Holy moly, aren’t they adorable? That *might* have something to do with why I took so many photos that it took me two and a half months to get them all processed (over 900 altogethr) and the decent ones (423) uploaded. (If you want to see them all, they’re here.)
First, a couple shots from Hannah’s PA wedding shower back in April:
(There are a few more on Flickr, but I forgot to get out my camera until people had started leaving, so I mostly just took pictures of Hannah and Lydia 🙂 but Hannah has a bunch of lovely pictures – including some of other people on her blog!)
Roadtrip Day!
That Wednesday, I got up obnoxiously early, loaded up the last bits, took a little detour into the city to pick up Hannah’s friend Jess – who had arrived from Perth, Australia the night before – and headed up to Massachusetts! Being July 3rd, we expected the traffic would probably be less than pleasant and could add an hour or two to the drive, so we left plenty early to try to avoid as much of it as possible.
Of course, that didn’t really work at all, and it took us a solid 10 hours (and three full-stop traffic jams) to get from Philly to northeast Mass. I was very happy to have Jess along to keep me company and we had lots of quality time to get to know each other! Fun fact: her parents and mine got married in the same church, just a couple years apart! (First Presbyterian in Bethlehem, PA! Small world!)
We got up there just in time to head straight to the nail salon, where Hannah’s assorted womenfolk were gathering for manicures and pedicures. (It was conveniently located right next to a coffeeshop, where we acquired some much-needed chai before settling in.) Apparently I didn’t take any pictures there – must have been too tired busy laughing and relaxing and catching up with Hannah and her family and meeting her Massachusetts friends and the ladies of David’s family!
Oh, and being indecisive about what color I wanted. They used this fancy nailpolish/gel hybrid concoction called Shellac, which you could layer to make additional colors… so of course I ended up asking for a combo they’d never tried before! It worked out just like I hoped! (Taken at the end of the trip, still impressively unmarred):
(Actually, it still looks pretty good, if a bit grown out, 2+ months later! The fingernails lasted about a week.)
Afterward, a few of us headed over to Hannah’s adorable little apartment and ate delicious wraps from a local place they love, and hung out a while. We were all pretty wiped, though, so before too long we said TTFN and I headed off to find my home for the week – Hannah’s dear friend Willa’s attic guestroom:
I could not have asked for a better place to stay! Willa, her husband Rennie, and their daughters Camilla and Fiona are all super hospitable and awesome and treated me like family. When they say “make yourself at home,” they really mean it. And their home is pretty much my dream house. 🙂
Rehearsal Day 🙂
The next day, a number of us had “secret plans” – rehearsal for the epic flashmob song & dance extravaganza that Hannah and David put together with the help of choreographer-extraordinare, Greg, to surprise… well, everyone coming to the wedding who wasn’t in the flashmob!
Once we’d sung and danced through “Life’s A Happy Song” (from the most recent Muppet movie) enough times that everyone was feeling reasonably comfortable with it – and thoroughly silly and tired – we dispersed. The wedding party headed to the actual wedding rehearsal, and I wandered off to find new shoes to wear to the wedding, since I’d forgotten it was on grass and only brought heels (and sneakers, but not ones I wanted to wear with a pretty dress)!
Then it was time for the rehearsal dinner / 4th of July picnic at… one of David’s relation’s houses.
(I lost track of whose was whose!)
We ate, we drank, we chatted with Hannah and David and their families and friends from various times/places…
Hannah sang a song she’d written (for David, though she didn’t know that when she started writing it!)…
Siblings and cousins toasted and roasted…
The small ones were adorable…
And a good time was had by all. 🙂
This is a really long post! Go to Page 2 to keep reading!
If I tried to list everything I’m thankful for, it would end up being either really abstract (silliness, grace, love, freedom, etc.) or downright molecular (oxygen, water, carbon…)
(Also, infinitely long… moreso because I’m a super-analytical, detail-oriented perfectionist, than actually because I’m grateful for that many things. I mean, I am, but what would really kill the list is the precision and thoroughness with which I would list them, and 2 feet of text later I’d give up, having only described the things that I’m thankful for that are presently on my desk.)
I’m obviously incredibly grateful for the big things like my home and my job and those abstract and molecular things, and most of all, family and friends and puppy obviously top the list, so we’ll skip them for this list, and I’ll attempt to avoid listing components and prerequisites and broad categories, SO…
Thirteen specific, tangible(ish), pretty random things that I am particularly grateful for at this relatively arbitrary moment in time! Alternately titled,
(in no particular order, just as they come to mind. ):
My dog, Rocky.
Ok, I just said I wasn’t going to list the dog, (twice, since he is also family… or maybe thrice since he’s also my friend!) but he is fuzzy and cuddly and delightful (and in snuggle range as I start typing this post), so apparently he’s getting included anyway. He’s a Bichon Frise, almost 12 in human years, and an impressively good communicator for someone who neither speaks words nor writes. Sometimes he’s a bad dog, but mostly he’s just a big fluffy pile of love and adorableness.
Apple Soy Chai Lattes
A couple months ago, I discovered Burlap & Bean offered apple among the many flavor syrups available to add to your coffee or whatever beverage. I thought, “Hmm, I bet that would be good in chai…” and holy hello was I right! It instantly became my “usual”! It is also amusing to see the baristas react, as I seem to be the first to think of it (there, at least), and they’re all intrigued, always saying, “Ooh, I’ll have to try that!” and today one guy told me he finally did, and confirmed it is absurdly delicious. Also, the one girl calls me “Apple Soy Chai Girl,” which makes me smile!
Crochet/Knitting
I sometimes say my attention span is as long as my yarn. My Grandma taught me the basics of crochet when I was like, 6 or so, and I figured out how to knit a few years later, so I’ve been making things with yarn long enough that it’s second nature– the simple repetitive motion only occasionally requires conscious thought, but keeps my hands busy while I pay attention to other things (teachers/presenters/tv/conversations/etc.). It provides a point of focus — a sort of tether to reality, keeping my scatterbrain from wandering — and you get a scarf or something out of it! And I’m the sort who mostly makes up my own patterns, so the figuring out a project/design is a fun, half art/half math puzzle to solve!
Graph Paper
For the aformentioned design puzzling, not just for crochet projects, but for sketching out layouts and all sorts of ideas!
Comfortable Shoes
Almost every day, I wear either my tan sneakery shoes or my black sandals. The sneakers are barely sneakers… soft lightweight almost sock-like sort-of running shoes with elastic instead of laces. The sandals are near-magical slides which I’ve worn pretty much nonstop when its warm-ish for the last 5 years, including a month in Taiwan where we walked way too much, and they’re holding up really well, and perfectly molded to my feet. Every time I wear any other shoes, I’m reminded of how awesome these two pairs are! They feel less like shoes, and more like hugs for my feet.
NASAtweetups and such
NASAtweetups, CSAtweetups, NASAsocials, rogue tweetups, really any gathering of “people from the internet” is bound to be a good time! I’ve written about this before, but I’m especially and specifically grateful to NASA and CSA (and other space agencies doing the same that I haven’t been to yet) for hosting us spacetweeps, educating and entertaining us — and showing us how amazing both the universe, and mankind’s endeavors to explore it, are. And generally making field trips for grown-ups a thing that exists.
Electric/Heated Blankets
The heat in our house doesn’t really reach upstairs (which is confusing, since I was pretty sure heat rises), so a blanket that actually produces heat is very welcome in my bed!
Netflix/Hulu/TV on the internet in general
I love tv, but I can never remember to watch current shows when they air, so I’d miss at least half the episodes if that was the only option. And since I’m all about character development and the long-term plot, I can’t stand seeing episodes out of order or missing them, so I’d pretty much just never watch anything good until it came out on DVD. And since I’m broke, that wouldn’t happen either. So Hulu and individual networks’ steaming video (and occasionally filling in the gaps with sources of questionable legality) are miraculous for keeping up with current shows. And if it’s too old for Hulu, it’s probably on Netflix or will be soon. I can mad marathon all previous seasons of as many shows as I want (and movies too) for a very reasonable $8 a month (which I have now roped my parents into paying, since the whole family started using my account)!
My Car, Neil
I like him. He is cute and shiny and blue and has a cd player and everything works! But I’ve already rambled on about that a bit too… it’s nice having a car that isn’t perpetually breaking!
Tote Bags
There is something to be said for purses and computer bags and cases for various things — consistency and organization and such. But I’m a big fan of simple tote bags. Like one giant-ass pocket you throw everything you need in, sling it over your shoulder, and off you go! Any shape/size/color/design you want, they probably make that tote bag, and if not, you can get one printed! And they’re cheap, so you can keep a bunch handy! And if you spill something on it, or something leaks inside it, just throw it in the wash and dump your stuff in another one. Plus, unlike more structured bags, which stay pretty much the same size whether they’re empty or full, a simple cloth tote bag only takes up as much space as the stuff inside it! *magic*
Connectivity
Ok, this is getting dangerously close to that abstract territory I said I’d avoid, but it’s simultaneously astounding and easy to take for granted, so it’s worth a mention. It’s tangible in smartphones and tablets, anyway. So many places have WiFi, and cellular data networks are finally getting fast enough to be worth using, so the internet is accessible pretty much anywhere, any time! And with technical connectivity comes human connectedness. A certain amount of paradoxical disconnectedness too, but things like Twitter and Skype and Wikipedia and Coursera and Trello and a thousand other sites and apps connect me with people and books and knowledge and tools in every area of human experience and the world geographically! Clearly, I’m a nerd about these sorts of things (and all the things!) but it makes me happy!
Ukulele!
I got a cheap but decently nice uke off eBay a thousand years or so ago, and mostly it has sat on a shelf collecting dust, but lately I’ve been playing it more, and while I still suck, it’s fun! Small enough for my stupidtiny hands to handle easily, and only four strings to keep track of, so I’m having better luck learning than on guitar. I wrote a song for/inspired by Rachel’s sweet kiddo, Gwenny, about a sassy pterodactyl, and managed to figure out a suitable chord progression for it! And theoretically, some day, I will know more than 4 chords! It’s fun!
Cup-a-noodles
Yes, instant ramen in a styrofoam cup. For 50 cents or less. I am poor and like hot food at work. Don’t judge me. Mmm salty chicken-flavor noodles of cheapness.
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.
I made it to my uncle’s house in Akron without incident. My spine was definitely sick of that car seat by the time I got there, but it was not a bad drive! It did, however, seem like the entirety of both the PA and Ohio turnpikes were marked as construction zones, with only 2 patches actually undergoing any construction… o_0 So I was happy to get there, go out for a late-ish dinner (Mexican!) with my aunt and uncle and cousins and then head for bed before too long. Of course, we all know you can’t get proper sleep the night before a tweetup/social, but being horizontal and reading until I eventually dozed off for a couple hours sufficed! Then there were alarm clocks, coffee, and sunlight (in that order) and I was off to Cleveland!
NASA Social @ Glenn Research Center
A slightly frantic arrival, in typical “me” fashion, because (though I left on time) I didn’t see the meeting point, and took a little detour through GRC’s parking lot before finding my way across the highway to actual registration, but I made it just in the nick of time! On the bus heading to the briefing center (back across the road where I’d just been!), I discovered that @KelleyApril was also present, by way of a tweet saying she’d seen me arrive! (Funny thing, being sufficiently busy between work and planning a fairly last-minute tweetup/Social trip that I missed most of the Twitter/Facebook chatter about who was going to be at which Socials, so neither of us knew that the other’d be there!)
Anyways!
GRC’s Center Director, Ray Lugo, welcomed us with a couple of fun facts I didn’t know about Curiosity, including:
Before coming to Glenn, he had worked as the Launch Services Program Director at KSC, and was actually the person who selected the Atlas V rocket as the launch vehicle for Curiosity! That seems to have worked out pretty well. 🙂
The rover was named by a then-6th-grader from Kansas, Clara Ma, who submitted the winning contest entry – Curiosity!
(He got to head out to JPL for the landing… “Perks of being Center Director!”)
Then we got a brief hello from STS-134 astronaut Greg Johnson, also known as @Astro_Box! I was hoping he’d stick around for a while so I could say hi and maybe get a picture with him, since I got to watch his launch from so delightfully close! But when he asked if anybody had any questions, I couldn’t think of an actual question (my brain was slightly overloaded with excitement!) …and apparently nobody else could either! Unfortunately, by the time I realized it was now or never, he had surmised nobody had any questions, and had another event to get to, so I never got the chance to properly meet him! 🙁 It was still very cool that he took the time to stop by though! (and take/tweet a quick picture!)
We had a few minutes to mingle and check out some of the exhibits in the lobby, and then we were off on a whirlwind tour of Glenn Research Center! – which is painfully punny, since my group’s first stop was at the 10×10 Supersonic Wind Tunnel (which just means the test section is 10ft high and 10ft wide, and uses compressors and the shape of the tunnel rather than just big fans to get the air flowing faster)! It was cool to see another wind tunnel after visiting Langley Research Center in the fall, where we saw their transonic wind tunnel, which operates right around the speed of sound – whereas this supersonic one typically runs at 2-3 times the speed of sound – and that one was cryogenic (they could cool the air for more accurate testing on small-scale models), while here they can heat the air to test how air flows in jet engines or during atmospheric entry! (As they did for one of the initial parachute deployment tests for Curiosity!) 😀
The coolest part was we got to go inside the test section, since it wasn’t in use at the moment. It was all very, very, smooth metal, because any little glitch in the surface would create a sonic line or somesuch and throw off the results! Also very nifty: they can change the contour of the walls leading into the test section, with a serious of giant hydraulic jacks that could actually move the 1.5inch thick stainless steel walls in or out by several feet, with a ridiculous degree of accuracy! So neat!
Next we were off to a Physical Sensors Instrumentation Research lab, where they are working on developing more heat-tolerant sensors to for detecting pressure, light, certain chemicals, or whatever else in jet engine tests and other high-temperature environments. Normal sensors use silicon-based chips, but apparently silicon can only withstand temperatures up to 200 or 250 degrees, and the inside of a jet engine goes upwards of 700 degrees, so that’s not going to cut it! To solve that problem, they’re working on using Silicon Carbide instead, which allows the sensors to keep functioning at much higher temperatures. The process requires certain bits of something to be exposed to UV light and not others (something about polymers that went over my head!), so there are all these storage containers and windows covered in those orange UV filters… and they’re made with microscopic precision, so everything’s done in clean rooms wearing bunny suits!
Then we saw the Stirling Research Lab‘s “Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator” – a power system they’ve developed to provide electricity for future deep space missions, rovers, and satellites! Curiosity runs on a similar nuclear power system, but this one will be much more efficient. (It’s advanced after all! 😛 But seriously.) It’s powered by a little bit of plutonium-238 (which, we are assured, is much more stable than the plutonioum-239 used in nuclear bombs!) producing a lot of heat energy, that the Advanced Stirling Converter converts into usable electricity, with four times the efficiency of current systems. It’s designed to provide power for 17 years, and the test model we saw in the lab has been running nearly continuously for 4 years already.
There are three proposed missions NASA is currently considering for development, and two of them would use this power system (a “Comet Hopper” and a… well, basically a boat, that would land on one of the methane seas of Titan to study the “water cycle”-like methane weather patterns!) so they’re obviously hoping one of those two gets selected (the other is a Mars lander that would be solar powered) and now, so am I! 🙂 (UPDATE: The selection has since been made, and they went with the Mars lander. Still awesome, just not as cool as sending a boat to a moon! 😛 )
The last stop on our tour was to the SLOPE (Simulated Lunar OPErations) Facility – a giant sandbox! It’s full of special sand designed to resemble the surface of the moon (but without the very fine particles that would create epic dust clouds every time anything moved) or Mars to test the traction/behavior of different tire designs and rovers! Awesomes.
Their goal when the facility was built was to pick up where Apollo folks had left off… they wanted to test the moon buggy tires and go from there, but obviously the ones actually used are still on the moon, and the rest are all sitting in museums somewhere… but they managed to get in touch with one of the guys who designed the tires, and he “just happened to have a spare sitting in his closet at home.” With his help, partnering with Goodyear, they managed to replicate the original design and manufacture 12 new ones, which they did use for research and as a starting point for new designs!
We got to see/poke/squish/roll a bunch of the designs they’ve been testing, and he drove the prototype rover that was in there around for us! It was really neat… each of the four wheels is on a sort of arm thing, and has its own motor, so they can both drive and position each independently, which makes for some neat tricks! (Including “inchworming” up hills, tilting the rover in relation to the ground incline to keep it level and improve stability, and all sorts of fancy “getting un-stuck” maneuvers!) And I got to pick up a handful of fake moon sand! 😀
That concluded the tour, and the bus took us over to the cafeteria/employee center for lunch and gift shop time! I had a pretty tasty cheeseburger and fries (which I think is becoming a tradition, since that’s what I ate at Langley, and I’m pretty sure also at KSC during 134), and a lovely chat with a fellow spacetweep who’s a police officer in Wisconsin! That’s one of the things I love about tweetups/socials – hanging out with people with whom you’d probably never even chance to cross paths, much less sit down and have an actual conversation, otherwise!
After lunch, we headed back to the briefing center where we’d started the day (not the parking lot – after that) for the multi-center portion of this first-in-history Multi-Center Social!
JPL Social Media Manager Veronica McGregor kicks things off
It was basically a simulcast, broadcast from JPL to the other 6 centers tweetupping that day (at some point they added a 50th Anniversary social at KSC, conveniently coinciding with the rest!) as well as NASAtv!
(Oh! Sweet! Turns out it was also streamed on Ustream, which apparently keeps the recording available online for a while! So feel free to skip my rambly bullet points and just watch it for yourself!)
The program started off with a rapid-fire sequence of presenters, including:
A brief welcome from JPL Director Dr. Charles Elachi
A recorded message from NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden
Deputy Administrator Lori Garver spoke about why we’re going to Mars at all!
Dave Lavery, NASA Program Executive for Solar System Exploration, talked the difficulty of landing on Mars.
Clara Ma! – no longer eleven – read the essay she wrote to suggest the name Curiosity.
Doug Ellison showed us the simulation of Curiosity’s landing on Eyes on the Solar System (check it out!)
Stephanie Smith, part of JPL’s social media team (who came to our 134 tweetup and let us hold aerogel!) acted as host/moderator/MC for the panel discussions
The science panel – Ashwin Vasavada, of JPL, MSL Deputy Project Scientist; Pam Conrad, from Goddard Spaceflight Center, Deputy Principal Investigator for the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument; and Ken Edget, Malin Space Science Systems, Principal Investigator for the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI – one of the 17 cameras on Curiosity, specifically at the end of the arm) – talked about why they chose to land in Gale Crater (largely the 6mi. high mountain of sedimentary rock at its center) and a bit about what the various cameras and instruments do.
The engineering panel – Rob Manning, MSL Flight System Chief Engineer; Adam Steltzner, EDL Phase Lead (@steltzner); Steve Lee, EDL and Surface Ops Engineer (@LeeCuriosity); and Anita Sengupta, EDL and Advanced Technologies Engineer (@Doctor_Astro) – kicked off with the “7 Minutes of Terror” video (which I’m sure most of those present had already seen at least once, but absolutely nobody minded watching again!) and discussed how complex Curiosity and her mission are, learning from and improving on past missions, actually getting to Mars, how they developed the rover and EDL systems, testing the different elements (since they can’t exactly test the whole thing together without being on Mars!), and how (and how soon) we’ll get data and pictures back from Curiosity!
A brief “interruption” by Astronaut John Grunsfeld (@SciAstro) just to sort of say hi and how excited he was about this mission!
…and time for some Q&A with both panels! That’s where it really got “multi-center” – each participating NASA center had a microphone hooked into JPL and the broadcast, so tweeps could ask questions live, regardless of which Social they were physically attending! What was particularly neat to me was how many of the question-askers I had met at prior NASAtweetups! (They’re addictive!) Seriously, I think I knew at least half of the folks who got to ask questions during the broadcast!
If you’ve ever wanted to see what this NASA Social/tweetup stuff is all about, or love tweetups but couldn’t make this one, or were there and just want to relive its awesomeness, you’re in luck! Almost 2 hours of NASA-y goodness are just a play button away!
The next and final segment of the NASA Glenn edition of the Curiosity NASA Social featured GRC’s resident Mars Expert, Geoffrey Landis. We had a whole hour to pick his brain, so covered quite the array of topics – everything from how rovers’ landing sites are selected, the weather on Mars, and a ton about Martian geography, to what it’ll take to get a manned mission to Mars, to how the Mars of science fiction relates to non-fictional Mars! As it happens, he has a pretty unique perspective on that last bit – being both a NASA scientist and award-winning sci-fi author! (Definitely going to have to check out his stories!)
We wrapped up, presented our lovely hosts with a poster signed by the tweeps, and hopped on the buses on last time to head back to our cars. A quick group photo with GRC in the background, and the our NASA Social came to its end… but only officially! Most of us just relocated across the parking lot to the 100th Bomb Group Restaurant for an early dinner and drinks and a few more hours of NASASocializing with our fellow spacetweeps! (Thanks once again to @KelleyApril for organizing!)
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!
That other time we knew each other. I haven’t seen this goof in… four years!
He’s from California (now living in Portland, Oregon), and we met in Minnesota, where we had two weeks training with a organization called CTI, which puts together bands and sends them to do music ministry in various countries for a month!
So, then his team went to Honduras and mine to Taiwan, and we were all together again briefly at the end, but that was it!
Thanks to the wonders of the interwebs, vaguely keeping in touch, twitter, facebook, and bloggery, I heard he was planning a cross-country train trip!
He didn’t end up stopping long in Philly, but he had enough of a layover at 30th Street to meet up and have lunch! What fun!
Perhaps we should hang out more than once every four years, though, eh?
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:
…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…
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:
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!
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.
"I'm not Tolkein, where I build the entire world, and then run a campaign through it! 'Why did four of you roll hobbits?!' – @scalzi
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.
Well, that was the most fun wedding I’ve been to in a long time! (Maybe ever?) Probably in part because of having the most people I knew and loved present!
The wedding was held in a lovely park overlooking Harrisburg, so I drove out the night before and crashed on the Keitel’s couch. After an emergency run to Best Buy to grab a camera batter (upon realizing the other one was still charging… at home!), I got dressed and headed over to the park! Apparently, while I was driving there, there was an earthquake?! I was completely unaware… I guess it wasn’t strong enough to be noticed over the normal vibration and motion of my car, so I just missed it entirely, but once everyone else arrived a little later (Jess had asked me to go early to guard the picnic area) they all clearly had noticed!
Earthquake aside, it was a gorgeous day, and a gorgeous wedding, for a gorgeous bride! (And sharp-lookin’ groom!) Everything was beautiful and simple and thoughtful and very, very, Jess!
Also, my friends are silly. And pretty. (But mostly silly!)
Now, I should like to point out that when one of your jobs lives in the interwebs and can be worked on wherever, whenever, and the other is retail with no predictable schedule or ever more than a week or week.5’s notice, and your social life is more likely to include coffee shops and board games than bars and… well, whatever the “partying” sorts do, weekends are apt to pass more or less unnoticed.
Obviously, sometimes I do weekendy things on the weekends, but neither the schedule inflicted upon me nor the ways I choose to fill in the blanks make the fun stuff any more likely to occur on a Friday or Saturday night than any other time in the week! (Particularly since most of the time, I’m not entirely sure what day of the week it actually is.)
So, for me to have 4 legitimately weekendy weekends in a row is kind of impressive. And! This fourth weekend of awesome featured another awesome Marian Call show!
Crazy, several years of waiting/trying to get to one of her shows, and now I swing two in eight days!
This one was rather closer to home, at the MilkBoy Coffee just over in Bryn Mawr! I used to go to the MilkBoy in Ardmore all the time when I took the train home from school, (since it was just across from the train station, and I’d walk over for a coffee and a warm place to sit until my Dad came to get me,) but I’d never been to the Bryn Mawr one before… and frankly didn’t remember it existed, so it’s a good thing I checked the address!
Once again, I helped with the selling of stuffs, but it’s a tiny place and she didn’t bring much this time, so I was mostly free to just enjoy the show. And once again, a great show, complete with Jayne hats, the TSA-friendly rainstick, typewriter percussion, a feather boa and kazoo, and lots of witty, geeky, folky, jazzy goodness!
This one’s not a very good photo, but it just makes me giggle!
Afterwards, I was invited to join Marian; her very talented guitarist, Brian Ray; their host for the night, Donna; and another couple, for drinks and “Nibbles”, as the menu called it, at the conveniently located Verdad Restaurant and Tequila Bar next door.
That’s a place I definitely want to get back to – can’t speak as to the tequila, but the sangria was tasty, the atmosphere lovely, and the food was friggin fantastic. I had a Black Truffle Flatbread, which was smallish-but-not-unreasonably-so for the price, and absurdly delicious. The kind of thing you force yourself to eat slowly so the flavor will be in your mouth longer. Mmm… and everything I didn’t taste looked delightful too!
The highlight of the evening, of course, was not the meal, but the company! Marian is just as lovely to chat with as to listen to her music. Donna, it turns out, is from the same town as my family and works with the Bethlehem Mounties(!) on social media. Somehow a conversation about shoes revealed that Brian and I have both been to and loved Taiwan! All in all, a seriously fun evening with a group of seriously fun, intelligent, snarky, very nice people! Can’t wait ’til the next tour swings our way!
As promised, this weekend continued the sequence with yet another adventure, and this one a bit more of an adventurous adventure, being the sort that requires several hours of driving and an overnight stay. But to see Marian Call play at ThinkGeek headquarters with my awesome #NASAtweetup friend/co-conspirator @stephonee AND get to hang with Megan and Andrew, the travel was most definitely worth it.
Having finagled my way into the sold-out show by offering to help Marian out, I needed to get there early… which might have been more successful had I remembered that driving near DC at approximately rush hour on a Friday afternoon is a terrible idea.
Luckily, I was planning on stoping by Megan’s before the show, so I did have a bit of cushion time, and by giving up on that idea, I still managed to get to ThinkGeek a while before the show was to start, which was later than I was supposed to arrive, and much later than I planned to arrive, but still technically within the realm of “early,” which meant it was fantasmically earlier than I generally show up to such things. o.0
Marian Call live! (Finally!)
I was assigned to man the merch table, which was nicely situated on the side of the courtyard, so as to give me a pretty sweet view, so in between peddling cds and posters, the camerabeastie came out to play:
Jayne hat! For singing a song about Jayne.
This one, to be precise:
(Which, we soon learned, was not originally about Jayne, nor written by Marian, but fit him so perfectly, she adopted and adapted it!)
The crowd enjoying the showTypewriters are the best percussion instruments.TSA-friendly(er) rainstick!
For her tribute to YoSafBridge, she got out a feather boa and her best ‘bad girl’ attitude and sang us this!
We were also so very lucky to be the first to hear her new song, written as an entry to NASA’s astronaut wake-up song contest! (And would have won, if I were the judge! Been stuck in my head ever since!)
Dear ThinkGeek, please hire me.
After the concert and merch-selling wrapped up, Steph gave me the grand tour of ThinkGeek’s very entertaining office, including her natural habitat and many other intriguing sights. Definitely looks like an awesome/awesomely geeky place to work! *must apply*
Timmy, the ThinkGeek monkey, complete with Jayne hat.The coolest plant home ever.…well… read the sign.And of course, the Ninja Exit.Lots of Timmys! (Timmies? Timmyi?)Mythbusters Timmys!
(Also, remember the tent/canopy thing behind/over Marian in the pictures? Well… it may or may not have migrated into somebody’s office.) o.0
We then moseyed back to where the lurkers were lurking and lurked with them a bit (a very nice/friendly/ entertaining bunch!), eventually said our goodbyes, and I headed off to find Megan and Andrew’s place and acquire sleep. That I did, quite successfully, and spent Saturday hanging with those crazy kids.
A Trip to the Post Office (no really!)
When we’re together, our power of indecision is greater than the sum of its parts… or something… anyway, as usual, it took us a [very amusing] while to decide what we wanted to do, but eventually we ended up on the metro heading into DC.
We went to the Old Post Office Building (it’s actually called that– the “Old Post Office Building” (and has been since 15 years after it was built!)) and toured the Clock Tower, which has an observation deck with a pretty incredible 360 view of Washington DC:
The clock tower also houses the Official Bells of Congress– the ringing of which, apparently, is both a regular occurrence and quite the ordeal! There’s a whole organization of “change ringers”… there are different types of “peals,” ranging from a couple hours long to pretty-darn-near-forever… and this supposedly attracts visitors from all over! Who knew?!
Also, BSoD. I imagine there was supposed to be a very informative presentation of some sort running here, but their display wasn’t cooperating… which may have had something to do with the fact that it was actually just an old Dell laptop with busted hinges hanging from chains, with a printout in a plastic binder sleeve taped on the keyboard.
There was also a barbecue festival going on that weekend which we thought might be worth checking out. ^
It cost $12 to get in, so I assumed we’d at least get lunch’s worth of BBQ included in the ticket… but all that was actually included were a couple samples, most of which seemed to be toothpaste…? We’d paid a decent meal’s worth to get in, but we’d have to pay it all over again at one of the stands to actually get that decent meal. What free food there was was tucked away in the “sample tent,” the line for which was so long and folded back on itself several times, that we couldn’t see where the end of the line even was, nor what sort of samples were available to decide if they were worth attempting that sort of a line!
It was super crowded (much more so when we got there than it looked from above earlier), rather too hot and sun-blasted, not even a cheery atmosphere, and basically a colossal rip-off! After we walked the length of it a couple times, we finally found a stand where we could actually taste some BBQ (on sweetbread the size of a small dinner roll) and it was tasty, but by then it was pretty clear we were never actually going to get our $12 worth of anything, and it was generally unpleasant enough being in there that we just gave up and left.
Just outside the fence, we discovered an ice cream cart, bought an overpriced soda and some strawberry popsicles (the awesome kind with legit chunks of strawberries frozen into them), found a nice shady patch of grass to sit and eat them, and it made it all better! That was sufficient adventuring for the day, so we hopped back on the train and headed back to their apartment for dinner and some bumming around. We watched “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” which was both really good, and amusingly appropriate, though I am not Mr. Smith.
Some adventures are the fun kind, others are… well…
The next morning, armed with The Latte of Happiness from the Starbucks in the bottom of their building (*envy face*), I headed home, and made most of the journey uneventfully. The better part of the way back up through Maryland, however, I stopped for gas, and when I got back in the car and attempted to start it back up, it decided not to. Seemed like the battery was dead, which was odd, since I’d been driving for two hours just fine, and stopped for all of four minutes, but whatever. Thankfully, the gas station was at one of those full service rest stops, and thus included a garage with a mechanic, who gave me a jump start and sent me on my way.
All seemed peachy… for about a mile. Then Charlie (my poor little car) started acting all sorts of not-thrilled.
When I say valiantly, I mean it. Here you see the tools required – including the hammer & dollar-store butter knife.
The middle of a 4-lane freeway didn’t seem like a great place for Charlie to develop a mind of his own (or lose it, maybe?) so I coerced him to the shoulder, just as it gave up/out again, and called Daddy. A highway maintenance dude came along and gave me a jump again, so I could make it to the next exit, and Charlie cooperated long enough to get to a shopping center.
I got some lunch and camped out in a Dunkin Donuts with very pleasant airconditioning and wifi, and waited for Daddy. When he got there an hour or so later, he discovered the battery was not just drained, but well and truly dead, so we found a WalMart, bought a new one, and he valiantly coaxed the old from Charlie’s corroded clutches and replaced it.
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.
series, which makes me ridiculously happy!
