Tomorrow morning is George’s cert

Tomorrow morning is George’s cert sim; he’ll be trying to certify as an ARD, the same flight control position that I am training for. Once he’s certified, I’ll be next in line with a self-set goal of certifying by August/September. Anyway, back to George: He’s nervous enough already, but on top of it being his ARD final eval, the sim is also scheduled as a Prop final eval and a Booster midpoint eval. Oh man, there are gonna be failures all over the place. I am so excited about watching it. This is going to be the best sim EVER.

I had a great weekend that passed — WHOOSH — in a flash. On Friday night, after going through the entire list of movies playing at the Cinemark and feeling pretty apathetic about all of them, Jose and I ended up renting Fever Pitch. Heh. I got him to rent a chick flick, but only because it takes place in Boston and is about the Sox and he could therefore reminisce about living there. It was a cute enough movie, at least until the end when I was disgusted by the memory of Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore on the field at the actual World Series filming a movie. That’s just wrong.

I played soccer on Saturday morning for the first time in a month, and my poor legs and knees paid the price. They hurt for the rest of the weekend. And my team lost, as usual… I spent the afternoon at the mall with the boy, getting new glasses (that look sort of weird in that photo), exploring the art store, and eating Cinnabon, before meeting up with Matt and Stephanie for a star party at the Haak Vineyard.

The star party was really fun! It was hosted by the vineyard and the JSC Astronomical Society, and Stephanie found out about it during a random check of the vineyard’s website to see what events were coming up. It was the perfect opportunity for Jose to get out his telescope as well, and the four of us had a great time. (We all made the amusing observation that Jose was the youngest person with a telescope by far.) They were selling wine, of course, which we enjoyed while looking at Saturn, the Orion Nebula, Betelguese, Sirius, Mars, the Sombrero Galaxy, the Whirlpool Galaxy, and (when it finally rose) Jupiter. One guy had a really fancy telescope where all he had to do was type in the object, and it whirred and spun until it pointed right at it — very cool. By contrast, with Jose’s telescope, we had to hunt and peck. I did have one shining moment, though, when Matt and Jose couldn’t find Mars and I was able to say “duh, it’s right there” and point the telescope right to it.

At the beginning of the evening, there were a few hundred people there. By the end of the night, Matt, Stephanie, Jose and I had become the hard-core astronomy buffs — we were there even longer than some of the astronomy club people.

I must mention that Becca was supposed to come along, but backed out because she is lame. I also couldn’t help but think about how much my dad would have loved the star party! Most of my knowledge of the constellations comes from him in the first place.

Yesterday was no less busy, with a trip to play Laser Tag and eat Coldstone ice cream in celebration of Gavin’s 30th birthday. I totally suck at Laser Tag, but it was fun to trash talk the little kids, especially the devil child in the second game that kept following me around. She hit me 11 times, but I got her 18 times! Ahahaha. Take that, devil child!