Airplanes and an Oxymoron – Part 2

Well, I still wouldn’t call it “relaxing”, but this family vacation definitely had more of my sort of fun in the mix than usual. And by “my sort of fun,” I mean airplanes and books. Got lots of reading done, and besides checking out NAS Wildwood, Daddy discovered there was to be an airshow in Atlantic City on Wednesday, so we ventured up there and caught the last couple hours of it! :D

(I got SO MANY PICTURES. And almost all of them are awesome. Narrowing it down to a sort-of-postable number was quite the challenge. Here is but a fraction. (Yes, seriously. This is less than 10% of what I took in 2 hours.)

Paratroopers! (Air Force 103rd Rescue Squadron)

Air Force HC-130H Hercules (106th Rescue Wing) + seagull

P-51D Mustang & A-10C Thunderbolt II

A-10C Thunderbolt II
   

Heavy Metal Jet Team (a civilian jet demonstration team! five Aero L-39 Albatros and a MiG-17)
   

Kendal Simpson aerobatics demonstration (in a Pitts Model 12)
   

   

USAF Thunderbirds!
   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

So much flying awesome. :)

The parents aren’t planning on coming home until Sunday night, and I’m driving out to Harrisburg on Monday for Jess’s wedding (and need to do laundry sometime before then), so when my Grandma and Aunt Carol came down to visit us and the beach for the day on Thursday, I decided to hitch a ride home with them. So now I have the house aaaaaaaaallll to myself for a few days!

Airplanes and an Oxymoron – Part 1

The oxymoron I speak of is “family vacation.” As I figure it, a trip has to either have a reasonable expectation of being relaxing, or be exciting in some way, in order to count as a vacation. (Preferably with elements of both, but let’s not be picky.) Not that I don’t love my family, but we don’t do particularly well together in confined spaces for extended periods of time, so on the whole, it isn’t exactly tranquil.

As for exciting, they have once again chosen New Jersey as the site of our mostly-yearly temporary migration, so that’s pretty much out too. Not that I have anything against New Jersey either, but I’m not a beach person and boardwalks have long since lost their novelty, so going “down the shore” (when there are so many places we haven’t seen yet, and several we’re always saying we should go back to, yet never quite manage to) is just kind of lame.

Not very relaxing, not very exciting… it’s not so much “vacation” as “let’s move to New Jersey, and then move back home a week later!” :/ But hey, at least this year, we’re staying in a different town… (Instead of another year in Ocean City, we’re cheaply renting a neighbor’s vacation home in Cape May. That’s almost exciting, right?)

The upside is my Dad discovered the NAS Wildwood Aviation Museum, which we explored today!

Historic Hangar #1 was restored and converted into the museum

UH-1 Huey                                                                   Hughes TH-55 Osage*
   

Bell OH-13 Sioux Helicopter                                            Kitties like airplanes too!
   

HH-52A Seaguard Helicopter (this one served on board the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker vessel “Polar Star”)

Air and Space 18A “Flymobil” Gyrocopter                          1940′s radios and transmitters
   

Vultee BT-13 Valiant                                                     Marine OE-2 Bird Dog (Cessna 321)
   

T-28C Trojan with arresting gear for carrier-deck landing

Propeller balancing area in the prop shop                          Wright Cyclone R-1820 engine (used in B-17s)
   

Bethlehem Steel!                                                          Smile, Daddy!
   

TBM Avenger (the type torpedo-bomber stationed at NAS Wildwood during WWII)

Grumman F-14 Tomcat (a la “Top Gun”)                          Lockheed T-33 Thunderbird / a Blue Angels’ A-4 Skyhawk
   

Army Boeing-Stearman PT-17 Kaydet

The part of the hangar we couldn’t get to!                      A herd of [de Havilland Canada DHC-4] Caribou*
   

There were a lot more exhibits too, including “All Available Boats” (about 9-11 rescue ops), a whole area about the Coast Guard, and a ton of historical stuff from WWII, when it was an a Naval air combat training station. Very interesting stuff. And I got a hat.

Cara and Quinn came down to hang for a few days… I think he’s afraid of the sistercreature. (As well he should be?)

* Thanks to @zippyg2 for identifying the TH-55 and Caribou when I couldn’t remember what they were!

“I’m old, let’s have a party!”

…or something to that effect.

Pop (my Dad’s dad) decided to throw a big fancy shindig and invite pretty much everyone he knows. No particular occasion, he’s just glad to be 92 and still kickin! We are too, so very nearly everyone came out for a random afternoon of family fun!

   
Jesenia! (my cousin Jamie & Joel’s munchkin)                    My mom’s side of the family came out too!

Mighty fine shindig.

   
Pop chatting with his guests                                           Uncle Joe speechifying

   
Daddy’s turn                                  And then there was music! (Cousins Adria & Daria, and Daria’s hubs Jack Grace)

The Chicago/Wisconsin branch of the family!
(Rosie, Uncle Joe, cousin Joe, Sergio and Karen with little Lyla, Jackie, Jamie and Joel with Jesenia, and Angie!)

   
Sweet little Lyla! (Cousin Karen and Sergio’s baby)             Such a cutie pie!

   
Freeman! (Adria’s kiddo)                  Aunt Rosie, Angie, Pop, Aunt Joanna, and Daria

It was great seeing everybody! A rare occasion to get everybody together, especially when it wasn’t for a wedding or a funeral! We should do it more often! (Weddings and random gatherings – not funerals.)

135: Another #NASAtweetup Adventure

I was not invited to this one.

No, I didn’t sneak in either.

Before Endeavour had even vanished aglow into the cruelly low ceiling of clouds on her final [operational] flight, STS-134, I knew I had to try to come back for STS-135. No, really, I knew I would come back to see Atlantis launch, one way or another. I did apply for the tweetup, of course, but as expected, did not get in. (Even if they didn’t automatically eliminate folks who’d already made a launch tweetup, there’s no way I’d get that lucky twice in a row!) I registered for a chance to purchase tickets for one of KSC’s public viewing areas as well, but didn’t win that lottery either. Undeterred, as soon as they set the target launch date, I started figuring out travel potential travel options and kept looking for any available tickets. After all, this was the last space shuttle launch ever. It wasn’t like there was going to be another chance to catch one, and I did not intend to pass it up if I could help it!

I told my Dad that I meant to go back down, expecting him to understand, if not actually join me again… but he kinda flipped out on me instead, so I had to let it drop for a while. He eventually came around and did decide to join me if he could make it a work trip again, so for the third time in as many months, I kicked the plan-making into high gear!

One of the crazier things I’ve done

For the last few launch tweetups, since they’re two-day events and tweeps come from far and wide for them, people have started a bit of a tradition of getting groups together to rent vacation houses for the week. As I’ve mentioned, my uncle (who works on the shuttle) and aunt live nearby, so for both of the previous trips, we-and-then-I just stayed with them. However, I felt like I was both wearing out my welcome and missing a-whole-mother element of tweetuppy goodness, so I decided to look into a shared rental for round three.

The fine folks at NASA did invite tweeps who had been at the 133 or 134 tweetups but hadn’t make it back for their actual launches to come back to watch this one from the press site with the 135ers, which was nice. Would have been nicer if that included me, but it did mean @Stephonee and several others we now knew would have a very good reason to make the trip, so we decided to try to get a house together (which took nearly as much convincing Daddy as the trip in the first place, but once again, he did eventually agree, if only so I wouldn’t be stranded if he needed to go off to do worky things), so Steph and I started looking for a good one.

We both put in so much time and effort and (being the organizational nerds we are) spreadsheet work, just in the preliminary scouting of what rentals were cheapish, could accommodate several unrelated people, and were still actually available, that we felt compelled to share all that research with the 135 tweetup attendees and the rest of the alumni and other space tweeps who’d be looking for places to stay that week.

Get ready, here comes the crazy part…

Somehow, for some now-unknown reason, we came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea and just go ahead and organize everybody’s housing who wanted us to.

O.O

Yup. And we did. We figured we’d maybe get enough alumni and a few of the new group to fill one or two big houses, maybe three. So we compiled our lists, put the word out, and started collecting info from folks who were interested. And the response was… impressive. Thankfully, It occurred to me early on that this was going to involve a crazy-ass-ton of email, so I snagged a new gmail account just for this… and boy was I glad I did.

As the first bunch of people indicated interest, the info we gathered seemed rather haphazard, so I made a survey/form thing to standardize it and make sure we got what we needed to know the first time and not have to email back and forth a thousand times. Then, our offer the link to the form got tweeted to the masses… over 100 responses!

So we were really in it now. D: And we had just under a month to work with, before people would start arriving!

Mad scouring of the interwebs, half a godzillion emails and phone calls to property owners, and 3 massive drowning-in-data spreadsheets, and we started piecing things together, forming strangers from all over the world, by the half dozen, into groups of temporary roommates, finding them houses and condos to rent, and facilitating communications and/or transactions to seal the deal.

Of course, it being summer in a vacation spot, and oh yeah, the little matter of an expected million people converging on the area for the same reason we were, finding available rentals on short notice was not exactly cake-like. Also, my computer up and died (the rest of the way) a week before we left, which didn’t exactly help! But we did it. It took us a while, but we did it. Not everyone who expressed interest ended up joining a tweetup house, but in the end, we had organized or helped coordinate 9 houses, accommodating over 60 tweeps altogether!

#SerenityHouse

The first time the idea of getting a shared rental for the 135 launch came up, long before any of it was actually decided (possibly while we were still at the 134 tweetup?) the conversation went like this:

Steph: “So you realize if we get a house together, it has to be called #SerenityHouse, right?”
Me: “Of course.”

Tweetup group houses traditionally have names, and being the domain of spacetweeps, they’re usually space themed and hashtagged. When we decided that we were actually going to go the rental house route, it was not even a question that ours would be named after our favorite fictional spaceship!

And oh was it shiny.

It was a little farther away from KSC than we wanted, way down at the southern tip of Merritt Island. And I do mean way. way. down. At the very end of the island. It tapers down to a skinny little spit of land between two rivers the farther south you get, and by the time you get to where this house is, it’s only wide enough to fit one house across, plus the road to get to the next one. It’s not even a road, technically, but a private driveway to reach the last 10 or so houses… only 3 of which are farther than ours.

   
It has a dock on both sides, and I think it was just about as far out to the end of the main one as from one river to the other… crazy. (Is it just me, or does the one on the right look like an ad for our car?)

   
The far end of the house                                               The house as seen from the smaller dock

   
The smaller dock                                                                                         Stairs up to the roof deck

The owners are apparently really fond of spiral stairs and turquoise glass block, which I didn’t know existed, but they managed to not only find but incorporate into pretty much every room in the place!
   
Entryway/stairs to the main floor       Main living area

   
Sunporch with a really strange coffee table                      Kitchen

   
View from the stairs                                                                                    Stairs to the master bedroom

Besides Daddy and I and Steph, the “crew” of #SerenityHouse also included Steph’s boyfriend @_caturday, a couple of Steph’s friends and their munchkin, and fellow tweetup alumni @JackDearlove, @DrLucyRogers, @genejm29, and @RobPegoraro. There was a great deal of awesome, smart, and snark going on in that house!

We ended up getting the master bedroom, which turned out to be the whole top floor! It was pretty much enormous… and strangely devoid of furniture.
   
From the top of the stairs                                              Literally the only furniture in the upstairs

(That counter wrapping around the glass block wall continues about 5 more feet to the left and ends with a minifridge and bar sink… add a microwave and you’d have got a killer studio apartment! The stained glass door leads out to a deck and stairs to the roof, the windows to the right are actually giant screened-in sliding doors, and there’s another screened-in balcony opposite them! Insane!)

And behind the fireplace, a hot tub! (And…a giant rhinoceros horn?)

      
Go around the rhino horn and you come to a vanity sink. To the left, the master bathroom (including the shower in the curve of that glass block wall you saw from the outside!) and to the right, a nice-sized walk-in closet… that leads to another walk-in closet… that is actually larger than the master bedroom in our house, much less my own.
      
Washer/dryer/island(?!) in the closet     Random Shuttle stained glass!            The neighboring house, from the roof

   
The roof deck                                                            Marina across the river

   
The views were incredible. I’m afraid to even wonder what this place is worth?! I seriously want to know what the folks we rented it from do for a living! And yet the weekly rental was pretty reasonable for a group!
   

Obviously, I did not particularly want to ever leave.

However, we did, of course. Several times in fact! :P (and then once at the end, when we didn’t go back!)

Pre-Launch Wanderings

Most folks, including us, got into town sometime Wednesday. The tweetup started Thursday, but those of us not attending had a day to hang out before the launch, so when we got to the house around 11 Wednesday night, I wasn’t too concerned about getting to sleep… and thus was still awake and tweeting at 3:30, when I discovered that @Ruthie147 had never gotten connected with a ride from her hotel to KSC. It wouldn’t have been hard to find her a carpool even on short notice, except that, being from Ireland, she needed to leave rather early to hit the international badging place before heading to the regular tweetup check-in, and it seemed like most of the other international tweeps had either been around for early registration or were coming from the opposite direction, and nobody else was heading out that early – the sort of early that my “late” was rapidly turning into – so I just drove up and took her over myself.

Once she got her super special international visitor’s badge and we found some other tweeps she could catch a lift with to the regular check-in and on to the press site, I headed back, detouring to a Starbucks to make use of some of Ruth’s overly generous gas money (and to mollify Daddy, who was less than thrilled upon waking up to me and his car being gone). Back at the house, there was breakfast, squeezed a bit of work in, some twittering, some puttering, and then we gathered the troops and headed off to Fishlips for lunch!

   
Space tweeps, assemble!                                               AstroTimmy! (of ThinkGeek.com)

The majority of the afternoon was spent scouting for locations from which to watch the launch. (I bought Causeway tickets from a guy on CraigsList who seemed legit, but he’s either a complete moron, or was indeed a scammer, as he claims he filled out the shipping form wrong, so they couldn’t get to my house before we left, and he supposedly couldn’t get them back to re-send them to my aunt’s either. He *says* he’ll send my money back… I really hope he does… grr.)

We eventually decided on the beach in Cape Canaveral (just down the street from a few of the tweetup houses!) which wouldn’t have quite as good a view as Titusville probably did, but there were already so many people camped out there we knew we’d never get a spot on the bridge for the clear line of site, so we opted for infinitely less crowded, easier access, and a much shorter drive. That settled, we headed over to Cocoa and had dinner with my aunt and uncle.

One Last Launch…

While everyone else started their day before it was actually day time, having to be in their launch viewing locations hours in advance, Dad and I had nowhere to rush to, so I slept until a rather lovely 8:30 or so, got ready and gathered my things at a leisurely pace, and we drove up to the Cape in very minimal traffic, parking at a tweetup house and walking down to the beach around 11.

We deployed chairs, tripodded camera, radio, and even found some open wifi to watch NASAtv, and waited to see if the rather testy weather would permit the launch. Part of me was hoping for a delay, so I could have another day or two to try to get tickets for a closer view. It really didn’t look like the weather was going to cooperate, but at the last minute, the clouds broke up just enough and the wind calmed down just enough, and they decided to go for it! Then, with 31 seconds to go, a surprise hold. For two minutes, I was sure it was going to be a scrub… but then countdown resumed, and 30 seconds later, the Space Shuttle left Earth one last time.

(Darkened and upped the contrast on this one so you can actually make out the shuttle a bit.)

Obviously, we didn’t have nearly as gloriously close a view as I did last time.

I didn’t want to watch the whole thing through my viewfinder, so my blind-shooting camera didn’t quite keep up…
   

Though not as close as I would have liked, our vantage point on the beach did have one advantage – while the clouds again impeded the view from KSC much too quickly, we were far enough away to see her pop out the top and peek-a-boo through the less-dense clouds for almost a minute before she faded into the haze and distance!
   

   

   

We stopped for coffee and the obligatory RonJon’s visit on the way home, hoping to wait out the traffic (which was decidedly worse than it had been on the way in), but it didn’t really work. At this point I finally realized this trip was the ultimate License Plate Game opportunity, and started playing as we plodded toward “home”. (I got 20some just on that drive, and ultimately hit the mid-40s… probably would have won if I’d started playing on the drive down!)

Between the complete gorgeous epicness of watching a space shuttle launch, and the leftover sleepyness from the previous couple days, the rest of that afternoon didn’t quite stick in my memory, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t really do much anyway. There may have been a dollar store involved.

SpaceTweeps Rock – Part 1

We went out for an earlyish dinner with my aunt and uncle, but I wasn’t really hungry yet, and when we got back to the house, a few of the housemates went out to a post-tweetup dinner. It was kind of awkward initially, as we kind of landed in a booth, from which it was hard to join any of the other conversations, but eventually I got up and “lurked strategically” so as to get absorbed into one conversation or another (my version of “social skills”).

I ended up talking with a lovely table of folks I realized had to be the residents of #NewFrontiersHouse (the arranging of which had been rather an adventure, but came together quite well at the last minute). And then I introduced myself…

Holy wow. Spacetweeps know how to make a girl feel appreciated. I figured some portion of people I’d helped find a place would, upon finding out who I was, thank me, and maybe one or two would offer to buy me a drink… but I never expected them to announce it to the whole group or give me an actual frakking round of applause in the middle of a restaurant! (I also got dinner, a whole lot of raving about how great their house and group turned out, and the offer of a youngest child!) Hehe. After all the drama between that landlord and finding enough people to take a longer rental, I was super glad they were happy with the place, and they did turn out to be an exceptionally fun group!

And now for some fictional spaceship.

Saturday we decided to use my free pass to the KSC Visitor’s Complex from the 134 tweetup, since I hadn’t gotten over there on either of those trips, and we don’t expect to come down a 4th time this year, before it would expire! We had spent a day and a half wandering there when we came on vacation a little over a year ago, so there wasn’t a whole lot we hadn’t seen, but there was a new Star Trek exhibit, and we were hoping to catch one of the “Astronaut Experience”s, which ended up not working timing-wise, but we did get to wander around a bit and check out the Trek stuff!

Main Engineering

A panel from the bridge                                                 Enterprise-D Shuttlecraft Model
   

Resistance is futile.                          Phasers and miscellany
   

Headless Dr. Crusher! Aah!                                             The chair in which the Shat sat.
   

Hmm… don’t actually remember whose spaceship this is. o.0

The panels behind the ship are a timeline… everything from the beginning of the space program through the present to the significant events of every Star Trek show and movie. It was very cool to read, but there was so much (the picture only shows a little more than half the wall of panels!) that I couldn’t get through it all without eating up our whole day… wonder if it’s published on the innertubes somewhere so I can read it sitting down? :P

DRAGONS!!! Er… just the one.

Next stop, it was back to non-fiction spaceships, stopping at SpaceX to see the Dragon capsule!
   

   

SpaceX’s building was right next to the Air Force Space and Missile Museum History Center, so of course we popped in there too, but it’s just one big room with everything on the walls, so it didn’t take long to make the circuit and see what there is to see.

SpaceTweeps Rock – Part 2

From there we headed back to the house, and Dad went off to Tampa to meet up with a boat or two for work, since I was planning on hitching a ride with some housemate or another to #EndlessBBQ and hanging there for the evening… only I somehow missed everyone leaving, and found myself stranded there, a solid half-hour drive from the shindig. I knew there were plenty of people staying reasonably close to where I was, but it turned out everyone had either already left, or had a full car!

After a bit of frantic twittering, looking for anyone who was still heading that way, a couple guys who were already there were actually considering driving all the way down the island and back to pick me up and bring me to the party! Then they decided, “Call a cab, we’ll pay for it.” O.O I figured, what the heck, and went along with this wacky plan.

Turns out, this wacky plan was far from being the wackiest part of this wacky plan… that award goes to the cab driver… I gave him directions to the end of the driveway-road, rather than the actual house, and he still barely found it, and then did not shut up the entire drive. -_- He was nice enough, I guess, but went on and on about every gorram thing, bouncing between very Florida-hick-ish, decidedly creepy, perfectly reasonable, and garden-variety annoying, for 19 slow miles in a minivan that smelt of cigarettes and God-knows-what. But he got me there in one piece, so okay. I was definitely thrilled to scramble out of that car as soon as we pulled into the driveway though!

The fare came to $60some, and I was thinking there were probably like five people in on the plan, intending to chip in a couple bucks, and I was gonna get stuck paying the difference (or feeling really guilty when some poor unwittingly generous soul felt obligated to cover it)… but it turns out, the hatchers of said wacky plan had actually temporarily commandeered the sound system, made an announcement explaining what was up, and then passed a bucket around! They actually collected more than enough to cover the fare and tip the crazy driver! (Who got out and seemed to hang around a while, though I ducked into the crowd as soon as possible so didn’t stay to find out how long.)

There was a pool, live music, and of course plenty of food and beverages, but [besides the top-notch company] the real hit of the party was taking pictures of the moon with our cellphones! (We are space geeks, after all!)

Yes, I really did take that picture with my phone… and a little help from @priesett‘s 10-inch-diameter telescope! (Just holding the phone camera over the eyepiece!) That picture’s not even the half of it though – in person, the detail was absolutely incredible. And when pointed at Saturn, you could actually make out the shape of the planet and its rings with that sucker! Crazy awesome. (Now I want one.)

I’m not typically much for big crowded parties, but when it’s a crowd of SpaceTweeps, it’s sure to be a good time! It’s still kind of mind-blowing to me that a crowd of people who, for the most part, I have never met, and many of whom I haven’t even really talked with, would collectively give upwards of $70 just to bring me to a party! But I’m very glad they did! It was a ton of fun!

SRB Retrieval

For those who aren’t NASA geeks: The Space Shuttle consists of an Orbiter (the plane-like ship containing crew and cargo), an orange External Tank, and two white Solid Rocket Boosters. A few minutes after launch, the SRBs are jettisoned and fall back to Earth, and the External Tank does the same once it reaches orbit. The Orbiter, obviously, is the part that stays in space a while, orbiting the planet, and the External Tank burns up in the atmosphere, but the SRBs, since they break off sooner/lower, land in the ocean intact, and a pair of ships, Freedom Star and Liberty Star, find and fetch them to be refurbished and reused.

Of course, these SRBs won’t be recycled for another shuttle launch, but they were retrieved nonetheless. The ships were supposed to be coming back to Port Canaveral sometime Sunday, and we didn’t have to leave until Monday, so we decided to go see them come through the canal! Unfortunately, one got back Sunday morning before we got up, but the other was still expected to get there in the early evening, so my Dad, aunt, uncle, and I went to Fishlips for dinner (which is right on the canal, and we got a table by the window).

Halfway through dinner, my ears catch someone at the table behind me talking about #EndlessBBQ! I turn around and exclaim, “I was there!” and discover it’s @KelleyApril! (Who I hadn’t met in person yet, and was seated so I hadn’t seen the NASA meatball temporary tattoo on her face when we came in, so I didn’t connect the girl eating dinner with her family to the picture on my Twitter feed!) Turns out she had had the same idea, but we eventually heard that the other ship was having engine issues and wouldn’t arrive until late that night, so we had to give up on that.

However, I found out that both ships would be going through the lock the next morning, and I convinced Dad to stop on our way out of town!

   

Freedom Star was in the lock when we got there.

We watched them guiding the first SRB out to Liberty Star, which had already passed through the lock.

They went through the lock single file, and once they were through, attached each SRB to the side of one of the ships.

   

The lock had walkways over the water at all sorts of odd angles, so I ran around taking pictures from different vantage points for a few minutes, and then we left, timing our exit so we would be crossing the one highway bridge just as Liberty Star would be coming out onto that bit of river!

Liberty Star heading for KSC with the VAB in sight!

Bye bye SRB!

And then the trees invaded my view as we drove away, and 18 hours or so later, we got home. Another lovely #NASAtweetup adventure concludes!

Marian Call at the MilkBoy

Now, I should like to point out that when one of your jobs lives in the interwebs and can be worked on wherever, whenever, and the other is retail with no predictable schedule or ever more than a week or week.5′s notice, and your social life is more likely to include coffee shops and board games than bars and… well, whatever the “partying” sorts do, weekends are apt to pass more or less unnoticed.

Obviously, sometimes I do weekendy things on the weekends, but neither the schedule inflicted upon me nor the ways I choose to fill in the blanks make the fun stuff any more likely to occur on a Friday or Saturday night than any other time in the week! (Particularly since most of the time, I’m not entirely sure what day of the week it actually is.)

So for me to have 4 legitimately weekendy weekends in a row is kind of epic.

   

This fourth weekend of awesome featured another awesome Marian Call show! (Crazy, several years of waiting/trying to get to one of her shows, and now I swing two in eight days!) This one was rather closer to home, at the MilkBoy Coffee just over in Bryn Mawr! I used to go to the MilkBoy in Ardmore all the time when I took the train home from school, (since it was just across from the train station, and I’d walk over for a coffee and a warm place to sit until my Dad came to get me,) but I’d never been to the Bryn Mawr one before… and frankly didn’t remember it existed, so it’s a good thing I checked the address!

   

Once again, I helped with the selling of stuffs, but it’s a tiny place and she didn’t bring much this time, so I was mostly free to just enjoy the show. And once again, a great show, complete with Jayne hats, the TSA-friendly rainstick, typewriter percussion, a feather boa and kazoo, and lots of witty, geeky, folky, jazzy goodness!

Afterwards, I was invited to join Marian; her very talented guitarist, Brian Ray; their host for the night, Donna; and another couple, for drinks and “Nibbles”, as the menu called it, at the conveniently located Verdad Restaurant and Tequila Bar next door.

That’s a place I definitely want to get back to – can’t speak as to the tequila, but the sangria was tasty, the atmosphere lovely, and the food was friggin fantastic. I had a Black Truffle Flatbread, which was smallish-but-not-unreasonably-so for the price, and absurdly delicious. The kind of thing you force yourself to eat slowly so the flavor will be in your mouth longer. Mmm… and everything I didn’t taste looked delightful too!

The highlight of the evening, of course, was not the meal, but the company! Marian is just as lovely to chat with as to listen to her music. Donna, it turns out, is from the same town as my family and works with the Bethlehem Mounties(!) on social media. Somehow a conversation about shoes revealed that Brian and I have both been to and loved Taiwan! All in all, a seriously fun evening with a group of seriously fun, intelligent, snarky, very nice people! Can’t wait ’til the next tour swings our way!

#TGMarianAkira And Then Some

As promised, this weekend continued the sequence with yet another adventure, and this one a bit more of an adventurous adventure, being the sort that requires several hours of driving and an overnight stay. But to see Marian Call play at ThinkGeek headquarters with my awesome #NASAtweetup friend/co-conspirator @stephonee AND get to hang with Megan and Andrew, the travel was most definitely worth it.

Having finagled my way into the sold-out show by offering to help Marian out, I needed to get there early… which might have been more successful had I remembered that driving near DC at approximately rush hour on a Friday afternoon is a terrible idea.

Luckily, I was planning on stoping by Megan’s before the show, so I did have a bit of cushion time, and by giving up on that idea, I still managed to get to ThinkGeek a while before the show was to start, which was later than I was supposed to arrive, and much later than I planned to arrive, but still technically within the realm of “early,” which meant it was fantasmically earlier than I generally show up to such things. o.0

Marian Call live! (Finally!)

I was assigned to man the merch table, which was nicely situated on the side of the courtyard, so as to give me a pretty sweet view, so in between peddling cds and posters, the camerabeastie came out to play:

   

Jayne hat! For singing a different song about Jayne than the one mentioned previously.

This one, to be precise:
                               
(Which, we learned, was not originally about Jayne, nor written by Marian, but fit him so perfectly, she adopted and adapted it!)

The crowd enjoying the show

Bryan Ray providing guitarriness for this tour

Typewriters are the best percussion instruments.               TSA-friendly(er) rainstick!
   

For her tribute to YoSafBridge, she got out a feather boa and her best “bad girl” attitude and sang us this!
                                (With a kazoo!)
   

We were also so very lucky to be the first to hear her new song, written as an entry to NASA’s astronaut wake-up song contest!
                               
(Would have won, if I were the judge! Been stuck in my head ever since!)

Dear ThinkGeek, please hire me.

After the concert and merch-selling wrapped up, Steph gave me the grand tour of ThinkGeek’s very entertaining office, including her natural habitat and many other intriguing sights. Definitely looks like an awesome/awesomely geeky place to work! *must apply*

Timmy, the ThinkGeek monkey, complete with Jayne hat. The coolest plant home ever.
   

…well… read the sign.

Lots of Timmys! (Timmies? Timmyi?)
   

And of course, the Ninja Exit. ->   

(Also, remember the tent/canopy thing behind/over
Marian in the pictures? Well… it may or may not have migrated into somebody’s office.) o.0

We then moseyed back to where the lurkers were
lurking and lurked with them a bit (a very nice/friendly/
entertaining group of people! all get my seal of
approval!), eventually said our goodbyes, and I headed
off to find Megan and Andrew’s place and acquire sleep.

That I did, quite successfully, and spent Saturday with those crazy kids.

A Trip to the Post Office (no really!)

When we’re together, our power of indecision is greater than the sum of its parts… or something… anyway, as usual, it took us a [very amusing] while to decide what we wanted to do, but eventually we ended up on the metro heading into DC.

We went to the Old Post Office Building (it’s actually called that– the “Old Post Office Building” (and has been since 15 years after it was built!)) and toured the Clock Tower, which has an observation deck with a pretty incredible 360 view of Washington DC:

   
   
   
   

The clock tower also houses the Official Bells of Congress– the ringing of which, apparently, is both a regular occurrence and quite the ordeal! There’s a whole organization of “change ringers”… there are different types of “peals,” ranging from a couple hours long to pretty-darn-near-forever… and this supposedly attracts visitors from all over! Who knew?!

Also, BSoD. I imagine there was supposed to be a very informative presentation of some sort running here, but their display wasn’t cooperating… which may have had something to do with the fact that it was actually just an old Dell laptop with busted hinges hanging from chains, with a printout in a plastic binder sleeve taped over the keyboard.
   
There was also a barbecue festival going on that weekend which we thought might be worth checking out. ^ It cost $12 to get in, so I assumed we’d at least get lunch’s worth of BBQ included in the ticket… but all that was actually included were a couple samples, most of which seemed to be toothpaste…? We’d paid a decent meal’s worth to get in, but we’d have to pay it all over again at one of the stands to actually get that decent meal. What free food there was was tucked away in the “sample tent,” the line for which was so long and folded back on itself several times, that we couldn’t see where the end of the line even was, nor what sort of samples were available to decide if they were worth attempting that sort of a line!

It was super crowded (much more so when we got there than it looked from above earlier), rather too hot and sun-blasted, not even a cheery atmosphere, and basically a colossal rip-off! After we walked the length of it a couple times, we finally found a stand where we could actually taste some BBQ (on sweetbread the size of a small dinner roll) and it was tasty, but by then it was pretty clear we were never actually going to get our $12 worth of anything, and it was generally unpleasant enough being in there that we just gave up and left.

Just outside the fence, we discovered an ice cream cart, bought an overpriced soda and some strawberry popsicles (the awesome kind with legit chunks of strawberries frozen into them), found a nice shady patch of grass to sit and eat them, and it made it all better! That was sufficient adventuring for the day, so we hopped back on the train and headed back to their apartment for dinner and some bumming around. We watched “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” which was both really good, and amusingly appropriate, though I am not Mr. Smith.

Some adventures are the fun kind, others are… well…

The next morning, armed with The Latte of Happiness from the Starbucks in the bottom of their building (*envy face*), I headed home, and made most of the journey uneventfully. The better part of the way back up through Maryland, however, I stopped for gas, and when I got back in the car and attempted to start it back up, it decided not to. Seemed like the battery was dead, which was odd, since I’d been driving for two hours just fine, and stopped for all of four minutes, but whatever. Thankfully, the gas station was at one of those full service rest stops, and thus included a garage with a mechanic, who gave me a jump start and sent me on my way.

All seemed peachy… for about a mile. Then my poor little car started acting all sorts of not-thrilled. The middle of a 4-lane freeway didn’t seem like a great place for Charlie (the car’s name, by the way) to develop a mind of its own (or loose its mind, maybe?) so I coerced it to the shoulder, just as it gave up/out again, and called Daddy. A highway maintenance dude came along and gave me a jump again, so I could make it to the next exit, and Charlie cooperated long enough to get to a shopping center.

I got some lunch and camped out in a Dunkin Donuts with very pleasant airconditioning and wifi, and waited for Daddy. When he got there an hour or so later, he discovered the battery was not just drained, but well and truly dead, so we found a WalMart, bought a new one, and he valiantly coaxed the old from Charlie’s corroded clutches and replaced it. (And when I say valiantly, I mean it. To the right, you see the tools required… including the hammer and dollar-store butter knife.)

Karaoke with Xander!

Back in February, I finally got around to watching of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix, and of course, being a Joss Whedon creation, I was quickly hooked and watched all 7 seasons, and started following cast members on twitter, including @NicholasBrendon (who played Buffy’s best guy-pal, Xander, as well as Garcia’s boyfriend, Kevin, on Criminal Minds!) Not long after, “his webgirl” Jacqui, who does most of the tweeting, announced Nick would be doing a karaoke meet-and-greet in Philly in June, while he was in town for the Wizard World con, and it sounded kind of awesome so I got a ticket.
Like CSTS Philly last weekend, when the night finally arrived, I didn’t really feeling like going out, but I had actually paid for this one, so I definitely wasn’t missing it, and it too was lots of fun! It was even smaller than I expected. They rented out the second floor “Fuji Bar” of the Fuji Mountain Japanese restaurant in center city, which was one small room, and there were maybe 30 people there, including Jacqui, Nick, and his twin brother, stuntman Kelly Donovan! They were super friendly and entertaining, singing with each other and other folks. I sang… something… can’t remember what now… but then at the end I sang “Piano Man” with Kelly! Good times. I ended up leaving with a ton of leftovers… most of which I realized when I got home were sushi, and went to waste with no one else home to eat them that night, but the tempura was yummy!

   

Also, as our shindig was ending, Mercedes McNab, Julie Benz, Clare Kramer, and Clare’s sister showed up. I thought I recognized them, but I didn’t want to bother them, and I wasn’t totally sure until I saw this conversation on twitter:

@juliebenz only 2 stories up. Let's make a break 4 it. Be4 @ClareKramer sings dancing queen #heldhostageatkareoke—
Mercedes McNab (@MercedesMcNab) June 19, 2011

Hehe. :P

CSTS Philly

Kicking off what promises to be a fairly epic month of smaller-yet-geektastic adventures in between space shuttles (yes, that’s a valid notation of time in my life lately!) was CSTS Philly last night.

For those who may not know, CSTS = Can’t Stop The Serenity, in which browncoats from all over the world gather in their respective cities to watch the movie, generally goof around, and raise money for Equality Now, a charity Firefly/Serenity creator Joss Whedon supports.

It’s been happening and growing every year since 2006, and I tried to go the last few years, but never could, for one reason or another.

Finally, a year arrived when I knew about it well in advance, yet remembered when it got closer, and had no other obligations that night! Of course, when the day actually arrived, I didn’t feel like going anywhere, but Marian Call (who made an awesome album inspired by Firefly and BSG) was coming to play in the area a couple of weeks later, and I had told her I’d take some flyers to put up/pass out there, so that filled in the missing motivation my inner lazy introvert ate, and it turned out to be a really fun night!

There were refreshments, trivia, raffles, and live music by Sean Faust. At one point he asked if anybody in the crowd could sing, and nobody volunteered, so after a minute I did, and ended up singing “The Hero of Canton” (also known as Jayne’s song) with him, though I didn’t know all the words to the verses, and once folks realized that was what they were being asked to sing, others quickly picked up the slack!

The main organizer, Matt, called me back up on stage a little later to announce the Marian Call show, which was awesome, and a bunch of people took flyers. We watched Serenity then, as a “Special Hell” screening, in which the audience is encouraged to talk in the theater, adding emphasis and snark a la MST3K, which definitely added an interesting layer to the always wonderful ‘verse. Definitely glad I went! I even won a couple of the raffles, coming home with the book finding Serenity (edited by Jane Espenson) and a copy of the “Done the Impossible” DVD!

#NASAtweetup 134Redux, Day 2: Launch!

Apparently, I fell asleep as soon as I got into bed, without managing to turn off the light, or take off my glasses… or set the alarm… But miraculously woke up right on time anyway. (Right on time being like, 2:30am!) I got ready, snagged some coffee my aunt had very kindly made for me before she went to bed, loaded my junk into the borrowed minivan, and headed off to KSC one last time!

   

There was no “twent” this time, but there are two sets of bleachers on the press site that we were welcomed to use, so I claimed a spot on the one that had very convenient desky/tabletop surfaces for each bench row, and set up camp for the morning. Then around 5 we went down to the road to see the AstroVan coming through… again.

We waved, and definitely saw a hand inside the van wave back! :D

Best of all, after dropping off LCC-bound folks, they continued on in the right direction! No U-turn this time! Yay!

   

It was odd being out and about in the middle of the night and there being so many people around, including a whole mess of news crews gearing up for the launch. Even stranger, and totally awesome, was there being programming for us tweeps at that hour! After the AstroVan pass, we were instructed to go to the press briefing room where we had waited out the storm, for a presentation on STORRM! (heehee.)

The metal box you see in the front there is the STORRM module (Sensor Test for Orion Relative navigation Risk Mitigation… basically a nifty new docking camera/navigation sensor system), a twin of which is flying on Endeavour to test it out. The folks on the dais told us all about the history of the program and the technology, a lot of which is the software analyzing the data from the cameras and sensors, and the tests they’ll be doing on STS-134.

We got to chat with them a bit after, and watch Endeavour’s crew suiting up on NASAtv too. By the time we left, the sun was coming up, and the shoreline was filling with tripods claiming front row spots.

The next couple hours were spent charging batteries, acquiring/consuming breakfast and coffee, keeping tabs on NASAtv and the interwebs for the status of the crew and shuttle preperations and the weather forecast, and mostly just hanging out, getting to know the tweeps around us (including Nina and Chris, who got engaged in front of the countdown clock the morning of the first launch attempt!).

The weather looked questionable at times. There were a couple of technical glitches, but they were all fixed or determined to not be a problem. I listened to the radio on the bleachers as long as I dared, started my cellphone recording video and propped it up, and headed out to the shore to find a spot to watch the launch!

   
(The countdown clock with just under 4 minutes to go.)      (One last shot of Endeavour on the launch pad.)

3…2…1…

I had had to leave the tripod behind, as it was too big fit in either of the bags I took on the plane, so I crawled through the line of tripods and sat under the rope at the edge of the shore, and propped my camera on my knee. I didn’t want to just watch the launch through the viewfinder, so I focused, used the live view screen to frame it with the launch pad at the very bottom of the frame, and when the time came, just held down the shutter button hoping for the best.

Of course, it didn’t really work, and the angle drifted over and up before there was anything to see, so I got a bunch of pictures of clouds… but then the buffer filled, so I let up for a second, picked it up, and blindly started shooting just holding it against my collar bone… and I got one lucky shot!

It was… insane. Amazing. Seemed so much faster than I expected, especially since the cloud ceiling was so low. The countdown hit zero, the smoke began billowing out, Endeavour started to rise, the rumbling crackling wave of sound hit us, and then zwoop! right up and disappeared into the clouds, making them glow for a moment before punching through, the column of smoke trailing it cast its shadow across the cloud layer, and off to space!

Here’s a zoomed/cropped version:                      The smoke plume:

The smoke begins to clear:

Immediately, like a kid coming off a roller coaster, all I could think was,

“Can we do it again now?”

Once confident the shuttle was out of range and wouldn’t peek-a-boo through the clouds, and the roar subsided, folks meandered back to listen to the radio coverage or watch NASAtv as Endeavour dumped its SRBs, jettisoned the external tank, and completed its 8 minute journey to Low Earth Orbit.

   
(Mr. Pink-tie-and-sneakers says *sigh*)                             (“So, uh, what now?”)

The countdown clock was counting up, but most people stuck around for a while, letting the traffic from the crowds watching from the causeway, visitors complex, or other sites clear out first… and perhaps moreso, processing the amazingness we just witnessed.

We talked, tweeted, took a preliminary pass through our pictures, and watched and rewatched everyone’s videos. I, for one, was just kind of stunned. Endeavour broke my brain. In a good way. A very, very good way. It’s disappointing that the clouds cut our view so short, but so so amazing that I got to see it at all. I can’t wait to come back and see STS-135 launch (because clearly, that has to happen now!) but it’s so sad that it will be the last shuttle launch ever. I demand a hundred more launches! But I’m so grateful I got the chance to see one from so close!

Like I said, brain = broken.
(Like how a power surge can fry your computer? The awesome overload of NASAtweetup has fried my brain.)

We hung out a while, chatting about random things, and intermittently spurting incoherent babble involving space shuttles and amazingness, and eventually people began to disperse. By the time I figured the traffic was probably manageable, my uncle’s launch responsibilities were wrapping up, so we met up in the VAB parking lot and I followed him home a back way, and traffic was surprisingly light, even for an alternate route several hours after launch!

The rest of the trip was pretty low key (not that anything could have compared anyway!) We went out for post-launch-lunch… and then a few hours later, my aunt got home from work, and we all went out to dinner. Tuesday, I did wash so I’d have something to wear home, got a bit of work done, and met up with Nina and Chris for dinner, which was lots of fun!

Then Wednesday morning it was off to the airport and home… with a 90 minute layover in Memphis that turned into several hours, because the plane we were supposed to be leaving on got ridiculously delayed at its previous stop. Delta was a class act about it, and handed out $25 vouchers when we finally did leave, but it still made for a nasty-long day. From the time we left my aunt & uncle’s house to when I finally walked through my own door was about 14 hours, for what is normally just under 2 hours in the air on a direct flight. For an extra 4 or 5 hours, I could have driven home and saved $175. >.< Oh well! Travelsuck does not diminish the awe of a shuttle launch, nor the awesome that is NASAtweetup! See you at 135, tweeps! :D

THE END.

#NASAtweetup 134Redux, Day 1: RSS Retraction

The bus made its way from the press site parking lot out towards the launch pad, and the tweeps squee with delight when the shuttle comes into view. And then we kept getting closer. And closer! And then there was a fence, so we couldn’t go any closer, but the bus pulled off into a field right outside the fence, with a roped off rectangle designating the RSS viewing area, clearly meant for us.

We filed out of the bus into our pen… and saw this:

*Squee!* And then even better, someone with a functioning brain (aka not me) quickly realized if you back up to the farther side of the field, the change in angle is enough that the fence is no longer in your line of sight! Yay!

The Rotating Service Structure (usually referred to as the RSS) is that grey scaffold-y-looking thinger, and like scaffolding, is how the engineers get at the orbiter to work on it, once it’s on the pad, hence the “Service Structure” part of the name. But the other part of the name is “Rotating” – and that’s what we came to see. :)
   
Initially, the RSS was still in place, obscuring the orbiter (as you can see on the left), but after a few minutes it began to swing out of the way, gradually revealing Endeavour herself! (on the right, and below)

And here we have the space tweeps!:

I wonder, how many thousands of photos were taken in that field, in that hour?

Not all of them were of the shuttle…

   
(This is Stephanie Schierholz, the lovely lady who makes NASAtweetups happen. On the right, the fellow in blue is Gary, the very same awesome tour guide from the last trip, who was once again my bus’s guide for this excursion!)

…But most were! And for good reason!

   

Endeavour with the RSS fully retracted for launch!

Eventually, we took a few last shots, said “Bon voyage!” to the pretty spaceship, and loaded back onto the busses. We thought that would be the last we’d see of Endeavour up close, but then as the bus made to leave, its path took us around to the front of the pad area, and stopped!

Through the right-side windows, we had this spectacular view:

We weren’t allowed to get off there, but they did stay put for a few minutes while we opened the windows, crammed over to the one side of the bus, and frantically snapped a zillion more shots of this amazing machine.

We continued on, with Gary pointing out more interesting tidbits (including the crawler that moves the shuttles from the VAB out to the launch pad) along the way, and headed back to the press site, and from there to where we were staying, because though it’s mid-afternoon, for astronauts and space tweeps who have things to do at 3am, it’s bedtime!