Challenger 2011

Twenty-five years later, and I still remember clearly where I was when the news broke about the loss of Challenger.

Greenlawn, Long Island, post office, just a short walk from work. Lunch time. The radio was tuned to some news channel which was covering the launch. Everyone was half-listening. It was "just another launch" of this now-routine system, although there was a bit more than the usual level of excitement because this time there was an ordinary person - a teacher - aboard.

And then there was an uncomfortable silence when the news announcer realized that something had gone wrong. And an even more uncomfortable silence when everyone in the post office realized the same thing.

The rest of the afternoon was like a dark cloud. All the employees at the facility (which supported the aerospace industry) were distraught; many had worked on space programs, including Apollo and Shuttle. Helen, the lady I worked with at the time, said something like, "Well, that's the end of the Space Program!" We listened to the news on the radio, hoping to hear that a miracle had occurred, that the astronauts had somehow been found alive and rescued. But it was not to be.

And I put away the copy of the Space Shuttle Operator's Manual which my friend Helen had let me borrow, which I'd been reading religiously in anticipation of one day getting a job down at the Cape. It didn't seem like I'd be needing it any time soon.

Captain January

It's nearly the end of January, and it's difficult to focus on anything in particular. Work has become meaningless; there are no concrete engineering goals, just drivel coming from the mouths of management as they attempt to inspire us with their visions of the future. Unfortunately for us, their visions (profits, bonuses, mergers) do not coincide with our visions (fantastically wonderful geeky hardware which solves all the world's problems). Thus we are at an impasse. Especially since here, at least, they are the only game in town. And who wants to go job-hunting in the middle of winter?

On the home front, there is snow, snow, and more snow. Well, what else could there be in Michigan at this time of year? The temperature has been well below freezing for weeks now; the humidity has been dropping below the comfort zone; the Lake continues to throw its excess moisture content on our heads, snarling traffic and causing us to spend far too many hours attempting to clear our driveways.

Speaking of driveway-clearing, we seem to have gotten the knack for it now after six years. We don't usually bother with the snow blower anymore, nor do we immediately run out and start clearing the moment the snow stops falling. In fact, usually we wait a few days after the snow has settled down to a reasonable level - after we've driven over it a few times and packed it down into nice, tight little ice crystals - to the point where the snow blower is useless anyway. Snow blowers, for those of you who are unfortunate enough not to own one, do not work on ice. For those kinds of surfaces, we have to resort to our handy-dandy little ice hoes, which are inserted underneath the ice and used to pry or chip the ice off the driveway. After which the chunks of brick-like ice can be picked up with a shovel and tossed out into the side yard to pile up into miniature Mt. Everests.

The boys and I have been out a few times to work on it, and we've settled into a bit of a routine. We don't clear it all at once; typically, we just work on it for half an hour or so, until there is a straight-line path for both cars from the garage to the street. Then we go inside for hot chocolate. The next day, we'll go out again, and work on the edges for half an hour, then go in for hot chocolate again. By the third day, there's a fresh batch of snow on the ground, so we're doing a mix of snow- and ice-clearing. But, again, only for half an hour or so. Then the siren call of the steaming cup of chocolate pulls us back inside again.

The main goal of the exercise is not to completely clear the driveway, but to expose enough of the driveway surface to allow heat absorption from the sun during the daylight hours, which prompts snow melt. It's preferable to let the sun do most of the work anyway, since it doesn't really do anything else all day except spray radiation all over the solar system.

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Deb's birthday was a difficult one to put together. We got this sinking feeling when the date for Aunt Cheryl's funeral was announced, because it's always difficult to combine family 'events', especially where one is happy and the other is not quite so happy. (We're happy that Aunt Cheryl got to go home and be with God, but we're not quite so happy that it'll be awhile before we see her again. We're happy that it's Deb's birthday, but we're not quite so happy that we'll be spending it away from home.) But we are proud of Deb: she put on her brave face and didn't complain, even though this is a particularly meaningful birthday for her. She's now a teenager, and she's turning into quite a little woman (scaring her old man near to death!), and there are so many exciting things going on in her life right now. Where has the time gone?

So the day of the funeral, on the way home we stopped at Steak & Shake for a birthday dinner, complete with ice cream; then the day after we got back from the funeral, she opened her cards and presents; and the day after the day after we got back from the funeral, we had cake and ice cream and M&Ms (immediately prior to departing for youth group!); It wasn't the ideal situation for a "coming of age" kind of birthday, but she seemed to be OK with it. The only downside was that her friends were unavailable for a sleepover, which would've been nice.

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We were never a "camping" family, so camping is not one of those things that comes instinctively, nor is it something I'm likely to initiate, especially when it involves gathering up a ton of equipment and fussing over menu planning and arranging for 'facilities'. But the youth minister had been planning for this winter campout for the kids, and he knew that I'd done winter camping with the Scouts, so when his camping facilitator had to drop out, he called on me to help out.

Organizing a winter campout for a bunch of teenagers is probably a lot easier than I'm envisioning, but I tend to oversweat the details when there's the possibility of humiliating failure (especially failure in front of a large number of teenagers who are supposed to be looking up to the adults for guidance and leadership and modeling). So my brain has been completely consumed by this activity, trying to figure out the logistics.

Putting together the tents and the sleeping bags and most of the other gear is simple. Creating a menu and ensuring adequate cooking supplies is not quite so simple, but very doable. Adding in the things needed for cold-weather camping is a little more difficult, but there are lots of Scout booklets available. Making sure that the girls have suitable rest room facilities is quite another story.

(When we announced the event, the first question from the young ladies was, Will there be real rest rooms? Please tell me that you are not suprised.)

The youth minister was really hoping that we would get some brave young women willing to go out into the woods in the middle of winter for this wonderful group-bonding event. I didn't want to disappoint. So I've been perusing the catalogs and on-line stores to see what kinds of 'facilities' are available. None of them are very impressive. Most of them are intended for summer use. And even though I've read many, many positive comments from brave older women who were enthusiastic about such products after being forced to go on camping for fishing or hunting trips with their husbands, I'm not wholly convinced that the response from the teenaged girl population will be identical.

Meanwhile my nimble little engineering brain keeps popping up to say, "You can design something better than that!" (It's the egotistical engineer inside of me.)

Can't wait to see how it all turns out.

Decorating the Girls Room

We suspected that the initial arrangement of bedding wasn't going to work, not with the need to slide Deb's mattress underneath Mary's bed every morning. That kind of regular maintenance chore is a bit high on the Hobarth Scale of Responsibility for a couple of youngsters like them, so we figured sooner or later we'd be needing to come up with some other idea.

And it was, indeed, sooner rather than later.

Cheryl had the bright idea of just taking off the front bottom rail (and, of course, the supporting slats) for the bottom bed so Deb could sleep on the floor as she seems to prefer; all we had to do was put the now-extra rail on the backside as an extra support to help sturdy the structure, and Mary was ready to head topside to enjoy her eye-in-the-sky pile o' pillows (which she terms a "bed" and the rest of us deem "a pile of multi-colored fabrics like you'd see in that book, 1001 Arabian Nights"). As you can see from the picture, Deb took right off to the situation, taking no time at all to catch herself a nap after working so hard to prep the room.

Cheryl got it into her head to get this here multi-colored lamp which appears to match the general look of the room now. To me, it looks like some refugee from the Beat era (late 50s, early 60s), but that don't bother me none because I'm a big fan of that particular style ever since I saw it in a picture of Charles Schulz's studio back when I first got addicted to Peanuts. So she went down to the store and bought it, and then put it together; and don't it look grand? It's got one of those 4-way switches, which means it'll turn on two, three, or all five lamps, depending on how much light you're wanting. Pretty snazzy.

Cheryl and Deb also worked up this little work table arrangement so the girls would have someplace to do their studying and homework and such. I'm thinking there's a bit too much fabric on the top to be doing any serious drafting work, but it should be sufficient for sketching diagrams for Science class, or writing essays in a notebook, or doing a math problem or two. The most important thing, apparently, is that the colors match the room, and it all "goes" together. Whatever that means. Some of those fancy concepts just leap right over my head, and I have to go outside to clear my head a spell.

Girls Move Back In

The girls have fled the basement, not for any fear of spiders or dust or floating feathers of pink insulation (which are there, it must be said), but for the reason that their mother has finished (for now) painting their room, and it is now safe for them to come back upstairs.

In this composite photograph, you can see that they have decided on a slightly different bed arrangement than they have had in the past. Mary will be sleeping in the "upper berth", while her sister will be taking the lower. Deborah prefers sleeping on (or near) the floor; we don't know where this strange quirk originates. Perhaps her ancestors liked camping. During the day, Deb's bed will be put away under her sister's bed, mainly to prevent Mary from cluttering the space beneath with all manner of strange things (books, papers, toys, etc.).

We were hoping to put a worktable in the room as well, but haven't quite figured out how to work it in, given the fact that we have to pull out Deb's bed every night so we can't have anything taking up too much space in or near the middle of the room. I've got some extremely clever, totally impractical ideas for making something out of 2-by-4s and plywood, and Cheryl will probably find something in a catalog. Can't wait to see how it all turns out.

Meanwhile, the new color looks fantastic all backlit by the halogen lamp. The halogen is only temporary, of course. Those lamps make me nervous, putting out all the heat they do. I'd like to put up some corner/ceiling fixtures to light the room at each corner rather than from the middle, but that's completely impractical from a wiring standpoint. Cheryl has this very practical idea of using regular floor lamps. Either way, the single light in the middle of the room (underneath the fan) just doesn't provide enough light for my tired old eyes.

Here's the colors they picked out for the room.
The fabric is for the curtains or drapes or whatever you call it that will be used around the windows and the closet.

Getting Things Done on a Day Off

Today was a great day for getting things done around the house. It was a holiday at work, meaning that I didn't have to go into the office. So I didn't. Instead, I got the brakes on the Subaru fixed, put the closet walls back up in the basement, and moved the girls' beds down into the room which will one day belong to James.

After getting so much progress done on the house painting over the weekend, Cheryl, never one to rest on her laurels, started her next exciting project: Painting the Girls' Room.

Since it will take a few days to get the clutter moved out and the room properly prepped for painting, we moved the girls' beds down to the basement room so they could have a place to sleep away from the paint fumes.

Now they're snug in their beds, ready to get to sleep after their first day of school in the new year!

(So why am I hearing chatter down there??)

SpaceGeekOut

My wife knows how to give gifts, especially to space geeks like her husband. The first one was awesome enough, but she went all out and got me TWO! About the Apollo Guidance Computer!! How exciting is that, huh??

OK, I won't bore you with the details, but let me assure you, these are the bestest gifts in the world for space-obsessed computer geeks like myself. One goes into a lot of historical detail on the project development, while the other goes into an incredible amount of detail on the actual hardware and software design aspects.

Now pardon me while I get off the Internet and get back to reading...

Snow At Last!

Those of you who have never lived in Michigan probably won't understand the absolute thrill of seeing snow again. You probably think that we're crazy to look forward to snow.

But when it's cold and wintry, we like to have some snow on the ground. It's kind of like the proof of the pudding. If there's snow, there's cold. And we can deal with cold so long as there's snow on the ground. We can play in snow. We can dress up warm and put on our skis or pile onto our sleds and have a great time out in the snow, then come back inside and laugh about all the fun we had while sitting in front of a warm fire, drinking a hot cup of chocolate.

Can't do that when it's raining, though. Can't do it when the temperature is up to fifty degrees Fahrenheit, like it's been the last few days. Nope. When the weather's warm, ya gotta go out and start raking leaves or trimming bushes or fixing the gutters or some other such nonsense, the kind of thing you normally associate with late fall or early spring. And you'll work up a sweat and then get all chilled because the air isn't quite warm or dry enough to evaporate all that water that's collecting between the layers of your clothes. And you can't just say, Forget it, I don't feel like working outside just because it's warm outside. You have to. It's your last chance before the cold weather really settles in, leaving you with nothing but the inside housework to do. You have to go outside, breathe the air, drink in the last vestiges of warmth before it disappears for six months.

So when the cold weather roars in like a lion, dropping the temperature like a stone and turning the ambient humidity into beautiful flakes of crystalline beauty which drop out of the sky and pile up onto the roads and sidewalks and lawns, it's time to sigh, toss all the tools back in the garage where they belong, walk right into the house and put on some hot water, grab that book you've been meaning to read for the last few weeks, and settle down in front of a warm fire.

And let Old Man Winter have some fun for a spell. You can worry about shoveling the driveway tomorrow when he's done. Tonight, it's time to relax.

Welcome to the New Year!