i am TIRED.
i had a lovely evening yesterday. it’s amazing what a difference it makes leaving work at 4:30 instead of 6:00. it’s only a difference of an hour and half, but it feels like much more. i went home and changed into shorts and a tank top and sat by the pool for 45 minutes as the sun sank lower and lower. it finally fell behind the clouds, so i headed back inside. at 6:30 i went for a run, and was completely mesmerized by the moon, which was rising full and orange. it looked like a halloween moon, half covered in clouds–it was gorgeous. at 7:00 i was back to watch bushie’s speech, and after that it was time for dinner. lovely.
so we are going to war. saddam ain’t gonna leave his country, so we have to go get him. i don’t know how i feel about the whole thing, but i think my current state of mind about the now-inevitable war could be best described as a combination of resignation and fear. resignation to the fact that unless the u.s. takes military action, saddam will never leave iraq, and fear of the repercussions of attacking them. are there options we still haven’t tried that don’t involve war? probably. are we wrong to not have tried them? i don’t know. should we be going to war? i don’t know.
my sister reminded me last night that i never did post pictures from my week in france with nick back in january. i had completely forgotten. in any case, here they are. not all of them (since i took well over 200 shots), but still plenty. if you get through them all in one sitting, i’ll be impressed.
yesterday i had my five minutes of fame, but unfortunately it was connected to a tragedy. the chair of the sightings team testified before the caib (columbia accident investigation board) about our work on pinpointing times, characteristics, and possible locations of all the debris that we have seen coming off the orbiter early, i.e. before main breakup over texas. and he showed them my footprints! the ones that were made with my data! i created the data, gavin plotted it, rich checked it and gave it to paul hill, and paul hill presented it to admiral gehmen and company. the chain of command at work. how cool. despite the circumstances, it was exciting to see my work being used at the highest level of the accident investigation, and nice to be reminded that i’m not busting my butt for nothing.
the most interesting thing to me has been the support from random joes across the southwest. we’ve seen this debris in videos given to us by members of the general public who happened to be watching that morning; without them, we’d be at a loss. it’s really amazing to see how many people out there do still care about the space program, enough to get up at or before the crack of dawn just to watch 3 minutes of the shuttle streaking past.
