I bailed on my final 4-miler last night. I felt pretty guilty about it, but I had yet another rough afternoon at work and just wanted to go home. As a trade-off, I thought about doing a very easy 3 miles tonight, but I’m not going to have time before heading to the HRB pasta get-together.
The source of my non-running thoughts was the load checkout we did for STS-117 yesterday; I’ll spare you the details but the main point is to check out the very very very large database of numbers and parameters as well as calibrate the simulator. The database check went swimmingly. But the calibration… Why does the simulator have to be calibrated? I don’t know. Probably because it’s old and crappy.
Anyway, nominally we need 3 runs to get the calibration correct. One to see how much it’s off, one to correct it by adding “weight” to the simulator, and one to evaluate the underspeed and use that to divide the weight into dry weight, liquid oxygen weight, and liquid hydrogen weight. It becomes a big headache, however, to try to do such a calibration when something changes between run 2 and run 3. Something that no one can explain. And when you find an error in one of your tools. A tool that’s supposed to be certified.
ARGH.
And yet, I love this job. I left work frustrated enough to skip running, and yet somehow satisfied. Can’t really explain that.
I did a last-minute online search for a hotel room downtown for tomorrow night to make half marathon morning much easier. It’s always nice to get an extra half hour of sleep, and nice to be able to go back and shower before climbing in the car to drive back to Clear Lake. I haven’t done it for my 2 Houston Halfs, but I did it before the full. I didn’t expect to find anything available, but I did! At the Marriott Courtyard. It’s not quite as low as the marathon rate, but it’s reasonable enough. Woo! Hopefully they will be ok with a late checkout, and I can stick around to cheer for all my marathon-finishing friends. 🙂