Katie IMed me this morning while I was still at home and said she and Caroline and Jennifer (her other two bridesmaids) found a dress! It’s the one pictured here except it has straps and is blue with blue trim (the 6th color up from the bottom in the lefthand column). Oooh, pretty. I’ll be ordering mine next week while I’m home.
I’m flying home today and I’m so excited. It was really hard to work yesterday, and even harder to come in today. However, yesterday afternoon at about 4:30, I had a breakthrough with the code I’ve been arguing with on and off since September. I hadn’t looked at it in a month and was trying to get back into it yesterday, just to be productive because Melanie was on the FADS terminal and I couldn’t work on contingency abort stuff. So I made a small change in the sim and sent it running again and wasn’t even really paying attention, because I just knew it would crash. My poor little simmed spacecraft would be pulverized on the surface of Mars.
Except…it ran. I happened to glance up at the screen and it was actually printing out the bank reversals (a good sign that things are going as planned)! Because I have never gotten it to perform the reversals before, I was quite surprised, and actually gasped. Melanie and Becca turned around. “It worked!” I said incredulously. “It’s not supposed to work! I mean, it is supposed to work, but it never works. And it just worked!”
It was all very exciting, and now that I finally have it working and have a hundred things to do with it, I’m going home. It’ll be waiting when I get back.
Yesterday we had a quick lunch and stopped by Space Center Houston to see the Liberty Bell 7, the second Mercury capsule that sank to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1961 after the hatch “mysteriously” blew. It was pretty cool to see a spacecraft, especially one that sat on the bottom of the ocean for 38 years. It’s in surprisingly good shape after being restored over the past five years.
Also, NASAWatch posted the website of a guy who built a Block I Apollo Guidance Computer in his basement. We totally must find a way to do this. Yes, the fact that I want to build one totally makes me a dork. Between me, Becca, Gavin, Jen, Jason, and others, I think we could actually get a group together that would want to do it. Seriously. We could use Gavin and Jen’s rec room. Totally. Like, I’m serious.
I just realized this post has been pretty much nothing except dorky engineering stuff. Hmm.
So last night was the branch Christmas party. We returned to Joe’s Crab Shack since they’re one of the few restaurants in the area that has a private party room, and fun was had by all. The monkey with a NASA t-shirt that I brought for the gift exchange was popular, and got stolen a few times before Jen ended up with it. At one point I had a bottle of Bailey’s and was quite happy, but Gavin stole it (but then someone stole it from him, haHA). In the end, I got a bag of Starbucks coffee, which is still pretty cool. It’s whole beans so I’ll have to get it ground somewhere, but we’ll have good coffee for a week at work when we all get back from the holidays!
