The boys flew on the Vomit Comet yesterday. I told Daniel I’d be there at 11:30 when the plane landed, and so I left work around 10:45, thinking I’d watch the last couple parabolas on the downlink and then see the plane come in. Well, as I’m sitting at a stoplight about a mile and a half from Ellington, I glance in the rear view mirror and see the plane on its approach to the runway! Crap, it’s half an hour early! So I speed down Highway 3, seeing the plane touch down and begin braking, then I turn into Ellington and whiz down the road that runs along the fence while the plane is moving down the taxiway parallel to me. I park my car, jump out, run through the hangar and find Alisa and Courtney literally a minute before the door opens up and the fly boys climb out.
They had a great time. No one on the entire plane threw up — only the third time there’s ever been a “no kill” flight. I wanna go again. Today the girls fly, and I’ll make sure I don’t cut it so close again when I go to meet them.
I just realized yesterday that I only have three and a half weeks of work left, and I have SO much to do in that time. I am gonna be working really hard to finish my project, since all the background work has taken longer than expected.
Becca’s going to Egypt and Morocco in October. I’m so envious. I want to go too!
So this guy in my group named Matt has put me on his email list, and sends out emails in the mornings with links to news in the TWA 800 crash, or the Oklahoma City bombing, or basically anything that has to do with government coverups. Since we’re both federal government employees, I find it sort of ironic that he is so distrusting of the very entity that employs him. Anyway, today he sent this link, which contains the statement that “science is nothing more than a long series of corrected mistakes.” I’m not going to argue the pros and cons of that idea, but it just reminds me of the heated debate Carter and Kent and I had in a train station in…Switzerland? I think it was in Switzerland. Anyway. Random memory.
And then, this side note from the article makes me laugh: “Would that [anthropologists] could be as succinct as astronomers. The beginning of everything? The Big Bang. A big red star? A red giant. A small white star? A white dwarf. And so on.” Yeah! Go astronomers!
