Hello. Yes, I am still alive. What have I been up to?
Well, last Tuesday we had our STS-133 undocking sim. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me say something along the lines of: after 30 years of flying the space shuttle, I don’t understand how we still come across new issues and new questions that we can’t immediately answer. And yet we do! We found ourselves in a gray area about when and how we can safely undock from the space station, and voila — a bunch of us “get” to meet later this week to talk it over. 30 years and still learning new things? Let’s just say that people aren’t kidding when they say the space shuttle is the most complex machine ever built.
I spent Wednesday and Thursday out of the office in a training class called “Foundations of Leadership at JSC.” The pre-class email advertised the class as something that would be “the highlight of our career,” which I must admit made me laugh. A 2-day class as the highlight of a 30+ year career? Unlikely. But while it didn’t exactly live up to THAT billing, it was actually quite good. It’s ironic — I never look forward to these classes, yet almost always end up enjoying them. Sitting in a classroom for 2 days talking about leadership as a concept never sounds appealing, yet I always learn something new. My challenge now is to go out and FIND something at work that I can really dive into. I’ve reached the point in my career where I’m ready to take the next step, and move on to something bigger. Unfortunately my timing couldn’t be worse, since NASA’s future is extremely murky and opportunities to do something new have essentially disappeared — at least for the near term. We’ll see.
Friday? Well Friday stunk, because I ended up staying home sick. I started feeling under the weather on Thursday. I don’t even know what I have — or had? Some congestion, but it stayed entirely in my head. No runny nose or any of that loveliness, but with the head congestion came aches and a really uncomfortable sore/scratchy throat. I thought I had licked the bug by Saturday night, but woke up this morning still feeling like I’d been hit by a ton of bricks. We’ll see how tomorrow morning goes!