Feeling Blah

This week I travelled to Hampton, Virginia, to join a meeting related to the Mars precision lander work I used to do a few years back. The guy who's the wiz with entry guidance is retiring in a few months, and Sarah and I are going to split his workload. Unfortunately, the current travel budget doesn't split -- they barely had enough to send one so they sent me. I was pretty impressed with the Langley work presented, plus I got to see a lot of people I hadn't seen in years or haven't met yet. So that was good.

Meanwhile I realized how inadequate my current understanding is of the entry guidance. I think I can use it pretty well; I think I know enough to teach Sarah how to do it. But a lot of the guys have good questions about the mathematic derivation and there I am sorely lacking. So, guess what I'll be doing the next few weeks. And I don't have a freakin' clue what an influence coefficient is. Should be fun! The JPL guys are really sharp but lifting entry is waaay out of their experience, and I'm finding it difficult to explain some simple things like how an entry vehicle can't change its azimuth quickly until it's slowed down to Mach 5 or so. (It's a question of momentum, really, but I didn't think of explaining it that way until the flight home.)

Anyways, Wednesday night I started having a really bad sore throat, which Thursday grew into a runny nose and a somewhat miserable pair of flights back to Houston. I was napping hard on the planes and in the airports. In fact, I almost missed both of my flights from napping. One of the gate agents came by to wake me, which I really, really appreciated. I was able to wake myself up for the final boarding call to Houston.

So, blah traveling on my birthday, woo. At least I made it back home before midnight. But I felt like crap so I stayed home on Friday, despite having all these new ideas and realizations as to what I need to start doing at work. And then I skipped out on a Saturday party with Ben, Farah, Greg, Michelle, Chris, and Monica (mostly old high school friends) because I still feel blah.

After two days of staying home, I'm starting to feel a little stir crazy. Jen got me some megacool new speakers (with subwoofer!) for my computer since my old speakers were shot. So last night I softly blasted the upstairs game room with Lord of the Rings music while I surfed the internet. The dogs actually didn't mind it as much as I thought they would. Lauren and Melissa got me a Green Day CD and two books, one by CS Forester (one of my favorite authors) on the Barbary Pirates and another on the collapse of societies by Jared Diamond. Diamond wrote "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which assessed how the environment and available resources play a factor in developing societies.

But being said stir crazy, I having trouble sitting still to watch Star Wars, Episode II, Attack of the Clones let alone read books. You know, watching it years later I actually appreciate it a lot more. I was a little disappointed when I first saw it, mostly because the romance scenes really seemed lame and contrived. But I liked it better this time -- Anakin and Padme are two teenagers and god knows I was pretty awkward and lame with my romance attempts back then too. But in watching the deleted scenes, there was a couple that I think they should have left in. Yeah, it would have slowed the movie down a tad, but it really helped developing the Anakin-Padme relationship. The best one was when she takes him home to meet her parents, and then tries to convince her family that he's NOT her boyfriend.

I hope Episode III is good.

So. That's been my life for the past few days. Jen's been busy with bridal showers and she should be back from a bachelorette party anytime soon. Which is probably for the best, the less time here the less chance she has of catching this blahness. But I still miss her after travelling for a few days and being stuck at home.

Blah.

I hope I feel better tomorrow. :)