Yummy Leaves

I've been disbelieving the parenting literature that says to start trying to teach babies Carina’s age about limits. Surely she’s still too young to understand "no". The word is often met with an innocent smile and a repeat offence. However, I saw something this weekend that makes me think maybe it is possible.

We went on a walk Sunday afternoon, and after getting back to the house I put Carina down on the lawn to play for a bit. She had a grand old time feeling the grass and the dead leaves that have reappeared all over the lawn after my grand raking day last month. Anyway, since she’s still in the stage where her tongue is used to explore as much as her hands, I was keeping a sharp eye out for the grass and leaves going into her mouth. Every time she started to put a leaf in there, I’d place my hand between the leaf and her mouth, say "no", and move her hand down. When I did it, she’d get a concerned look on her face and then offer me the leaf as if to say "Oh, do you want it, Mommy? Here you go." Then I’d smile, take the leaf, say thank you, and tell her what a good girl she is.

Do you see it coming? Twice, right before we went inside, she started to put a leaf in her mouth, but before I could get my hand into position and say "no" she stopped, held it out to me, and smiled! Once might have been coincidence, but twice?

Weekend - At Last

Here's hoping that the weather report is wrong and there will NOT be a 1500 ft ceiling tomorrow. My luck being what it is, though... The weather looks like crap for the next week. Maybe Becca can get something out of it.

Tomorrow is my first weekend day at home since March 8. That's 20 days. I got plenty of time off during the mission; I for one am a fan of the work guidelines that say we shouldn't work for 16 days straight. Still, when you aren't home on the weekend, you don't get to see your husband much. I did get to spend lots of quality time with Carina, though.

I'm putting the finishing touches on the trip plans for next weekend. I made daycare reservations today for the skiing days,

Endeavor Is Home

Endeavor landed at Kennedy Space Center about 40 minutes ago. That brings to an official end my first mission as Lead FDO.

For reference, one can watch a Shuttle deorbit burn while feeding a baby dinner, then bath the baby, get her in pyjamas, read her stories, put her to bed, put a load of diapers in the washer, put a frozen pizza in the oven, and sit back down to watch the landing.

Wave Off #1

Today is the first day I've worked in my office in almost 3 weeks. I got to talk to co-workers I haven't seen in many days. I got to go out to lunch for Sarah's birthday (Happy Birthday, Sarah!). I got to go on coke break. I get to go home whenever I want, because let's face it, I'm set for hours.

Sounds like the weather in Florida is looking less good than we hoped. The entry team just waved off the first landing opportunity. The forecast for then second opportunity is still GO, but the clouds that didn't clear for this opportunity might stick around. I hope they make it down today - it has been a long mission. Plus, weather doesn't look that much better for the next couple days. Winds out west are blowing hard, and the cape has springtime afternoon cloud cover.

Easter Photos

Carina's grandad took lots of great pictures on Easter weekend.

I love my Grammy, and Grammy loves me!

We got her "Easter toys" instead of Easter candy.

You guys, this dress totally messes up my crawling!

Grandad labled most of these "Carina Happy". I guess that pretty much summs it up.

She's starting to climb, people!

Shona is way more willing to get up close and personal with Carina than our dogs. Carina loves it usually, but that nose is cold!

Dustbuster

Carina is enjoying her newfound mobility. She’s starting to get annoyed when you want her to lie still, say for a diaper change. She’s also very good at finding dirt in the corners of rooms. She will crawl over, pick up some dog hair or a piece of grass and hold it up to me as if to say “Mommy! Look what I found! And guess what? THERE’S MORE!”

Tomorrow is my last shift. It will be Undocking day. I’m glad the mission is winding down – I’m ready to get back to normal working and family hours. Working in the office again after a mission is always a bit of a letdown, though. We have skiing plans for the first weekend in April, though, so it will be all good.

If you’re in the Houston area, set your watch for 8:28 PM Tuesday night. Go outside and look to the Southwest. Three space vehicles will be passing over: ATV, then ISS, then Shuttle. It should be a really cool sighting.

Inspecting

I have three more shifts left during this mission after today. It has been a long, long mission. March has almost completely passed me by while we've been in space.

Today is the "late inspection" day. We're taking pictures of the Shuttle's wings and nose to look for any damage from orbital debris hits. After today, my console is on the downslope of the mission. It will mainly be about getting ready to undock and land. In non-trajectory world, though, there is still one EVA to accomplish tomorrow.

I'm feeling a bit blue about working this weekend. Meg and Mike are down to celebrate Easter with their grandchild (Gavin and I barely enter into the equation anymore!) :) I'm kind of bummed that I didn't get to see their reactions to seeing Carina crawl for the first time, as I was already at work when they arrived. Oh well, it looks like my parents will be here in a couple weeks, so I'll get to see that.

Big Dog

This is the kind of thing that makes me think working for DARPA might be fun. That's a pretty cool piece of hardware. I bet all the actual DARPA jobs are mainly as contract monitors, though.

Real Women

Real women play tuba.

Word.

If my mother influenced my decision in 5th grade to pick up the flute, I don't remember it. The only other instrument I remember considering is the cello. So, I started the flute, and coming from a pretty musical family I did quite well with it. Then in 8th grade, I decided I wanted to join a drum and bugle corps. I mean I really wanted to join - but there are no flutes in drum corps. My idea was to pick up mellophone, as the training corps would teach me any instrument I wanted to play. This time, I do remember my mother discouraged it, saying she was afraid I would ruin my flute embrasure by playing brass.

So, when I went to the corps "open house" on Wednesday evening after church choir, I was making a decision between color guard and drumline. I watched the guard practice for a few minutes, but I really wasn't feeling it. I wanted to play an instrument, darn it. So we walked on down to the drum room.

I wasn't particularly a girly-girl growing up, but I don't think I would have predicted that I'd be in the position of being the only girl standing in a room full of boys considering whether I wanted to play the drums. I think it was probably only because I wanted to be a Trooper so badly that I entered that room at all. And this is difficult for the woman I've become to admit, but I was intimidated - very much so. They were all so masculine (in a junior high sort of way) - boys being boys. And it was SO LOUD.

Did I mention how much I wanted to be a Trooper? Enough that I swallowed all that insecruity, walked up to the drumline instructor, who was the founder of the drum corps and was probably in his 60s, and said that I think I want to play the drums. "Did I have any experience?" I play piano and flute, but not on drums. Mr Jones looked me up and down. He took in my clothing - skirt (just came from church choir), pink shirt, the thick glasses that I was never without before I got contacts. His response: "Are you sure you wouldn't like to try the color guard?"

He told my mother a couple years later that he saw the determination fill my eyes the minute he said those words; the decision had been made. I would play the drums - nobody would tell me I couldn't.

From that day, I was the only girl in the battery (marching percussion) in my corps for the next four years. Drumming didn't come completely natrually to me. I really worked at it. I practiced more than I ever did on flute or piano. My second year, I was lead drummer and "drum major" of the training corps. (It wasn't a conducting position; it was like being "head boy/girl" in a Brittish boarding school.) My third year, I graduated to the A corps. I did four years in the A corps, two on bass and two on snare. I played snare four years in college, too, and finally had female company in the snare line (shout out to sista Squirt!).

I believe that playing drums and living in that boys' world so much in high school prepared me for studying and having a career in the mens' world of engineering. I had to learn a bit about how to survive and ever thrive as a woman in a mostly male environment. The female/male ratios (and the maturity levels) have never been so low as in those drumline years.

I've been trying to think what could/will prompt this "girls don't" reaction in me. Carina announcing she wanted to join the wrestling team? Get a hair transplant so she can have a beard? I'm sure I have my limit. Whatever it is, I hope she gets that look. Then I hope I can get past my social programming and be proud of her.

A Glovemaker's Story

Last year NASA awarded a small spacesuit glove prize, $200,000, to a team who could demonstrate a glove prototype that surpassed the performance of the current NASA glove while still meeting sufficient safety requirements. The current gloves work, but they are hard to use in a vacuum and the astronauts get tired pretty quickly. This a perfect example of a small prize dedicated to a specific problem. I think Rand Simberg may have been one of the first to suggest it.

The guy who won, Peter Homer, wrote a column describing his experience. It's a good story of practical engineering.

Saturday

Today was nice. Stayed up until 2am playing online. I lost my spaceship to a catastrophic hail of lasers and missiles, and lots of my friends lost theirs, but we had fun. Slept until 0815, did some dishes and then went upstairs to check on Carina. She was awake, just laying quietly in her crib and playing with her feet. Big smile for daddy. Back downstairs I surprised her with a bowl of rice instead of the bowl of oatmeal she's used to. Several more big smiles. More big smiles for mom, for dogs, for sunlight, for dinner time and feeding herself chicken and brocilli mush from her bowl, and then after bath time there were smiles and stares of wonder for moonlight and the sounds of dusk.

In a nice contrast to most of this week, nearly every time today Carina went to sleep without a fuss. Even though she's only spent a few hours a day at day care in the afternoon, it's been hard getting her to unwind at the end of the day. Some evenings were spent with her crying loudly except for A) bites of food, B) some gulps of milk, and C) bath time. Given all that took a few hours, it was a lot of crying. But today she was great.

Today was nice.

Sploosh

9:47 PM and it actually feels like the middle of the afternoon to me. Missions do strange things to my internal clock.

I'm very much looking forward to the weekend. I'm excited that I'll get to see Gavin for more than 2 minutes. I'm also excited that he'll be there to get up with Carina so that I can get my first 8 hour stretch of sleep since last Friday. I got through this week by telling myself that I went through a worse spell of interrupted nights last June, but you do forget how tired you were with that newborn.

Becca and I went out to lunch today (had the best bread ever at Tuscany Bistro, by the way). By the time I got back home, Carina was getting a little tired, but I needed to take her to the daycare anyway in about 20 minutes. So in order to keep her up and happy while I got her bag ready, I sat her in the kitchen over by the fridge and gave her my car keys to play with. She sat there jingling them for a few minutes while I started making here a couple bottles to take, and then I realized that I didn't hear them anymore. I looked to where she had been, and she was no longer there. I looked the other way, and there she was - crawling very deliberately across the kitchen floor. I proceeded to watch, bottles half made and formula powder everywere, as she crawled straight up to the dog dishes and SPLOOSH! plunged both hands into the water bowl giggling madly at the huge fountain of slobbery water that fountained over her head and onto the floor.

No doubt the idea of my baby daughter playing in the dog water and later sucking on her fingers is just something I'm going to have to get used to. For today, I was unable to restrain my yuk response entirely, and those little hands got dried as soon as the bottles were capped. I think we are officiall into the "getting into everything" phase, though.

Approaching the Ides of March

It's been a busy couple of weeks. Jen's working the mission and it's coming along pretty well. They've had a few pieces of space junk to avoid, and that's about it. She gets home a little after midnight so I get to see her for about 5 minutes before we both fall asleep.

Carina is feeling better, after her 104+ deg fever over the weekend. She still has a runny nose, but, it's not very bad. Attention, oh unsuspecting world: she is now crawling! Last night she crawled 5 feet towards me in the kitchen while she was very unhappy and hungry. Tonight she was crawling around in the room upstairs, chasing the dogs and me. We've been trying to get the dogs ready for this over the last few weeks, and I think they're doing pretty well. Roxy let Carina climb a little on her without getting grumpy, and then Carina left her alone and went on to something else. Zoya's pretty gentle with her now too. We're also working with Carina to get her to softly pet the dogs, instead of fiercely grabbing their fur and skin.

No one likes the fierce grab. She's pretty strong!

My work is coming along. I'm splitting my time between the Mars Science Laboratory mission I've been working on since I graduated and the Orion capsule that we'll fly after we retire the Shuttle. For the Mars mission we've been spending time figuring out what crazy scenarios can break the entry guidance while it tries to get us within 10 km of the target, and how we can counter that without hamstringing the guidance. The desire is to have a robust guidance that still delivers the spacecraft to the target on both good days and bad days. Some of this is done in the flight software. Some of this is done in how we operate the spacecraft. Many of these ideas we've been carrying of for a few years but haven't had time to really start looking at them until now. Meanwhile, the project pushes forward with successful parachute tests in wind tunnels, with flight software being tested in thousands of simulations, and with flight hardware being delivered and assembled. Launching in Summer 2009 doesn't really feel that far away now. :)

The Orion work I'm involved with is interesting, mostly because its new for me. I'm not doing much guidance work with it because I don't have the time available to really sink my teeth into it. But a few weeks ago there were some URGENT! items that had to be addressed pretty quickly as the design settles down for this year's Preliminary Design Review. I've been working with some people to figure out some of the ops concept for the capsule entry and recovery, how often we would try to splashdown where, where should we go if we can't wait in orbit for some reason. It's working with maps and orbit dynamics and constraints such as ensuring the safe disposal of rocket debris, acceptable weather for the capsule to splashdown, where our recovery forces may be, and getting enough sunlight prior to spacecraft return so the batteries have enough juice to last through entry and the time spent bobbing in the water afterwards. The last few days we've been chasing after an issue where one system team's assumptions turned out to be too constraining for us to fly missions, so we had to work out a reasonable constraint that balances our ability to fly the spacecraft and also doesn't drive their system to an extreme.

It is fun designing a spacecraft. It is also a lot of fun figuring out how best to fly one whether it's at Mars or at Earth. That is why I'm pretty glad to be where I am in Mission Operations, getting to help out with both.

Besides work and playing Carina, I haven't done very much lately. We went out on Sunday for steak with Becca and friends in celebration of Becca's birthday; Carina tried to eat the crayons. Jen and I also watched Innerspace on cable. Jen had never seen it. That took me back to some memories when I was a kid. I totally forgot Meg Ryan was in it... must have been one of her first movies since she didn't headline it.

Patacake

I know I just posted videos, but I'm so proud. Look what my girl learned to do!

I'm Reading...

I just finished reading (more like devouring) A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. He also wrote Kite Runner, which of course is incredibly popular. I really like his writing, although of course the settings of his novels are somewhat depressing. I think novels like these are extremely helpful in putting a human face on the history of a country that looms large in the news.

Hosseini's latest book deals with the lives of women in Afghanistan, whereas Kite Runner dealt almost exclusively with male characters. I've read some articles about womens' issues in Afghanistan in the past, and the issues that figure in the novel were not surprising to me. But it makes me so sad. Why do so many people feel that opressing others (women, ethnic sects, castes, homosexuals, whatever) bolsters their self-worth? I just don't understand it.

I always wonder what I would think and feel about feminism if I was born and raised in a part of the world where women are not valued as anything except mothes and wives. Would I be a Mariam that accepted my lot in life placidly, depressed but uncomplaining? Or would I be a Laila, convinced that there was a better world out there and I could help it become if I dared?

I do know one thing: I am a feminist for my myself. Because I have been told that "girls don't do that", and it makes me angry. I am a feminist for my daughter. Because I want her to grow up in a world where she never has to be angry about the same ineqalities that I was.