The full moon was still high and bright in the dark sky this morning as I drove to work at 5:45 a.m. Seriously. It was just absurd how early I was up. I’m assigned to work the launch of STS-120 in October, and we had our first flight-specific ascent sim scheduled for this morning at 7:30. Then on Friday they moved it up to 7:00. Which meant that, since I have to arrive an hour before sim start, I had to be here at 6:00. The fact that I was tired did not exactly go along with the fact that I’m rusty on my ascent skills (it’s amazing how quickly you forget things when you’re not simming every week), and I had a mediocre sim. Fortunately, this is why we have four leading up to each flight, and not just one.
The weekend was good. Saturday seemed to last forever; apparently getting up at 5:00 makes the day last longer. I ran, came home, showered, went to Borders, went to Katie’s baby shower, went to the mall, helped Jose pick out “front room” clothes for work now that he’ll be simming under the eye of the flight director, ate dinner, agonized about whether an iPhone was too much of a splurge, finally bought said iPhone, went home, and spent the rest of the night playing with my new toy. Whew! It makes me tired all over again just thinking about it.
Yesterday was much calmer. I slept in, and then organized a group outing to see the Simpsons movie. It was funny in exactly the ways I expected. The first half hour or so was hilarious, and then things slowed down a lot in the middle while they just concentrated on forwarding the plot. Things picked up and were funnier again at the end. Going in, I figured they’d be able to maintain the humor at least as long as a normal TV show, but wondered what would happen after that. It was about what I expected. Overall, it was a funny movie and worth the money. Despite seeing it in the previews, Spider Pig still cracked me up, especially when the credits rolled.
