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So last time he went, he bought 5 cans of Rotel. He did this because they were on sale for like 50 cents each and he couldn't stand to not buy them. What the heck are we supposed to do with 5 cans of Rotel? I am not sure, because we rarely buy one can if ever.

For those of you not in the "know", in Texas, Rotel is a big deal. Its a canned thing of stewed tomatoes and chili peppers. Typically one mixes it with melted Velveeta cheese to make queso dip. Yes, its that terrible for you. I am not really sure if Rotel has any other uses. As you can see, this is why I was appalled by the purchase of 5 cans of it.

So, anyway, he goes to the grocery store last night. I add Velveeta and nacho chips to his grocery list, thinking that we could at least use some of the Rotel by making some queso to snack on.

Home comes another giant can of Rotel. Seriously?

As it turns out, they were giving the cans away free with the purchase of Velveeta.

Irony anyone?

Its doubly creepy because morale is so low about the future of the manned space program. Really low. I am not sure if its a failure of vision or a failure of management. Its not normal for a budget with this drastic a shift to be rolled out without a real plan in place. And yet a week later, all we hear are platitudes about "bold" and "game changing". Seriously? We're engineers. That doesn't inspire us.

Ok, there's my downward roller coaster space program thought for today.

And now on the upswing, I got a fortune cookie, that if it comes true, will definitely be game changing for the space program:

The President released a proposed budget for NASA. News roundup here.

It wasn't unexpected that we might abandon Ares 1 in favor of commercial spaceflight. It may be a bit technologically premature, but its not a bad idea. It wasn't unexpected that research and robotic missions would get a boost, they took their own bloodbath during the Bush administration. It wasn't unexpected that the Space Station be continued until 2020, we put all that effort until building it.

What was unexpected was the wholesale cancellation of the Constellation program, which included the development of a promising Orion capsule and a return to the moon and beyond... to replace it with... nothing. I mean nothing. No manned spaceflight done by NASA for the foreseeable future (besides the Space Station).

WTF?

Interestingly the NASA budget remains untouched. Devoted to "innovation." May I ask why you would bother to innovate without a mission, a timeline, a destination, a plan of some sort in mind? Just for the sake of it? Yeah, not cool.

Things are not good around the Manned Spaceflight Center. Everyone is expecting a bloodbath of contractor jobs. Those of us remaining are worried that we might have no meaningful work to do.

Its hard not to be doom and gloom.

This morning when I left my house (at 6:30 a.m., ouch!) it was humid and hte water was kind of seeping out of the hot air.

By the time I had arrived at work, the line arrived, pooring buckets of rain on the parking lot. Bad timing on my part, I popped open my umbrella and made a run for the door. The umbrella only provided about 75% coverage, and my pants were soaked.

Two hourse later, the system had passed and I had to go outside in the now frigid temperatures in my soaking wet pants to make a meeting.

That's kind of been my day today.

The weekend is here! No plans tomorrow. Sunday, we're taking a little aerial convoy to another town in Nowhere, TX to eat some southern style food at a boarding house.

Anyway, so I switched my comments to Haloscan, which has been serving me nicely for several years now. I just got an email saying that they are shutting down due to irrecoverable hardware and software problems. I can export my comments for an archive (there is no way to convert them to anything visible though, at least not yet) or I can switch to a pay service called Echo. Neither seem to be good options.

Any suggestions?

My contention is that if you have the ability to pay and are mearly walking away as a business decision (e.g. you are not trading off paying your loan versus feeding your family), it is unethical to do a "strategic default." Yes, its legal to do it, but not ehtical. My argument for the lack of ethics is because of the way it effects people around you. A foreclosure in a neighborhood brings down all the other house prices around you. Too many people strategically defaulting will also lead to a tightening of the credit market as mortgages become more risky to the lender. I just think its a bad thing.

But a few things are making me change my mind. One is this article that says it is nearly $1000 more expensive to get a mortgage in a non-recourse state than a recourse state. That means you are effectively paying for the "right" to walk away from the mortgage and send the keys to the bank. Now that's a different story.

Then I hear stupid stuff. Like today on NPR they interviewed someone from Arizona who bought a $300,000 house a few years ago. Its now worth $150,000, and a large portion of the value loss comes from other foreclosures on his street. Mr Joe Arizona lost his job, which accounts for 40% of his household's income, and therefore was eligible for one of the rare loan modifications. The bank allowed him to refinance the principal at 2% over 40 years, cutting his monthly payment in half. He was still considering a strategic default simply because he still felt the principal he owed (about $250k) remained more than the house was currently worth, and so it was not worth repaying. Even though three years ago he agreed to that price.

First of all, if only I could get my mortgage refinanced to those awesome terms.

Second of all, where did we as a country decide houses are different than any other purchase, where we can agree on a price to an object, use that object for years (sometimes many years), and then get to decide it wasn't worth the price we agreed to and get to change it to whatever we want?

It still doesn't make sense.

Its been in the news for almost two years now. But whenever I talk to someone (outside our little space program universe here in Houston), they are extremely surprised and slightly outraged when I tell them...

And then they are woefully and terribly not excited with the response to "what next", which is a large and more technologically advanced Apollo-like capsule called Orion that launches on a new rocket called Ares 1 to the Space Station. After this, there is a more nebulous plan to build another rocket, called Ares 5, to go to the moon.

Going boldly where we've been before, right?

The promising ray of sunshine in this, to me, is that there are a number of space start-ups in a burgeoning space tourism industry. Now, there has always been "commercial" space, with the big names, like Lockheed and Boeing selling launch services. But now these little guys are getting into the mix, though not so little anymore, they are designing vehicles which hold the promise of flying people, even without the gaurantee of government passengers.

It makes you wonder why we even bother spending another billion dollars building a government rocket (still contracted out to private business to build it) when we could just use one of these suppliers.

So the rumor mill is churning that the giant government program behind Ares 1 is going to get canned in favor of private access to space. There are advantages to this approach. But disadvantges, these companies are new and inexperienced, and we would be trusting them to provide our national access to space -- even with the seeming inevitability of an accident that could cripple the industry. But, of course, the government-run space program doesn't exactly have an accident free history either.

Anyway, either way, changes may be ahead, and the rumor mill is churning. We'll see what this means for both the space program and my career...

Otherwise I had a typical weekend.

I went sailboat racing on Saturday in the "icicle series". I don't think it really counts as icicle as it was a pleasant 70 degrees. We won, I mean kicked ass, won. Which is always nice. It was a pretty great day for sailing.

Today I was more of a vegetable. I gave Apache a bath and took her on a long walk. Then I dealt with my "book problem." I have three bookshelves lining a wall in my study. The books were stacked two layers deep. So last week when Ikea had a sale (talk about a mob scene), I bought two more bookshelves to fill the empty space left by Cari's desk. And a printer stand (Byron's printer had been living on the floor). So I spread out all the books between the two shelves. Much to my surprise, there was actually some empty space when I finished this project.

This means I can keep buying books!

Which, of course, fill up the entire house, from the built-ins in the living room, to the stack of to-be-read next to my bed. There's always room for a few more books, right?

But between tile stores, we actually did do other things. We bought Byron a new MacBook Pro (his was 5 years old). I now want a new MacBook Pro (and mine is only 9 months old.. but the new ones have shinier screens, better battery life, and a backlit keyboard. Jealous.)

We also went flying to check me out in a Liberty. That was pretty neat. I am definitely going to need another hour or two of instruction in it to get comfortable. It was all sorts of weird. There is a FADEC, which means the engine is controlled by electronics. Unlike planes I am used to flying, this one actually needs electrical power to make its engine go. It is also a very light, fast airplane. Oh and it has a stick, a real stick, not the steering wheel yoke I'm used to. Probably weirdest, though, is the breaks. Airplanes typically brake and steer by the rudder pedals on the ground. This one stears and breaks with a hand controller next to the throttle lever. The whole thing was disconcerting. But Byron was all about making me uncomfortable, just testing out how it performs in a cross controlled stall. I'll probably fly it later this week. Its price/speed point is right to make it a great option for a $100 hamburger aircraft.

Ok, tile. Yes, my life is tile. We have graduated from the entertaining sketchy tile stores along the feeder to high end home design stores. You know, not that kind of store you go to when you are getting a "custom" home from a developer, but the type of store you go to when you are getting a real, actual custom home, with your architect's drawings and making selections.

So, as you know, Byron and I really want glass tiles. We've looked at travertine, we've looked at slate, but they all looked faded and just not "right" for our kitchen and what we want. We want glass. Now, "modern" glass kitchen displays often favor subway bricks for glass tiles, and we don't like that either, because it looks like a subway. Seriously. Its just oddly trendy and a little too industrial for us.

As we look more and more, our price point kept climbing and climbing.

Finally we found this lovely glass tile in a "French" pattern. That means its a bunch of different shaped tile in a pattern. Fairly large tiles. We thought it was nice, there were two off-white beige colors that looked liked they would work with our contertops. The darker one we worried was a little too dark/brown, but turned out to be a perfect match for the beige speckles in the black granite and paired beautifully with a white grout to bring out the white of our cabinets. Think Cutri beige. There was also a whiter option that we were considering, but when we brought it home, it was a little too washed out.

But of course, this wasn't good enough for us. We found this company, Oceanside Tile. Our big complaint about all the glass tiles we found so far is they didn't have much character, they were perfectly smooth and colored, clearly pressed out a machine. Part of the appeal of glass is its natural beauty. Oceanside uses recycled glass in three different finishes - matted, clear, and iridescent. We really liked the latter two. All their glass had that beautiful look we wanted. The also have these textured "deco" pieces that we loved.

And the price per square food was nearly DOUBLE the already expensive French pattern... Oh yeah, and they make the tile to order and it takes 5 weeks to get in. Clearly doing our whole backsplash in this would not be an option. So at the expensive interior design stores in downtown Houston, we worked on a plan to buy some Oceanside tile, either 2 x 2" pieces in the deco style or maybe in plane or even some 4 x 4" pieces and pop out some tile from the field and replace them with Oceanside. We settled on two of Oceanside's shades of green that matched the two beiges of the the French pattern (depending on which beige we tried to use). We also loved the "oxygen" clear tile. But things were getting busy. We're still struggling with how much tile replacing we can do without disrupting the field of French patterned glass tile while incorporating all the Oceanside we can afford.

Anyway, here's what all the options look like in one picture:

Anyway, good thing he came home unexpectedly early. Because in addition to the countertops, he figured since he was here, he'd also replace the back splash and install lighting underneath the cabinets.

So, just before I arrived home, the kitchen looked a little like this:

But, luckily, I arrived to it looking awesome like this:

Being indecisive, its apparently my job to help pick out the backsplash. Both Byron and I have a slight preference for glass, as a lot of the travertine we looked at appeared old fashioned.

As is tradition on this blog, I'd like to open this up to the peanut gallery to see what you think.

Here are all the samples:

We particularly like these large green tiles:

And also this travertine - what's interesting is that the colors are not actually as bright in real life as they are in the photos:

We really liked this piece too. We liked that the glass was not perfect and all crackly inside. We have two issues with it. One, the the accent color is blue, and our walls are green. Though the blue and greens do appear to be complementary. Also, the black is black marble and clearly a different pattern from the counter top black granite, with a white vein going through it.

Other options we liked less:

Kent took me to eat the best kebab I've ever had in my life. I think the place was Pakastani. Well, whatever it was, oh my god, they made incredible lamb. Oh my god. I dreamt about that kebab last night.

Byron is home. I mean home in Houston. That's lessening the blow of my long vacation coming to its end on Saturday.

Phase 1: Philadelphia with the family for Christmas.
Phase 2: Skiing in Killington with more family for the days after Christmas
Phase 3: Snowshoeing in Ithaca with even more family.
Phase 4: D.C. with the other side of my family

Every single phase made me want to move away from Houston. Also, every single phase was extremely cold (well except DC), which made me laugh about how everyone in Houston is starting to go into panic about the upcoming "arctic air mass."

Yesterday we went and looked at all the cool art at the Torpedo Factory (named because its an old torpedo factory. Don't you love literal names?) and I had sushi with Melissa and Sharon and Kim. Tonight is another get together with old friends, this time Georgia Tech. A trip to the portrait gallery is in order. As is Kramer's Books. And Ethiopian food.

Byron pointed out it has been 12 days. That's between harassing me by refusing to disclose my Christmas gift (which will apparently be a surprise when I get home) and suggesting we buy another bird (no more birds!).

For those of you who don't follow me on Facebook (which recently has become my preferred method of life updates), it turns out our silent parrot loves to talk... when she's staying at my mother-in-law's. We've heard her speak three times since September (Hello, Bella, and What are you doing on three separate occasions). Apparently at mom-in-law's house, she is talking up a storm, repeating, Hello, Bella, Pretty Bird, Wolf Whistles, Come here dog, Good morning. Apparently the key is to get her grooving to loud rock 'n roll music first. Well, at least she has good taste.

To add irony, apparently she says all these things in my voice! It has been suggested by my relatives up here that I teach the bird to nag Byron, just in cases he misses me. Things like "Byron, do the dishes" or "Byron, buy me jewelry."

Anyway.

I am having a fabulous trip hopping around the north. After spending Christmas with my Dad and brother, my Grandma took me and two cousins to NYC to see Billy Elliot on Broadway and fight the crowds to see the Christmas tree in Rockerfeller Center.

My dog had a vet emergency, and thanks to the Mendecks she was rushed to the doggie-ER. (Again, irony, we put her in the kennel so we didn't have to impose on their chaotic newborn twin filled life, but they were the only people in town able to rescue the dog from the kennel). It turns out the "stress" of the kennel gave her an ulcer. Stupid dog. Good thing I adore her.

Ok, then onto Vermont. My dad and brother bought a cute little ski cottage outside of Killington. It has a beautiful view in the forest. And they got down to the first order of business of buying two giant plasma tv's and getting the satellite dish installed. And we skied for two days and took the kids rock climbing when it was too cold to ski (brr, -20 with wind chill was too cold for me).

We got booted from the cottage so Nick could have his friends there for a New Years party.

So, I invited myself (mostly) to Ithaca. So yesterday, Em and Aunt Nancy took me on a 6 mile (they say 8, but no way I walked that fast) hike around the woods behind their house, through a forest, on a snow mobile trail, and back. Oooh, on snowshoes? Did I mention snowshoes? It was a regular winter wonderland.

Today, we're going to see some frozen cascades. Tomorrow maybe another hike with Emily's friends (only reason I have any hope of keeping up: one of the friends it 8 months pregnant.)

Tomorrow I am back to Philadelphia and then onto D.C.

Anyway, I got a text message this afternoon that said "So we went to Mozambique to trade planes with Juan. Turns out the oil leak was worse than expected. Had to shut one down and land single engine." I expressed concern and asked which country he was now in: "Yeah fine. We landed at Kruger, put 7 more quarts in and went to Lanseria. They should fix the leak. We emptied the engine in 1 hr."

Yep. My husband. Flying outside his contract, mostly because he's bored, on one engine.

He sent these pictures shortly after: