The last time I looked up, it was Wednesday morning. Suddenly, it’s Friday afternoon! Don’t get me wrong, Friday is great — but where did my last three days go? And why do I feel so exhausted?
So let’s see. Wednesday morning was an ascent sim to test out and work through some new procedures we are putting in place in light of the engine cutoff sensor problems that are currently preventing STS-122 from launching. I wondered if we really needed a whole sim to do that, but as it turns out, we did. It was good. It was intense. I learned interesting things. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon switching gears back to rendezvous mode after more than a week of concentrating solely on ascent.
I ran 5 miles on Wednesday night for my third day of running in a row. I rarely run more than two days in a row, so I was feeling pretty beat when I finished, however, I’d decided to run because I knew I wouldn’t be able to run yesterday. At least on Wednesday the weather had finally started to cool down and all in all it was a pretty pleasant run. I took it easy and averaged a bit over 11:00 pace.
So yesterday. When the launch was cancelled, all of these sims suddenly popped back onto the schedule, including a rendezvous sim that was quickly pinpointed as my midpoint evaluation for the position I’m currently training for: rendezvous support. I hadn’t been expecting this until January, since we were supposed to be flying a space shuttle right now — but I was still ready to go. A midpoint is a chance to get official feedback on how you are performing as a flight controller and what areas you need to work on before you’re ready to be certified. The sim was a bit slow, without any major failures, but I did well — my biggest failure was prior to the start of the sim when I dropped a binder that landed on my coffee and I ended up with an entire peppermint mocha all over my console. The government buys the absolutely crappiest paper towels that are about 95% paper and only 5% towel; instead of absorbing liqud, they just sort of push it around. It took me 20 minutes to clean up. Thank goodness it was only a tall — not a grande or venti!
Anyway, I got a “pass” grade from my group lead. A midpoint isn’t really pass/fail, but by telling me I passed, they’re saying I’m right on track. Woohoo! There are a few areas I need to work on, but all in all I’m feeling good. I am scheduled to work STS-124 in April as rendezvous, so with a good midpoint my belt, I’m still on schedule to get certified in time. Hurrah! I celebrated the successful evaluation with Mexican food and margaritas last night. The smell of the restaurant seeped into my jacket and this morning I kept getting whiffs of fajitas.
So today. Another ascent sim to yet again test our new procedures for the engine cutoff sensor failure case, which went well enough. I was going to go home early, but when I got back from lunch I had a voicemail from one of the software developers saying he was upstairs in the lab waiting for me to come do some software testing. What?? I sort of remembered there was a test scheduled for today, but I’m new to the testing process and I hadn’t tagged up with the guy who has previously done all the testing. Ugh.
That about cover it. I’m gonna collapse for the weekend and do a whole lot of nothing.
