Oh hey there, blog. I posted about how busy I was, then promptly disappeared for another three weeks. Not very nice, eh?
Work is finally calming down. In the weeks since the aborted Soyuz launch in early October, I’ve been leading a small team of safety engineers in assessing all the hazards associated with decrewing the ISS — something that we absolutely don’t expect to happen, but had to be considered while our Russian colleages worked to figure out what went wrong with the last launch. (More, including a shot of me in serious work mode, on this Instagram post.) My team works on safety assessments frequently, but this one was quite a bit larger in scope than usual and it took every bit of the last 5 weeks to get it done. There was a similar effort done in late 2011 so as a silver lining, we were able to use that as a starting point. But there is a LOT that has changed about the ISS in the last 7 years.
But as of yesterday, it is essentially done! We still have to get it vetted by other organizations and take it to management, but the hard part — scouring hundreds of documents and thousands of what we call “operational controls” — is finished.
With that out of the way, I’m very much looking forward to regaining some much-needed mental bandwidth heading in to the holidays.
Of course, we did continue to have some fun in the last few weeks. I was able to stay on top of work enough to stick with previously-made plans to go to both Quilt Market and Quilt Festival! I went to Festival one day with friends, and then we went back as a family for the last hour of the show on Sunday afternoon so the girls could see my quilt. As I expected, they liked seeing my quilt for about 30 seconds, and then were ready to run around the convention center and enjoy the relative novelty of being downtown.
Emma’s favorite part wasn’t the quilt show at all. It was the dance show we stumbled upon in Discovery Green as we were heading back to the car. *shrug*
(I’ll share pics of my favorites from the show this year soon!)
We also had a fun day at Armand Bayou’s Fall Farm Festival, one of our favorite local events. The girls made candles, Emma and I sack raced, we took a wagon ride, and had a nice time.
I’ve been spearheading efforts to get our Gulf Coast MQG charity quilt top made, and we had a sew day on Sunday afternoon that went really well! They jokingly called it “Sarah’s Sweat Shop” but we did get a lot done and have a nearly-complete quilt top. I just have to add sashing between rows and it’ll be ready to head off to the longarm quilter who volunteered to quilt it for us. Yay!
I’m also wrapping up my quilt for this year’s Michael Miller fabric challenge. That’s the category that I won last year and while I certainly don’t expect to be lucky enough to win again, I’ll admittedly be a little disappointed if my entry doesn’t make it in. Quilt judging is so subjective — but I’ve got my fingers crossed!
I started quilting it with simple straight lines yesterday in hopes of finishing today and binding it over the upcoming holiday weekend. But after quilting about a third of it, I discovered that I had a LOT of puckering on the back — argh!! I did something different with my basting setup and knew I’d had some issues there, but thought it would be ok. NOPE. Lesson definitely learned. I knew that if I didn’t start all over I’d regret it, so I “got” to spend a couple hours ripping out all the stitches so I could re-baste the whole thing properly and start over. Good thing I’ve got until the 30th to submit my entry!
