This 'n That

Hi there. Here’s what’s been happening over the last week and a half:

Work has been steady, but not too busy. The Russians had a problem during some of their ground testing of the next Soyuz vehicle, so there will be delays to all the Russian flights for the rest of the year. I initially thought this would make me much busier for the next couple months, but it’s now looking more like the opposite. I won’t have too much going on until April, so I’m trying to learn about some of the new commercial space vehicles in develop and help out there.

On Saturday, Jose and I went to see the Houston Symphony do an encore performance of The Planets, set to a great movie of high def NASA imagery. They played at one of the local mega-churches, so we didn’t even have to go that far! It was a great performance and we thoroughly enjoyed it. We are going to see them downtown in a couple weeks when they premiere a “sequal” to The Planets featuring different music and a film of awesome Earth imagery.

On Sunday, we had a bunch of friends over for the Super Bowl. I didn’t take a single picture, so you will have to enjoy this photo of this pizza I made the next day. I had planned to make it for the party, but everyone else brought a ton of food so we didn’t need it. I saw a couple minutes of the halftime show and the last 5 minutes of the game. That was it! I was too busy talking to people and laughing at the 5 kids running circles around our house. (I thought their energy would die down after a while, but I was totally wrong about that!) I didn’t even see the commercials, so if there was a good one I need to go find on YouTube, someone needs to let me know.

This week I’m helping another team of teachers fly their experiment on the Vomit Comet. They are from a half-day math and science magnet program in Warren, Michigan and their students (high school) designed an experiment to test convection currents in microgravity. They have several tubes filled with half cold water and half hot water. A valve in the middle keeps the two halves separated until they’re ready to mix them. They fly on Thursday and Friday and are pretty excited, as you can imagine.