Gotta go to bed. A

Gotta go to bed. A few thoughts…
California is great. It’s hot, but not Houston hot. Pleasantly hot. With a breeze — Santa Ana winds. I am dying to go running, but the opportunity has not presented itself. Today was full. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll find a spare hour while the sun’s still out.
Day 1 of the concept review was long, but interesting. I’m no longer worrying about having nothing to contribute, because I’m learning a lot. And — and this sounds like a minor detail but really isn’t — I’m finally putting faces with names, and faces with the voices I’ve been hearing for more than a year on telecons.
JPL is awesome. It feels utterly and completely like a college campus, nestled in the hills. There are flat panel TVs showing Saturn, and Mars, and the Sun. The cafeteria is awesome, but it takes a long time to get your food. Pasadena is lovely. I could live here. I could totally live here. Except it did take me 15 minutes to find a freaking coke machine. Turns out it’s in the basement.
The MSL team is a fun bunch. They are all older than me, and most have worked on other missions. They have a lot of great stories about backward star tracker doors, and mission controllers walking into the control room in bunny suits. No, not bunny suits like the Intel clean suits. Bunny suits, like the Easter bunny, with floppy ears.
We took a “break” this afternoon to go see a high bay covered in red dirt with a fully functioning MER rover, where they test-drive it, and bring in random kinds of clay to devise methods for getting the rovers un-stuck all the way out there on Mars. Very cool.
Finally met the infamous Dr. Braun, who’s been an AE professor at Tech for two years now. Too bad he wasn’t there when I was, he seems cool. Tech sounds like they are making a lot of changes for the better. A recent SSDL graduate who just started working out here told me that the undergraduate program at Tech seems hard, from what he saw while doing his M.S. He couldn’t believe we didn’t have a space option for senior design a mere four years ago. It’s true, I told him. He was incredulous.
Had dinner tonight at Buca di Beppo. Me, another girl, and 20 men. That is a lot of men. Where are the women engineers? At least the men had lots of good stories. I got to share some good stories too.
Yesterday I told Gavin that I have limited interest in working on robotic missions, that if I work for the space program, human spaceflight is where I want to be, impacting people, working for people, with people. Today I’m reconsidering. JPL is cool. JPL people are cool. Mars is cool.
It was a good day.