I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar.

Jen and I saw Serenity tonight, along with a bunch of friends. It was good, I'm sure I'll see it again soon. The director likes to give scenes where people feel a lot of strong emotion, and he succeeded. There was lots of emotion there for me, much that I haven't felt in a long time in a movie. Since The Empire Strikes Back, or maybe... Saving Private Ryan? After watching and loving the TV series I expected to laugh a lot and see a few tense scenes, but the movie had some emotion impacts that I reckon Joss Whedon had originally planned for a season or maybe even series finale.

Like I said, the movie was good. I hope it's successful and that they make another TV series. Jen and I were chatting on the way home, I'd prefer another series to a sequel movie. Because... there's just so much storytelling that a movie ain't good for.

Hurry back to Houston, Becca, so we can go see it again. :)

Read my Mind

Sarah has been complaining of a restless feeling this week. I don't think it's just her. I've been experiencing similar symptoms, although they're manifesting in slightly different ways. For instance, I've been thinking a lot about what I'd do when/if we actually made the decision to leave Houston. A couple friends of ours told us Sunday that they're moving to Colorado, and I'm just jealous. Why can't I have one of those jobs where you can go anywhere and do the same thing? We never would have ended up here in the first place.

I can't believe the Astros took 2 from the Cardinals. I didn't expect that. It makes it less likely that the game we're going to Sunday will be relevant (which is a good thing - clinching ealry is good), but more likely that I am going to get to use those playoff tickets Sarah got me.

I'm experiencing my first major case of internal blog-related conflict. There is something I'd really like to discuss here, but due to a desire/necessity for a certain amount of secrecy I can't post my thoughts on the internet. Sucks.

I think you have a problem with your brain being missing

Plans are in the offing for another baseball outing this weekend. Of all the stupid things to be greatful for, but I'm really happy that the hurricane didn't preclude having the last series of the year in Houston. Also, Sarah is such a WONDERFUL person that she bought playoff tickets and I get a seat. :) :)

I have in my possession 2 tickets for Serenity on Friday night. :) I haven't been bubbling over about this movie since May (like some people I know), but I am getting pretty excited now that it's almost here. If you don't have plans to already, you should GO SEE IT for many reasons. 1) It's good, and you'll enjoy it. 2) Otherwise we will annoy you by quoting it incessantly, and you won't get the joke. 3) If the movie is a huge success, maybe the show will come back, and we can finally find out what's up with all the story lines that got tragically cut off before their times when the show got murdered, I mean cancelled, by the evil Fox empire... OK, I'll stop now.

"Also, I can kill you with my brain." (See - it's already starting.)

Back to Work

We had our first post-hurricane Mely's tonight. I'm a little nervous about it, because I threw out all the food I had in my refrigerator "just in case". I guess we'll know if it was a mistake in a few hours. Also, while we were waiting for a table, I got eaten alive by mosquitos. I must have a dozen bites from the 10 minutes we were standing outside in a parking lot. I guess the rain from Rita provided the good mosquito conditions that we haven't had the rest of the summer.

We're going back to work in the morning. We have the house basically put back together. The plywood is all down, and the pictures are back on the walls. Let's hope that's the last time we have to do that in a while.

You can't take the sky from me

I've successfully spread the word of Firefly, courtesy of Hurricane Rita stranding Becca, Sarah, and Cari at my parents' house. We can't wait to see the movie this coming weekend! I imagine my only complaint about the movie will be that it doesn't feature the theme song of the TV series. But, you can download it from here, if you'd like to listen to it. :)

After Rita

We're back home tonight, with full power and no damage. It took us 6 hours to drive from League City to Conroe on Wednesday. Today it took less than 2 hours to drive from Conroe to League City, and that included driving slowly after one of the clasps on our cartop carrier broke. We only lost a stuff sack that had a blanket and pillow in it. Luckily we had tie down straps and a chain in our spare wheel well. After that we had to drive a bit more slowly, but we basically had no traffic. As we drove down here, we heard them say on the radio that they didn't want people to return to Houston yet. By that time, it was a bit late, though, and we were on a back route that didn't have any service providers attempting to return that we could see.

We really dodged a bullet with Hurricane Rita. I hope that the experience of evacuating Houston allowed planners to gain some insight into holes in their evacuation plans, and if we have to evacuate again, things will go more smoothly. Meanwhile, we're going to eat canned soup and be glad that we didn't have any real problems.

Friday Afternoon

It is slightly breezy outside, but the outer reaches of the storm haven't reached us yet. We've heard from pretty much all of our friends, and everyone got out of town OK. We're helping Mike and Meg take down paintings from the walls and watching the baseball game. It looks like maybe things won't get bad here until very late tonight or even early tomorrow morning. So, we may be comfortable for one more night.

Landfall Tonight

Friday morning dawns and we still wait for Rita. It's so wierd that this big thing is coming tonight and yet we spent much of yesterday watching movies. Minor beach flooding is already occurring at Surfside, the TV reports. We are pretty much ready, just trying to bring the last few loose objects in from the outdoors and move as much as possible away from the windows.

It looks like the freeways mostly cleared out overnight, which is a really great thing to see. I hope everyone gets safely off the roads before the wind and rain come. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and I'm sure the city of Houston has learned a lot from this experience.

The dogs seem nervous this morning - I keep remembering the old advice about watching animals' reactions. They know something isn't right.

Stay safe everyone. We'll talk to you after the storm.

Update: Changed "Katrina" to "Rita". Apparently I have the same inability to remember the storm name correctly as all the newscasters.

Preparing for Hurricane Rita

Yesterday we boarded up our house, packed the car, and headed out of League City at about 2:15 PM. We decided to go to Gavin’s parents’ the “back way”. We did fairly well until we got on Beltway 8 East. The traffic was moving at the most 15 mph. At the slowest point we were moving around 5 mph. Anyway, we got to Conroe at about 8:30 PM. The drive is normally about 1.5 hrs, and it took 6. Still, we felt like we made good decisions on our route and leaving when we did.

Becca, Cari, and Sarah evacuated with us. So, we have 4 dogs, 2 cats, 1 bird, and 1 fish in the house. Fortunately, evacuating to Meg’s means that we are going to be very well fed! We had vegi lasagna last night, and we’re having Mexican tonight.

Meanwhile, it is at least 10 deg hotter than normal for this time of year. That made boarding up yesterday REALLY fun. The thermometer in my car (which I think is a bit on the high side) read 100 – 104 during most of the drive up yesterday. Whoohoo for no A/C once the power goes out.

Watching and Waiting

Everybody is pretty much on pins and needles down here waiting to see where Hurricane Rita decides to aim. We are going to be packing things for possible evacuation tomorrow, and boarding up the house if we are thinking about leaving. Tension is understandably high after all the damage in Louisiana and Mississippi. The good news is that I think the government agencies responsible for disaster planning will have an easier time convincing people to leave town if that's what should be done.

Meanwhile, I'm in a sim. I kind of hope they call it early so that we can go home and start thinking about what needs to happen. The good news for us is that we have several options available to us, including going to Conroe or College Station with Gavin's folks/sisters respectively. Actually, we were heading up to CS this weekend anyway for some family time, so the change is just go a bit early and take all the animals.

Do You Really Have To?

I love this little dialog Mighty Girl posted. It totally describes my house. Not so much with Harry Potter, though. More like with books about naval history.

Nostalgia

Right now on my desktop background is the picture of all of us at Machu Picchu. There I am looking very pale. There Karen is looking like Anna. There Sarah and Cari are sandwiching Pauld, who I must say is looking very exotic and hot. And there Nancy, Becca, Emily, and Gavin are looking pretty much like themselves. *Sigh* Peru was cool.



This week is Week of Sims. I have three. This leaves me practically no time to do office work, which is OK with me. It also doesn't leave me much time to study, which doesn't bum me out too badly, but will end up being a problem eventually. Also, I'm nervous because I think the easy script honeymoon may already be over.

Also, I assume nobody has been trying to read this blog in Firefox, because I think I would have gotten an e-mail if you had. The computer techs at work can't figure out why Internet Exploder crashes my whole system, so they told me to use Firefox until further notice. I pulled up this page, and boy did it look awful. Anyway, I think I've fixed it now.

The Russians Aren't Coming

Thank God the Astros beat the Marlins tonight. We went to the game last night (good seats) and watched them throw away a perfectly winnable game. To be fair, things weren't falling the right way for them - some interesting calls went against them at key points. Anyway, if we can win tomorrow we will only be in slightly worse shape than when we started this series.

I went to work at 7am this morning for a meeting, which was vexing because I had a night sim and coming in at 7am was going to make my day very long. Anyway I got there only to find that the Russians weren't coming. Seriously. I know not having Russians at a meeting may sound normal, but we needed them. Without the Russians, there was pretty much no point in having the meeting, so it was canceled. So, I went back to my office and started working on sim prep for tomorrow, and my computer, which has been exhibiting troubling symptoms for a few days, decided it didn't want to do anything today. So, I said screw it and went home. (At least until noon, when I had to go back.)

I had fun on my sim tonight - I got to actually produce numbers! :) This is something that I don't do much as a team "leader". Tomorrow, I get to do my first Rendezvous FDO sim. I'm looking forward to it!

Lack of Web Doth Sucketh

Oh, how lack of web browser doth suck. Let me count the ways.

I've been having trouble accessing a certain web site at work (yes it is required for work, not surfing) for a few months now. It finally got annoying enough to call in the computer "experts" to try to fix my machine. A guy came and reloaded Acrobat Reader and Java on my machine. After he was done, the offending web page came up and seemed to be working fine.

Fast forward to this morning. I try to bring up Exploder, and I get a "There has been an error, and the application must be shut down" message. I try again unsuccessfully, at which point my whole machine locks up. So, I reboot and try again. Same thing. So, I call the help desk back and they tell me to try reinstalling Exploder and call back if that doesn't work. It doesn't. So the guy does this spooky thing where they take over your computer remotely. He manages to reproduce my problem and spike my CPU to 100% in about an hour of work - no resolution.

So here I am at 5:30pm without having had access to the web all day. I couldn't pull up the weather radar to look at the the thunderstorms that came through. I couldn't wile away the compiling time reading the newspaper. I had to walk down the hall to the conference room to fill out an access request form for a new lab. I did manage to make the application I'm coding break another way than how it was breaking this morning. I'm not sure if the original problem is still there, because I now can't get that far.

Productivity sucks.

Happy / Not Happy

I think part of my lack of blogginess this last week is that I feel like I should be making some grand statement about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. To be quite honest, however, I find myself without words on the topic. Nothing I can say feels adequate, and so I have kept my silence.

In the meantime, life for the rest of us goes on. I got a haircut yesterday, and got the car washed. Both things are making me happy today. I just found out I have a 7am meeting to go to on the same day I have a 2-9pm sim. That's making me not happy. My code is broken (not happy). I have leftover pizza for dinner tonight (happy).

According to the weatherstation at work, it is 83 outside right now. It is humid as all get out, so I don't expect that to feel cool, but maybe it is pleasant enough to walk the dogs tonight. They'd like that.

Pictures

I haven't been feeling very talkative since we got back from Seattle. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but I think I may be getting tired of traveling at the 1-2 times a month rate. We don't have any trips planned out of Texas until Christmas, so I should get some rest.

I posted pictures from the ballunar fest and Washington State on my albums page. Since I still haven't done a real trip report for Hawaii, I'm not going to promise one from Seattle right away. It's on my list, though. In short, it was beautiful, I saw friends, and I love it there.

I'm starting to train on rendezvous at work, which is good since it now sounds like the Shuttle won't be flying again for at least a year. In the meantime, I'll be following my tradition of getting certified a position beyond the one I'm going to work next. Or in this case, two positions beyond.

Ender's Game

I read Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, when I was in high school. It's still one of my favorite books; if you haven't read it yet you should. Whenever I find a friend of mine who hasn't read it, I usually give them a copy. Today I received a copy from one of my good friends, Andy C. It wasn't just any copy, though...

to Gavin --
Thanks for getting Andy to read this book!
Orson Scott Card

Way cool! Thanks Andy!

Play harder

Freshly back from vacation, I am SO tired. I really believe in the saying "Work hard, play harder". In fact, I believe in it so much that I usually come back from vacation needing vacation to catch up from vacation. I can't help it, though. There is something about being up in the mountains that makes me want to get up at the crack of dawn. Want to climb just one more hill to see what's on the other side. Want to squeeze in one more hike before we get back on the plane to come back to the land of the hot, flat, and humid.

I don't feel up to a full-length trip entry today. Plus, my photos are at home. I'll try to post some more tomorrow.