Balloon Ride

The weekend alternated between busy and lazy moments. On Friday night I got to ride in the hot air balloon I was crewing for, if only for a short moment. We took off from a field at JSC and landed about three minutes later — in the same field, farther out. But it was still extremely cool. We landed a little roughly, and I ended up being “bottom man” as Cindy called it, i.e. I was the one that got smushed by the others on top of me when the basket tipped over before righting itself. My knee slammed into the basket as I fell, and I didn’t notice until last night that it is a lovely shade of black and blue. Proof that ballooning isn’t all pretty and softly floating by!

On Saturday morning the balloon took its longest flight, launching from UHCL and landing all the way down in League City — in the middle of the street in a subdivision. Many of the neighbors came out to see the show; the lady whose front yard we used to pack up the balloon said she’d been looking out the window thinking “hmm, they sure are low” before realizing they were landing and running through the house going “wake up! wake up!” to get her kids up to go see the balloon that landed in their front yard.

Saturday night we took off from JSC just behind the security building and they landed in the same field as the night before — another short flight. Yesterday morning, sadly, the festival was cancelled after a storm blew through on Saturday night scattering tents and chairs everywhere at the festival site. There wasn’t enough time to clean everything up before the crowd would have arrived, so Sunday’s events were cancelled and we didn’t fly. We said goodbye to Dan and Sue as they headed home to Mississippi — only 120 miles north of New Orleans, so they were basically driving into the hurricane. Hope they made it home!

The entire experience of crewing at the Ballunar Festival was just so much fun. The people I met were so nice and friendly, and being on chase crew was exhilirating. It was fun to be a part of the Happy Teeth team and to see all the spectators having fun — I mean, who doesn’t like hot air balloons? Everyone likes them! I can’t wait to do it again next year.

Melanie is town briefly to pick up all her stuff before heading up to Boston to start grad school, so we all had dinner last night with her. It was nice to see her, and it weirdly felt like she’d never left. The summer went by pretty quickly, I guess.

I spent all yesterday afternoon sitting on my couch with my laptop (yay laptop!) doing homework. Yes, homework. My first assignment for the graphic design class I’m taking involved learning the basics of Adobe Illustrator, creating a bunch of objects, and working through the examples in my textbook. It felt very strange to be doing homework again, but fortunately for me, the homework was fun. I probably could have knocked it out in about 2 hours, but instead I spent something like 6 hours just messing around with Illustrator.

No matter what Jen and Becca say though, a laptop’s touch pad is not as good as an actual mouse, and much harder to use when trying to do precision work, so I plugged in my wireless mouse and used that. Much easier, though the wireless “base” is big and bulky and annoying, so this afternoon I’m going to stop by Office Depot and get one made for laptops so that the base is just a little USB key. Should work well.

Oh, and as an afterthough, Gavin sent me this lovely article about a “news item” in Charlotte.