Yep, you heard me.

    Remember what I said about not having a reasonable bone in my body?

    See, my dear friend Rachel is having a baby, and her surprise baby shower was Saturday. I wasn’t expecting to be able to be there, once the tweetup date had been moved from mid-April to the end, since the launch was supposed to be Friday afternoon, and with a couple gazillion people there, traffic would be all sorts of impossible getting out of the area afterward… and since we drove down, there literally wouldn’t be enough hours between when we could leave and when the shower would start, even if we drove straight through…

    But with the delay, it occurred to me that this trip really hadn’t cost me much, so I had just enough time and money to fly home for the shower and fly back for the launch, and drive home with Daddy as planned.

    He, of course, thought I was insane. But when I get an idea in my head, it’s hard to stop me, and I had decided I wanted to go to Rachel’s baby shower!

    Surprise!

    I found a reasonably-priced flight for Saturday morning that would get me back just in time, and my mom volunteered to pick me up at the airport. It was pretty funny, because I talked to Rachel via email Friday night, so she knew about the delay and that I was still in Florida… then.

    So when I turned up in her house the next day, she was pretty surprised! ^_^

    It was kind of epic, and just as well that I came home for it, because now it sounds like it’s going to be a little while before the next launch attempt. They’re not setting a new date yet (until they make sure the part they’re replacing fixes the problem, I guess), but not before the 8th, they say, so Dad’s driving home, and once we get a date, we’ll see if he can go back, and if not, I’ll find a flight back! One way or another, I will see Endeavour fly!