Category Archives: She Blinded me with Science

No Capes! No Capes! *

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* From the Incredibles

I am on the verge of a mini break down. Just a mini one. THERE ARE TOO MANY THINGS TO DO IN ONE DAY.

Seriously, how do people survive this?

So far this is my week:

  1. Monday was an off day, spent the entire morning with girls outside/at neighbors to keep them out of Jay’s hair so he could relax.
  2. Sunday night? Luna requested to go in panties at night. And peed three times over night. Yeah!
  3. Tuesday, back to work (yea!) and take Jay to his infusion and to get Luna back at daycare and Soleil back at school after the break.
  4. Wednesday, look at the week and realize Jay needs to take Luna to the doc to do an ear check, go to pick up Soleil’s RIGHT Boot and return the LEFT boot that we had to take at the play space Sunday when someone took her right boot by mistake. And get the kids to temple. Oh and write a phase 2 proposal for XMM. And on Friday I am walking the school with Soleil (DON’T ASK), and going to her doctor to discuss anger management (an upcoming protected post) and then work
  5. Have I mentioned that I am also working on two Girl Scout volunteer awards projects?
  6. And I just set up a community service project for my Brownies? (we’re making valentine’s day cards for people in the hospital)
  7. And I was just assigned a fun job at work on the radiation belt ingress and egress (YES! It is fun, but alot of work)

How do other moms DO this? Are we really expected to be supermoms? Seriously?

How do people handle all of this?

 

Archeological Dig

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I am going through my cabinets, cleaning out into boxes what we need to move. We are keeping some things available like the pans I need to make treats for a party this week, and the pots and pans we use everyday.

But the majority of this is going on a dig. I find things from years ago. Things like the garlic press that Jay and I took from the house he lived in all of graduate school. I only lived there one year. He lived there 6. It was finally being sold, so we moved to a cottage that I lived in 1 year before. We were the last two people there, so we took all of the kitchen stuff that had been left in the house along with any furniture left by former housemates that we could. We still have the coffee table down stairs that took a hit when the 40 gallon fish tank exploded on it 17 years ago. I refinished it 12 years ago. Still good

It is weird running through our history. I forget that Jay and I have been together so long (since 1992!).

Okay, break over, back to cleaning the kitchen!

 

BTW- for those concerned about my telescope- We are in a very stable orbit. We launched AFTER the ruling that all satellites must be launched in a decaying orbit to reenter and burn in the atmosphere, but we got grandfathered. We go 1/3 of the way to the moon and orbit the earth once every 63 hours. We cannot be serviced like Hubble, so our project was designed for many years. We are in year 10 of the mission and recently were (or are in the process) of being approved for 12. We have started work on studying the 20-25 year mission life. In theory, we can go 50 or more years, with proper planning. At some point, we will run out of consumables (the fuel for the thrusters, etc) but for now? We are going strong!

A weekend of fun

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I saw Orion this weekend. He was high in the southern sky, dominating over all of the heavens with his trusty dog, Canis Major, next to him. 

“DUDE! It’s been so long since I’ve seen you! What the hell are you doing up? It’s the beginning of October!”

Orion: “dude! It’s 5 in the morning. Of course I am up. What the hell are you doing up?” 

“um, It’s a long story”

Orion: “I’ve got time, I’m just hanging out”

“okay, well it started last night, or is it tonight? Damn, I can never remember. Anyway, Jay and I went to shoot some pool. Nice date night.”

Orion: “Who won?”

“well, the table sucked, the bounces weren’t true and frankly we had more fun laughing at how terrible the shots were instead of who cared who won. Except when Jay beat me at 9-ball without me even getting a chance to shoot!”

Orion: ” I hate when the tables are warped”

“Me, too. This is off topic! So we got home, got ready for bed and … my phone goes off. Not once, but twice! That’s usually a bad sign. And I was on call, so I climb out of bed and check. Sure enough, our instrument rebooted and was running the initial software.”

Orion: “Bummer, that’s a bad thing, right?”

“yeah, really bad. SO I call a telecon and it turns out the reboot happened during a target of opportunity, one of those observations where we STOP everything, replan the entire week around, and then observe it. This one was coordinated with several ground based telescopes. I was not pleased.”

Orion:”Is that pronounced T-O-O or “two”?”

” I don’t know, I use the letters.  After much discussion, my co-worker R and I waited for the data from the last 8 hours to come down. Then we both processed it using different methods and checked what happened. Luckily, we got about 2 hours of the TOO. After the data reduction and emails, I took a 45 minute nap. I needed to be up to get in to the control center”

Orion: “Ah! So that’s why you are up now.So now what?”

“Well, if I could read the future, I would say that we will have our telecon in about 5 minutes. The flight director will have to be convinced to let us reboot and start the science again. We have a chance to reload the old software at midnight if we see something in the data when we are more coherent. Also, if I could read into the future, I would say that the coffee machine at the occ will have NO coffee and my 24 hours Dunkin’ donuts will be closed due to renovations. I would think that I would be working until 8 am and get home around 8:30. Then I would think to play with the girls and snuggle then pass out around 9:30am”

Orion:”wow, that’s a pretty detailed future. You must be good.”

“or crazy. I am talking to a constellation which is really just a random set of stars at different distances from the earth that project from a 3 dimensional space into a 2 dimensional picture.”

Orion: “no need to get snippy! “

“sorry, Have I mentioned I’ve gotten 45 minutes of sleep tonight? Anyway, my telecon is in 2 minutes, so I better call in”

Orion: “good luck. And don’t forget to stop and watch the stars sometime. We miss you too!”

“I promise, I will.”

Reading

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You want to know something? 45 minutes of exercise is not long enough to get through a Meg Cabot book. I mean if I had the time, I could bike for an hour or 90 minutes. Maybe then I could get through one of her books in one sitting.. Their pretty quick you know!

In the middle of Airhead. More sci-fi than her normal stuff, but I still like it.

Big stuff at work today. New software going up to the spacecraft soon.

 

Deadlines!

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Officially, my book should be done in first draft form in 30 days. I have given myself until September 30. Why the extra time? Well, let’s be honest. I work, I have two younger kids, I travel and I am still working out my whole "what the hell am I doing when I grow up ?" thing. Therefore, the extra time comes in. I am actually excited about where I am in the story, and I am having trouble finding the time to sit and write. It’s the time. Where is the time?

I spent some extra time at the control center yesterday understanding the timing from a meeting that we had. Last week, our telescope went into something called "Normal Sun Mode". This means the solar arrays (the things that power the telescope) were aligned to be 90 degrees to the sun and we stopped pointing where we should and the whole thing just sat there and waited for us to tell it to go back to work. It turned out there was an SEU* that caused a computer to reboot, which caused a timing issue, which caused a slew to take too long, which caused a shut down of the telescope, which caused our instrument to reboot, which caused many headaches. So, when I didn’t write much last week? Yeah, this is why. We were busy.

Now I have a series of deadlines:

  • My book, Sept 30.
  • Timing paperwork and documents- soon
  • annual review soon
  • wallpaper removal and painting in Soleil’s room- soon
  • School supplies – as soon as I know what to buy
  • Girl Scout stuff- WAY too soon
  • Code updates-soon soon soon

Just a lot of deadlines. I wish I could make these flow better, but I can’t right now! Any ideas how to make time work for you? 

SEU=Single Event Upset…ie WTF? the thing reset and we aren’t sure why, and until we have a cause, it’s a Single Event Upset

 

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity

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I am seeing red. As in severe thunderstorms coming our way! YES! PLEASE!

Today’s high was around 97F. I was a sticky mess. My hair is curlier than Daniel Craig’s Short and curlies. Ugh. I hate the humidity. Tomorrow should be a balmy 87! (or one place claims 85!) But without the humidity.

I spent most of the day grueling away over a computer simulating a proposed observation for an upcoming Peer review. I am pretty sure of the outcome, but the pain of working on this is terrible. I need to finish this tomorrow, but I have a coordinate issue that I failed to document last time. Sigh.

Please let those thunderstorms take some humidity out of the air….I think I speak for the whole North east.

 

Fore!

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My car was hit yesterday. It was the most unexpected collision. There a was driving down the road between Lexington and Belmont (which I never know the name of because each town here HAS to change the name of the street when it gets to them. “ooh! look! Main street!” “No! we want to call it “The Great Road”" “NO! It’s the “Really Nice, But Not So Great Road” in our town”) Anyway, Here I was, just driving along and THUNK… A golf ball came flying out of the country club and nailed my side door. Good Lord! Luna and I both jumped about 20 feet! I watched the offending object bouncing along in the road and all I could think was “Golf balls bounce?”

Sigh

 

I actually have 5 pages of my 8 page paper! I am so proud of myself. I need to add FIGURES because we all know that FIGURES make the difference. They fill space! And they are FIGURES! Because NOBODY wants to just read 8 pages of text on spacecraft operations. Trust me on that. We want to see FIGURES! Now I just have to find some…FIGURES! that is! 

I just spell checked this post and I had ONE WORD misspelled. Which one? and. Yes folks, I can not spell the simple conjunctive word and.

 

Watching Michelle

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I have one of the best window offices in the building. My window overlooks a small courtyard. I can hear the busy Cambridge Streets, but I cannot see them. I can hear the children playing outside at the Catholic School. I watch when the local hawks land on the dome and I can see the trees and birds.

Today, I see Michelle. She is over welmed. I can see that. She has her headset on, ipod playing. I feel as though I am a voyeur, watching her try to relax.

 Michelle is one of those people who work their butt off here. And rarely does she get the recogniztion she deserves.

So Michelle, as I watch you there, I think I will go and give you a small token chocolate to remind you that some people do see how hard you work, and we appreicate you!

 

 

“Your worst Nightmare”

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"Quaternions are the things that scare all manner of mice and men. They are the things that go bump in the night.They are the reason your math teacher gave you an F. They are all that you have come to fear, and more.Quaternions are your worst nightmare."-from cprogramming.com

I have just spent a marathon session of trying to debug my code that is heavily laced with Quaternions. This 4 dimensional, real and imaginary numbers have plagued my dreams the last few nights. I have been fighting and fighting. Delving deep into code that someone who no longer works for us had written. He did things in a manner that was difficult to understand and follow. He chose not to comment. He wrote in "matlab"(shudder). He counted starting with the number 1! (as opposed to all sane programmers who count from zero).

And today, after going on a chocolate run for the Mission Planners (if the planners ain’t happy, nobody is happy), I found the source of my hell.

I couldn’t make a unit vector to save my life. Oy vey! I need a drink!

Sigh…