The primary job of the backup person in my area, in addition to the real-time flight support, is to be the Book Manager for the flight. The Book Manager is in charge of all the rendezvous and undocking procedures -- maintaining them, correcting them, etc. It's a lot of paperwork (both real and virtual) and it can be a headache sometimes, but it's a necessary part of the job to ensure that the rendezvous goes exactly as planned. The "rendezvous book," as we call it, is only one of dozens of books of procedures, checklists, and cue cards that make up the "flight data file" or FDF.

(What, you thought the astronauts just magically remembered how to do everything that has to be done over a two-week flight? They're smart people with good memory, but not THAT good!)

(Also, if you are curious for a closer look at some of the FDF flown each mission, you can view many of the documents on the NASA website.)

The final edition of the book gets published a month or two before launch, and my final act as Book Manager is to go over to the FDF office and check each of the actual flight copies of the book -- the ones that will be packed up, shipped to Florida, loaded onto the space shuttle, and launched into orbit with the crew.

For this flight, there were 6 identical copies of the rendezvous book, along with two sets of cue cards (which are concise checklists for certain activities that are velcroed into place in orbit) and overlays (which are transparencies that they tape over the camera monitor on the flight deck to help them judge their approach rate to the space station). This means 6 separate books to go through page by page to check for errors.

Three of the copies will be flown in space, and the other three stay on the ground as backups and for archival purposes. They're color-coded -- a prime and backup book each for the commander (red), pilot (yellow), and one of the mission specialists (purple).

It's a tedious process to be sure, but it's necessary. In the past, we've discovered pages that are missing, pages with print errors, graphics that didn't come out right, and overlays that are the wrong size. Much better to discover that type of thing on the ground than to be surprised by it in orbit!

I declare these books ready for flight!

For today though, enjoy this email from a few days ago. It's from Jose's friend Meryl. She grew up in Unalakleet, Alaska, a small town on the west coast that is one of the checkpoints along the Iditarod route. This year's race was won on March 16 after just under 9 days on the trail.

The Iditarod dog race is going on right now, and I've been keeping track of the news on it. Today I read about what the mushers are eating along the trail. Some are eating lasagna prepared by their wives, moose chimichangas, caribou stroganoff, chicken alfredo...pretty normal stuff in Alaska. But one guy is eating this:

"Iditarod veteran Paul Gebhardt of Kasilof is packing McDonald's quarter-pounders with cheese. He's also bringing breakfast burritos his wife makes with bacon, eggs, hash browns and salsa, as well as his own concoction: french bread sandwiches with grape jelly spread on one half, Miracle Whip on the other, then heaped with roast pork and ketchup."

Sounds delish. He also eats Twinkies along the trail. He explains why, "It's fascinating to school kids because Twinkies don't freeze -- ever," he said. "At 65 below a Twinkie is still soft."

Aren't Twinkies amazing? Just thought I'd give you all something to be hungry for when it comes time to lunch today.

(Don't ask me why I had a sudden flash of rational thought in regards to this particular item, because I have absolutely no idea. I'm a horrible impulse buyer. I can justify almost anything!)

As I think I've alluded to already in recent months, I didn't do anything drastic. I didn't cut anything out of my diet, mainly because my willpower is just not quite that strong. That willpower IS strong enough, however, to watch portion sizes, cook at home more often, bring my lunch to work instead of eat from the cafeteria, and avoid french fries and cookies....at least avoid them most of the time. I'm still a Starbucks addict and refused to give that up, but since my drink of choice is only 130 calories, I declare that my skinny cinnamon dolce latte is acceptable!

I weigh myself every day, despite having read lots of advice over the years that says you shouldn't weight yourself more than once a week. I chalk that up as being applicable to people whose mood and opinion is greatly influenced by what they see on the scale, since weighing yourself every day means you will absolutely see fluctuations. I can be 2-3 pounds heavier one morning than I was the morning before, or will be the morning after. I know this, and it doesn't worry me, because I just monitor the overall trend.

Last week, I saw the number I've been looking for! 8 pounds down! I've now been at that number or just under for 5 or 6 of the last 8 days. I'm calling it. I did it! Woo!

Except now I'm not sure I actually want the Wii. I think I might rather have a fancy camera bag from here or here or here or here. I've been ogling them all lately as I consider getting something to replace my old Crumpler bag. (The Crumpler bag has been great, but it's slightly too small, doesn't have a good spot for "purse stuff" like my wallet and keys, and has a shoulder strap that is too bulky and stiff.)

I've also considered buying myself a sewing machine instead, but I don't think I have the time to learn how to use it right now. Perhaps that would be a good reward for later this year, since my ultimate goal -- i.e. get back to where I was 5 years ago -- is still 10-15 pounds away!

This year we seem even further behind than usual. There are always girls who send their photos late, and advertisers who send their ads late. Lateness would not be quite as big an issue if what they sent was correct. But the ones who send late tend to be the ones who also don't follow the specs. There are the ones who send a 2x3 at 72 dpi photo they saved off the internet despite you specifically request a 5x7 at 300 dpi. And there are the ones who send lovely ads with photos that run right to the edge of the page, but their file is sized to 8.5x11, instead of the 8.75x11.25 I need to effectively print a full bleed, and their text is so close to the edge of the page that enlarging it slightly would mean that the text gets cut off. And there are the ones that insist on trying to fix the file themselves, instead of complying with my polite request to have their photographer or designer send the file directly to me.

It's not their fault, and I'm not blaming them. They're not designers or photographers, and I don't expect them to know exactly how to do things. But I do get tired of the endless polite emails saying "this file is not large enough, here are the requirements, please try again." Perhaps I should make a tutorial. But I doubt anyone would actually read it.

On Saturday I went for a 6.3 mile run. At noon. It was a little warm, but still not awful, though it certainly won't be long before running in the middle of the day becomes completely out of the question. I was out for just over an hour, and sunburned my neck. Oops. That was my own fault. Even in March, I can't be outside for that long on a sunny day without sunscreen, but apparently I still have not learned this lesson after 31 years.

L to R: Kathleen, me, Steve (in the gray & blue behind us), Donna, Cleve, and Mike (in the blue in the back)

On Sunday morning, I drove over to Manvel to meet up with some people from my tri club (and hundreds of others) for the Great Escape Ride. It's one of the many MS150 warmup rides that go on in the greater Houston area in the spring, which means it's a supported ride with rest stops, snacks and fluids, and police support at major intersections. They had routes mapped out for people to go 16, 42, 55, and 73 miles. Most of the tri club people rode 55, but I'm not quite ready for that distance yet (maybe next weekend). When the two routes split at mile 20, I rode the rest of the way with my friend Cathy.

The start of the ride was a bit chilly, but it warmed up quickly as the sun rose. By the time we hit the final rest stop, it was warm enough that I took off my tights (which I'd been wearing over my bike shorts) and just tied them around my handlebars for the rest of the ride. It was an awesome day for a ride, and it wasn't even too windy! I took things easy and finished with an average of 16.4 miles per hour. Not too shabby for a nice, easy ride. I still felt good when we finished, so it seems my legs could have handled 55 miles. I'm not sure my butt could have taken the extra 45 minutes in the saddle though!

I was pretty hungry after the ride, and when I got home, Jose was cooking eggs and biscuits. He is pretty awesome.

My first tri of the season is coming up in just under 4 weeks: the Gateway to the Bay tri in Kemah on April 11. I'll be doing the Olympic distance -- 1500 meter swim, 40 kilometer bike, and 10k run. This is a new race, so it should be fun. I love races that are practically in my backyard!

http://www.cosmicappetite.com

This kind of lovely, cloudless day happens with welcome frequency in the spring. Last month, one of the crewmembers on the International Space Station took this photo from orbit. Just to the lower left of center is a neighborhood with a golf course running through the middle. (It's easier to see if you view large on Flickr.) That's my neighborhood!

While I was looking for that picture, I also came across this picture of Dubai. I knew they had a palm shaped island. Islands in the shape of continents? That's a new one!

While I don't know if he took these photos specifically, one of the current crewmember, Soichi Noguchi from Japan, has been taking tons of photos from orbit and posting them via Twitter. (He's @Astro_Soichi.) Since I'm on the topic, here are a couple of my favorites that he's posted lately:

"Himalaya in sunset. Lake Manasarovar is still frozen."

He's also been taking photos of the glaciers in Patagonia. They are spectacular. I'm pretty sure we saw both of these when we went to Patagonia in 2006. (I need to repost those photos. Dang I was skinny then.)

"South Patagonia. One of the most beautiful glaciers of the world. 800mm lens will take you there :-)"

"Glacier lake in Southern Patagonia. See the color difference between the two lakes."

We got a late start, and traffic was horrendous. By the time we finally walked through the gate, it was 8:15 and the rodeo was 3/4 done. I was really annoyed at the world while we were stuck in traffic and missing the steer roping and bull riding, etc, but after I finally accepted the idea that we were just not going to get there, it was fine. Neither of us particularly cared about the concert that followed the rodeo (Rascal Flatts), so we didn't even bother going inside the arena. Instead, we headed straight for the food and the carnival and ended up salvaging our rodeo outing -- in fact, we had a great time.

We rode the Ferris wheel...

... and enjoyed the view from on high.

Then we rode the swings, which made us dizzy...

...but that was fine, since there was no one else on the ride to witness our stumbling afterwards.

Although the fact that we got dizzy on the mere swings made us decide to forego crazier rides like this one!

These turkey legs looked tasty, but we'd already eaten brisket sandwiches.

We checked out all our options for fried desserts, which included Twinkies, Moon Pies, cheesecake, and tiramisu...

...before deciding to partake of some fried Oreos covered with powdered sugar.

So you know: fried Oreos taste like chocolate doughnuts!

Since most people were inside listening to Rascal Flatts, it wasn't crowded at all!

Jose tried to win a giant stuffed basketball, but alas, luck was not on his side.

At the end of the night, we took the carnival chair lift back to the other side of the park, and waved at the monkey and banana traveling in the other direction! I'm sure they had a fun time on the rest of the rides.

(All photos were taken with the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone. There are a few more on Flickr if you're interested.)

No secrets here. I just follow the recipe that's on the back of pretty much every Nestle Toll House bag. I use Crisco instead of butter. Why? Because that's how my mom always did it, which made me wonder what the difference between butter and shortening really is.

While I don't think shortening is actually any healthier, it does seem to make a difference in the texture of the cookies. I've used actual butter once or twice, and while the cookies taste more buttery (obviously), they come out kind of flattened. With shortening, they come out fluffier. Actually, fluffier is probably not the right word, but they are definitely less dense. I like 'em better that way, and I don't miss the butter flavor.

I found this blog entry this morning that explains why, if you're curious. (The difference is primarily that butter has some water in it and a lower melting point, while shortening does not. Cooking = science! Hooray for science!)

I've used that recipe a hundred times, but often substitute different kinds of chips, which can really change the cookies. I haven't done anything truly crazy, but I've made this same recipe using butterscotch chips, peanut butter chips, M&Ms, white chocolate chips, and Andes mint chips. Maybe some others that I can't remember, too. Anyway, this time I used half a bag of peanut butter chips and half a bag of chocolate chunks. You can also add nuts if you want, though I usually don't.

The recipe says to bake for 9-11 minutes. For years, I always had to bake for more like 8 minutes. I would inevitably forget this, and end up toasting the first pan a bit too much. Apparently this was due to my many crappy electric apartment ovens that ran hot. Ever since we moved into the house with our awesome gas oven (with digital temperature gauge!), these cookies come out perfect after exactly 10 minutes.

Yum!

The photo above of the flower beds in front of our house was taken last July. Everything had just been planted by the builder, and it was the middle of summertime. Lots of sun, plenty of late afternoon thunderstorms to keep thirsty plants happy.

This is what they looked like by the beginning of March. Pretty ragged, right? While I don't expect everything to look as lush and green in February as it does in July, the periods of unusually cold weather have taken their toll. I expect (hope) that most of the plants will make a comeback now that the weather is warming up -- along with the stupid crunchy St. Augustine grass that turns brown in the winter -- but the large fern-like plant that was front and center was obviously a casualty of the freeze and the monkey grass looked like it had all been stomped on by an elephant. It was time for some gardening.

I know basically nothing about plants and shrubs, so we headed over to Maas Nursery in Seabrook. Multiple people had told me it was the place to go, and it was indeed awesome. We said "show us the low maintenance section" and then picked out a couple different plants to start our experiment. We decided to address the front row of the beds for now, since it looked the worst. (Plus, we think the stuff in the back rows will perk up over the next couple months.) Our main criteria was anything that looked nice, was reasonably drought-tolerant, and liked full sun, since our front yard bears the brunt of the afternoon summer sun. We bought:

• 4 dwarf yaupon holly
• 5 pink autumn sage
• 1 big mirror leaf viburnum

(Side note: when I googled yaupon holly, I discovered that the scientific name is ilex vomitoria. Yes, vomitoria. What a pleasant name for a plant.)

This past Saturday was an absolutely beautiful spring Houston day, so we spent two hours outside planting all of the new stuff. It was surprising hard work and we were both sore the next day. But the beds look better already!

We replaced the dead fern thing with the big viburnum. The bright green color is really nice, and it should produce flowers at some point. We also dug out most of the monkeygrass and replaced them with alternating holly and sage bushes. Those can grow pretty big if you let them, so we'll have to prune them occasionally, but that's sufficiently "low maintenance" for me.

Before

After

We do still need a new batch of mulch to put down over the whole bed. Any of my truck-owning friends want to volunteer?

Before

After

I still don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to gardening, so who knows, we may be replacing some of these again next year. It's a learning experience!

I finally got the final DVD full of the high-resolution scans of the 1000+ old slides I sent off to be digitized. They are pretty awesome.

In honor of David's birthday, here are 3 pictures of him. I snuck myself into the last one because hey -- it's MY blog. Haha.

We are dog-sitting Gizmo for a few days while Kelly and John are out of town. She is small and cute, and though she knows us, she seemed absolutely terrified when we went over to pick her up on Wednesday evening. She calmed down pretty quickly though and is now being thoroughly spoiled by Jose's mom, who took her on at least 3 walks yesterday.

She follows us around the house and watches whatever we are doing. Making dinner, folding laundry, working on the computer...it's pretty cute. Jose has already announced that he wants a dog. (He announced that a couple months ago; dog-sitting for Gizmo just reminded him.) So we'll see.

Jose's mom is visiting us for the week. Tickets from Corpus Christi to Houston get so cheap on Southwest that if you wait for the right time, you can fly round trip for $78. That's within a few bucks of what we pay for gas each time we drive down there -- one tank there, one tank back. Anyway, the cheap ticket prices let her come for a longer visit than usual, so she flew in on Saturday and leaves next Monday.

We can't take the week off work, so she's been hanging out at the house during the day. Yesterday I came home and she had made cupcakes. Yum! Then while I went for a run, she started making dinner and it was ready right when Jose got home from class at 7:00.

Just like I say whenever my own mom comes to visit and does my laundry: I could get used to this!

In other news, last night we finally went live with two websites I've been spending every free moment working on since mid-January. (They're paying me, so the comment about spending all my free time on it is not a complaint in any way, but merely a statement of fact.) After spending so much time on them, I find myself looking at them now and thinking that they don't look like they should have taken so much work. Hmph.

Anyway, if you are curious, here they are: misshoustonpageant.com and missbayareapageant.com. I've been working with the pageant producer for a couple years now; you may remember a mention here or there of creating the program book each year since early 2008. This time around they wanted a refresh of their very stale old site. They seem really happy with the result, so I'm happy too.

I'm encouraged to find that I haven't completely forgotten all of my Matlab skills, and that I'm pretty good at picking up Simulink. Simulink is all visual -- as in, you drag blocks around that represent equations and functions and inputs and outputs -- and I'm pretty good with all things visual.

I'm not really sure why I'm in this class except for the fact that they needed a civil servant to meet their headcount requirements. (As a cynical aside, the fact that I'm a civil servant seems to be all I'm good for these days.) I don't have any immediate use for these skills. But it's been more fun so far than I thought, and it's always good to have a new skill. Right???

Now for a complete topic shift, and to give the non-engineers reading this something that they actually care about, I will show you what I made for dinner last night: Pioneer Woman's meatloaf. I haven't had meatloaf in a very long time, and after we finished, Jose said "that was major comfort food." And it was. Meatloaf with a side of potatoes.

Meatloaf is totally easy to make. You just put everything in a bowl and mash it up.
We were generous with the parsley, yet I still wish we'd added more.

In addition to that stuff above (meat and cheese and spices), you also add eggs and bread soaked in milk. Then you get to mush everything together, which is easiest to do if you use your hands. I suppose this part would suck if you don't like touching meat. I'm not a huge fan of touching raw chicken, but for some reason ground beef really doesn't bother me.

The only hitch was that I couldn't find my loaf pan. I KNOW I used to have a blue pyrex bread pan. It matched the blue pyrex baking dishes I have in 2 different sizes. But last night it was nowhere to be found, and the only thing Jose could find was a small aluminum loaf pan that was not nearly big enough for all that meat. Let's just say we will be eating meatloaf for the next couple days as leftovers. See, something I have quickly realized is that Pioneer Woman's recipes make a TON of food. Enough to feed her family of 6 plus a few guests, I suppose. I really need to start cutting them in half.

So we used one of the baking dishes and had "meatloaf brownies." That picture shows the situation after I'd covered half the meatloaf brownies in sauce. Don't worry, I finished covering it with sauce before I baked them.

Meatloaf brownies. Try it.

We had twelve checkpoints -- figuring out where they were required puzzle-solving and Google-searching skills (phones and laptops were allowed, and calling people was also fair game) -- and were allowed to skip one. We started at Lucky's Pub just a couple blocks from Minute Maid Park, and ended up running through downtown and all the way to Montrose when all was said and done.

Debbie named our team the Lollipop Lobsters, and she invented lobster costumes for us to wear. Our extra arms turned out looking more like sausages, but oh well. One of the clues had nine things to take a photo of, and we needed any 3 in a tic-tac-toe pattern. The first one we got was both of us with a stranger wearing a cowboy hat. Since there was a gun show going on at the convention center, this was quite easy to find.

Another of the tic-tac-toe options was to take a photo of us with 5 strangers in front of a fountain. This one was right in the middle of Discovery Green, and there were tons of people around so it was easy to find some enthusiastic strangers. Being dressed in our ridiculous lobster getup didn't hurt either.

The first couple checkpoints we attacked were downtown. (We weren't required to do the checkpoints in any certain order, but could determine ourselves how we wanted to proceed.) The clue for this was to take a photo of both teammates touching the statue at a given set of coordinates, which turned out to the Joan Miro statue in front of the Chase building at the corner of Milam and Capitol.

We also had to take a picture of us in front of the clock on the corner of Main and Texas. The catch was that we had to be within a minute of 20 minute increments (i.e. 1:00, 1:20, 1:40, 2:00, etc). Fortunately we timed things well.

From there, we hopped on the Metro and rode along for a few stops until right after we'd passed under I-45. Public transportation was allowed and encouraged! A few blocks from the stop was the Nouveau Antique Art Bar, where we had to take a picture of ourselves in front of the mural on the wall. We then ran over to "the best place to watch hockey in Houston," which turned out to be the Maple Leaf Pub on Elgin, where we had to get a ping pong ball into a cup a la beer pong. There was one more checkpoint in this area that we skipped -- it would have required one of us to eat a habanero pepper, and neither of us wanted to do that!

Then we had to head out Westheimer. We kept looking for the bus to come by so we could hop on, but it never did. The winning teams did indeed take the bus, so I guess we were just unlucky. No bus meant we had to go on foot, which added about 3 miles to our path. We did it anyway. One stop was in front of this mural at the Leopard Lounge, another was at the Aurora Picture Show, and a third was at Cherryhurst Park where we had to do an obstacle course.

We had no luck with buses on the way back either, so we had to go all the way back to the Metro stop and ride a few stops back into downtown. We ran over to the Houston Public Library and made origami. I have to say, we totally ROCKED the origami challenge. We were in and out of there in about 5 minutes, and it sounded like other teams had been there for a lot longer than that.

Our final stop was "the Travis location of the restaurant founded by Tom & James Papadakis," where we had to take a photo of one teammate feeding the other teammate a cookie. The restaurant turned out to be James Coney Island. (Thanks to Jose for Googling that one for us as our "phone-a-friend!")

We passed back through Discovery Green on our way to the finish line, where we stopped to get a photo of Debbie shaking a dog's paw to complete our tic-tac-toe. We'd had to change direction halfway through the race after failing to find a restaurant with a to-go menu with an eggroll on it -- it was amazing to us that we couldn't find a single Chinese restaurant with egg rolls. Oh, there were spring rolls galore, but no egg rolls!

We finished back at the pub, where we think we were in the middle of the pack. We'll know for sure when they post results later this week. We hung around for the awards and costume contest, but sadly we didn't even make the finals. There were a lot of people in great costumes, and since the voting was done by applause, the guys who won were the guys who had the most friends there, pretty much. They were entertaining though.

I mapped something close to our path this morning, and found that we covered around 10 miles. About 2.5 of that was on the Metro, which means we ended up covering somewhere between 7-8 miles on foot. I didn't realize it had been that far, but that explains why I was so tired that night!!