May 2009 Archives

That's all I've got for now. A quick iPhone photo from our most excellent photographer duo shot seconds before I walked down the aisle to meet the most handsome groom in the world, plus two shots my brother David took with my camera as Jose and I were exiting.

Speaking of Jose: he is my husband! I am his wife! And I couldn't be happier. My cheeks ache from all the smiling.

The day was perfect. The wedding was perfect. It went by so, so very, very fast that I am going to dedicate some time on the beach in Belize to writing down all the things I remember that made it so awesome, at a speed I can process. Right now everything is just snippets of smiling and laughing and dancing and camera flashes.

I will tell you all about it next week. But this week it's all about spending quality time with my husband. :)

How is it Thursday already? Seriously? Thursday?! We have been very busy.

On Sunday, we relaxed and watched the Rockets lose to the Lakers in Game 7. Boo. Then we had dinner at San Lorenzo's with Melissa, Kelly and John.

On Monday, Jose went to work while Katie, Joel and I ran a lot of errands. That night we made dinner at home, see:

On Tuesday, Jose went to work again and I got my hair cut. Then I put Katie and Joel to work helping me make table numbers and favors for the wedding. They did an awesome job. That night, my parents arrived and we all went to Sonic for ice cream.

Yesterday, we took mom and dad to see our house, which was in the middle of being bricked! Awesomeness!

After that we went downtown to the ballroom, followed by dinner at the House of Blues. As we walked a couple blocks to dinner, we came across a Metro bus stopped at the light. Katie works for the King County (Seattle) Department of Transportation on their bus system, and her coworkers all said she should ride the light rail here in Houston. We haven't done that, but we did snap a photo of Katie and the bus, much to the amusement of the bus driver. :) We followed dinner up with an evening at the Astros game. They won, 6-4!

Today, we picked up Jose's tux, then Katie and I got manicures and pedicures. Then Katie, Joel, Mom and Dad headed to the Museum of Natural Science to do something touristy, and Jose went to take his friend Seth flying, and Jose's mom and brother, who arrived a few hours ago, went to run some errands. Suddenly, I'm alone at the apartment!!

I decided to take advantage of the alone time, and at this very moment I am simultaneously blogging, printing wedding programs, and rocking out to some good music.

:)

Katie and Joel, my sister and brother-in-law, arrived yesterday for a week of fun and wedding-ness. We quickly took them over to see our house, which has undergone more transformations this week. On Thursday, we made it over at twilight to find that insulation had been installed.

They were also preparing for brick, by the looks of the giant pallets of brick in the front yard. When we arrived yesterday afternoon, we found scaffolding in place but still no brick installed. However, over the course of a day and a half, the entire house had been sheetrocked! It still has to be cleaned up, the seams taped, etc, but the basic sheetrock is there. It's amazing how different things look now. First of all, it is really starting to look like a REAL HOUSE. And it didn't look smaller, like I expected it to. If anything, it looked a little larger now that the rooms are well-defined.

Kitchen

Katie and Joel by the dining room

Look at how short Katie and Joel look in that photo! The high ceilings make it look like a house for giants. Haha.

Front Bedroom

Master Bedroom

Bonus Room

Weird Doodle on the Sheetrock

The NASA photographers caught me on console on Tuesday afternoon before we successfully met up with the Hubble in orbit. I am rocking my oh-so-sexy glasses because of my pink eye. Stupid pink eye. I'm happy to report that I am now pink eye free, and back to wearing my contacts and thus looking normal. Nothing against anyone with glasses, but I just don't like them. Not having peripheral vision annoys me greatly.

To balance out that less-than-awesome photo of me, here's an more-than-awesome picture of the Hubble in the payload bay, as seen through the aft windows on the shuttle.

Last night we checked out our house, which is now insulated! Woo. Today they're supposed to start sheetrock, so it will look quite different when we go over this weekend. Speaking of the weekend: this is my last day at work before 2+ weeks of vacation which will be spent hanging out with friends and family, going to Belize, and in between those two things -- getting married. :)

In honor of today's successful rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope, here's a great article from Bad Astronomy: 10 Things You Don't Know About Hubble.

The New York Times also has an excellent interactive graphic showing all the work that will be done to repair and update Hubble over the next five days.

Five days of exciting spacewalks coming right up!

The house continues. When we drive up, it's not as obvious anymore that work is happening, since the exterior has remained essentially the same for more than a week now. This was expected, of course, but still makes it less exciting to park the car and see the same house. Brick will be awesome, when it arrives.

We have two doors now, a nice one in the back and this lovely fake door in the front.

The problem studs in the guest bathroom have been reinforced sufficiently.

And the rafter that will hold the weight of half the brick on the back of the house has also been reinforced so that it meets code.

They're scheduled to do insulation and sheetrock this week, so things will start to change rapidly on the inside. After wandering around the house so many times in the framing stage, I expect it to look a lot smaller once there are solid walls that we can't see through. Then again, walls means we're one step closer to me being able to relax after work and sip margaritas on our awesome patio. :)

STS-125 launched this afternoon on a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, and I missed it. I missed my first launch in many, many missions, and all because of my stupid, stupid eyeball.

See, about a week and a half ago, as we drove back to work from lunch one day, my right eye started stinging and watering. This kept up at a very low level for more than a week. I changed my contact in hopes that would help, but it continued to come and go. But then on Saturday things got really bad, and the stinging and watering was constant. Then yesterday morning I found an eyelash! I took it out, and things improved drastically. I thought all was right with the world again.

This morning I got up and puttered around for a few hours, since I'm working the afternoon and evening shift for STS-125 this week. Around 11:20 I walked outside to head to work, and in the sunlight my eye exploded into a stinging, watery mess again. AGAIN.

And my wedding is in TWO WEEKS.

Enough is enough, so I immediately called the eye doctor, who fit me in at 12:15. He looked it over, asked if I'd been sick recently (why yes, I was sick with a sore throat, runny nose, and congestion just last week) and quickly said "looks like viral conjunctivitis."

Say what? Conjunctivitis? But that's pink eye. And I have had pink eye exactly once, when I was a kid, and it involved all sorts of nastiness and gunk oozing out of my eye and sealing it shut each night.

Ah, he says, but that is bacterial conjunctivitis. Viral conjunctivitis is different, involves watering and redness and irritation but no oozing, and is most often associated with a respiratory infection, a cold, or sore throat. Just like I had last week. Lovely.

The good news is that it runs it's course in 1-2 weeks, and since it's been an on-and-off issue for a week and a half now, I'm on the back side. And at this point, it sounds like I should just be happy that I didn't spread it to my left eye too. He gave me some medicated eye drops to help with the irritation and slight swelling (the latter of which is apparently the cause of light sensitivity) and said it should clear up in a couple days.

Because I do NOT want to have to wear my glasses at my wedding. And in the meantime, it is SERIOUSLY ANNOYING to have only one good eye.

Other than my eye issues, the weekend was nice. On Saturday we took a group of 10 people in 5 airplanes and flew down to Angleton for a $100 hamburger (so named because of the price of the plane rental and fuel) at the Windsock Grill, which is at the Brazoria County Airport. It was all of a 25 minute flight. Jose and I flew in his instructor's Cessna 150, the little yellow plane we hadn't flown for many months. I'd forgotten how tiny it is, but we squeezed in and enjoyed the trip. Jen and Nujoud took another 150, which was hilarious because in a way, they were carrying FIVE people in a 2-seat plane. See, Nujoud is about 3 months pregnant. And Jen is about 7 weeks pregnant. And Jen had just learned on Friday that she and Gavin are having TWINS this time. (I guess that technically means we had a group of 13 people in 5 planes, eh?) Flying into an airport, taxiing into an airplane parking lot, hopping out, and walking across the ramp to a restaurant is pretty cool overall. It was a fun adventure.

Windsock Grill (Jen and Nujoud flew in the red plane on the left)

Jose pre-flighting the little yellow plane before leaving Brazoria

Jason and Becca prepping their Warrior for the return trip

Yesterday we checked out our house again and were very happy to see that many of our issues have now been addressed. They have a couple more fixes to make today and tomorrow, but barring something unforeseen, sheetrock will start sometime late this week! Awesomeness.

So my cover didn't win the class contest. In fact, it didn't even finish in the top three! That was a little disappointing, but I'm over it. Design, after all, is a very subjective thing. As I was working on my cover, I told Jose that while I was happy with how it was turning out, I wasn't sure that it was exactly what the newspaper was looking for (based on looking through their archives). After seeing their top three, and their winner, I am absolutely certain that mine just wasn't what they were looking for.

The winner was a piece that the designer described as follows: "I just wanted to make something with shock value." It was two little Southpark-like cartoon characters, a boy and a girl, and the boy had ripped the girl's heart out and was holding it in his hand.

So. Yeah.

One of the coolest parts was the background, which was a lovely patterned wallpaper. When asked how it was created, the designer said they downloaded the texture from a website.

So. Yeah.

It was actually a very well-done cover, so I don't want to sound petty. It wasn't something that I would have created, but it was visually impressive and eye-catching and the designer obviously put a lot of time and effort into creating it. And they also understood what the newspaper was looking for, I suppose, in creating something purely for shock value.

However, she didn't do all the work herself. The assignment parameters specifically said everything must be original, and I don't count downloading a texture and using it as "original." (Not to mention that most free downloads have provisions against commercial use.)

Our professor read the email from the newspaper editor on why it was chosen, and two of the other considerations were that the design left plenty of empty space for headlines and such, and that it would print well on cheap newsprint. That made me a little annoyed with our professor, since I felt that those constraints should have been included in our assignment parameters if they were going to be part of the judging considerations.

Anyway, now it sounds like I'm just whining so I will definitely end it here! I still like my cover a lot, and based on the feedback you guys gave me, I'm going to tweak it a bit, remove the masthead, and keep it as a portfolio piece.

Thanks for all your suggestions!

My sim evaluation went pretty well on Tuesday. The sim was not as hard as I was expecting, which actually threw me off a bit -- that and the fact that my last sim was at the end of February and I felt very rusty. Still, overall I did ok. The main feedback I got from the flight director is that I was too "wishy-washy" in how I dealt with one of the failures we had. He wanted me to be more firm and directive in my calls, and to have a more defined line-in-the-sand when I need to make a choice between two options. It's not an unfounded piece of feedback, however, I also think that it's pretty dang difficult to have a line-in-the-sand when it comes to trajectory issues. It's not like we have a temperature or pressure that we're watching, and when it exceeds a certain limit we do x, y, and z. Trajectory issues are much more nebulous.

Anyway. It's done, and that's what makes me happy. Now I have to wait at least another two months before there's an opportunity to certify.

In other news, work on our house continues. There hasn't been much happening over the past few days because they should be preparing to fix the items our inspector pointed out as deficient.

Yesterday we noted the following new additions: Boracare termite treatment has been applied to the bottom of the entire frame as expected (that's why the bottom 2 feet of the house are now blue), the Green Guard has been sealed up on the outside of the house, and we have a chimney (as in, the actual tubing from the fireplace to the chimney structure). Of course the fact that they ran the chimney piping up the chimney means that we can't see the structure anymore, which means we can't check to see if they added the bracing they needed to. My bet is that they did NOT, since they haven't anywhere else. So hooray, they'll get to take the piping out again. That's what they get!

Also, I posted some of the proofs from our engagement session over on the wedding blog so you can check that out if you are interested.

There's a lot going on. It was a busy and full weekend of fun and wedding-related activities, including many errands and a very fun not-a-shower bridal BBQ. And Christine put the proofs from our engagement session online yesterday, so I'll share a couple of those when I get a free moment. They are awesome. :)

This afternoon and evening at work I have my "cert qual" sim, which is short for certification qualification. It's basically a sim to make sure I'm ready to certify. I expect it to be difficult and busy, and I'm feeling very unprepared, since my last sim was on February 27. It's hard to build any kind of significant training momentum when you don't get to practice very much.

I haven't run in three weeks and feel like a big, fat slob.

Also, this morning I woke up with a sore throat and some general achiness, which makes me feel just *great* going into my sim today.

Hope it's not swine flu. ;)

Yesterday we had our house inspected by an inspector of our choosing (i.e. not the builder's inspector, and not the city inspector, but someone working for us). This was something we wanted to do before everything gets covered in drywall. Everyone recommends doing this during the house building process, and everyone is right.

Our inspector was pretty awesome. He has years of experience as both an inspector and a general contractor. He went over the house for 2.5 hours with us in the morning, then spent the entire afternoon writing up a report. After work, he met us with a 100-page binder full of his report, all the photos he took of our house, excerpts from the parts of the building code that have been violated, spec sheets and installation instructions for parts that were put in wrong...the whole shebang. He also gave us a summary of all of that to give to our builder. Yep, he was awesome.

We knew there would be issues, and there are. The roof needs to be redone, at least 75% of it anyway, because it looks like the installed it in the dark or the rain or in about 5 minutes. There are humps and buckled shingles all over the place, and we're not really in love with the idea of all our shingles blowing off in the next tropical storm or hurricane. There are a couple structural issues -- some overnotched 2x6 boards, a wiggly half-wall, a few roof rafters that need shoring up -- and a few miscellaneous items -- a can light that's smushed up against ducting (fire hazard), pinched ducting -- but overall I think it went pretty well.

Tonight we go over with our list, present it to the builder, and say "fix these things so that they meet code, or else."