So, my work excitement is that I am moving offices. The unfortunate part is I am moving to a smaller, windowless office (my current office is large and has windows). My current desk is to become a hallway.

Anyway, the exciting part is that I have gotten to select all new furniture and rearrange it anyway I want. So, I managed to significantly increase my desk area (with an L-shaped desk) and gained a whiteboard that will be in an actual useable location. And of course, as expected, I arranged for bookshelves galore (a hutch over my desk and a bookshelf on the wall). And I'll have the office all to myself until Sarah arrives at the end of July (she is to be my office-mate, watch out NASA!). And most exciting of all is that I will be getting a 21" monitor to replace the 17" one I have right now (big monitors are a good thing when you open as many windows as I normally do in a working day).

hmmm

Other news: I submitted an application to be on my first U.N. panel (the Space Generation Summit, which is part of the Space Policy summit, which is part of the World Space Congress, which will be held in Houston in October), so cross your fingers for me.

Thursday and Friday I am going to take a training class, so I will be WAY out of the office, which will also be a nice change.

and while Karen is talking about weather...

Summer is definitely winning out in Houston. We've had several months of absolutely lovely spring like weather. But now our heat is actually breaking records (it hit 90 F yesterday and MUGGY). Sarah is trying to talk me into training to run a marathon with her (right now I would be happy if I could make the 4 miles I irregularly ran in Switzerland) and I don't know how I am going to talk myself into going out to run in this weather.

Yesterday I tried convincing my brother, Nick, to go traveling with me at the end of his next school year. I want to go to Japan. We both agree that we want to go to Australia but can't afford it. He is afraid of the language barrier in Japan and would rather go back to Europe. Anyway, I would be up for that too - we agreed that northern Spain, France and Germany might be doable in two weeks (or at least part of that, focusing on France, which is where he really wants to go for whatever reason). So I may get one more backpacking stint in yet - May 2003!!

So, the irony of this weekend was I didn't get to go sailing on Saturday because it was TOO windy.. Very funny considering the number of times I didn't get to go sailing in Atlanta because it wasn't windy enough.

Anyway, I had a very relaxing pleasant weekend. The weather was lovely and I spent a lot of time on the patio, reading (several books).

I bought my tickets to San Fran on Friday (whoo hoO!) - so now I have a plan for Memorial Day weekend. Now Sarah and I just need to work out how we're going to do a 10 hour streneous hike up 4000' of elevation gain (including pulling ourselves up cables on a 55 degree incline) in one day because there are no campsite reservations left. But Yosemite will be fun and exciting...

I am glad it is Friday. Instead of her usual 6:15 a.m. barking, Apache started at 4 a.m. and didn't stop all morning. Needless to say I now have a pounding headache.

So, agenda for the weekend: this evening I have a sailing class; tomorrow I am going sailing; Sunday I am hanging out/watching movies/doing sweet, lovely nothing.

I'm getting itchy feet again, but I keep trying to buy a ticket to San Fran to visit Sarah for our little camping trip, and, well, I can't find a ticket for less than $300. Its funny, the reason I didn't buy them when they were $248 was because I was hoping they'd drop back down to $198 (which is what they had been for a long time). Now my upper limit is $300. Otherwise, no trip.

And of course, on my trip list for the next 6 months: San Fran, Carbibean/Mexico-pipe-dream, Canada, Washington DC, Cleveland, Scotland, and Seattle. And I haven't bought a single plane ticket yet, I need to start setting dates...

So, for those of you who wonder what I do at work... after a week of coding, today, I put everything in action to accomplish my ?sinister? purpose:

to calculate the swath of death and destruction caused by a deorbiting satellite

Isn't the life of a rocket scientist exciting?

In the trend of Karen and Jen , I too would like to add my own tales of foreign beauracracy.

I've already told the story of the lost passports and the ineffeciently always-closed U.S. consulates (resulting in a trip to Bern, rather than nearby Zurich). Of course, if you want to brush up, you can read about that here. Since coming to Houston, I have met two other people who have "lost" their passports in Munich, mostly while drinking (I took down my exploits in vices at Oktoberfest on the grounds that it might incriminate me). There must be a real black market for stealing American passports in Munich.

And then there was my continual battle with the bus fines - because I paid at 5 p.m. on the day the fine was due, they had already forwarded my name to the stadt police (which I guess they do at 4:30, so they can all go home at the close of business at 5:05, but the ever punctual Swiss would never dream of waiting until the next morning to report I was late). The police then tracked me down to arrest me (I can only assume) - thankfully, I walked them over to the bus station to prove to them that I had paid the fine.

And, of course, finally, and most hilariously, was the trash incident. The reason I bring this up is because there has been a NEW development. So, you have to buy these special Stadt Baden trash bags to have your trash collected. The cost 3 franks, and I was just poor enough that those 3 franks really really matter. Anyway, I was good and diligent anyway, and dutifully purchased a bag from evil-psycho-landlady Frau Schmidt (who sold them singularly so I wouldn't have to buy a roll of 40 of them which I would never use that many anyway). I took my trash bag out of the can, and placed it inside the Stadt Baden-approved bag (so it was double bagged) and placed it in a pile of about 100 other trash bags by our house on a corner for collection.

A month later, I receive a ticket. I couldn't read the ticket (the German was too complicated for me and my dictionary). I assumed it was another notice about the affore mentioned bus fines. Anyway, toward the due date on the ticket, I had a German friend help me read it. She explained I was in trouble for not using the right trash bag.

Now, there were two things that bothered me about this, 1. I did use the right trash bag. 2. How did the police find out I used the wrong one? (they must have dug through the trash to find receipts or items with my name on it).

So, I went to the police station. Let me explain something. The Baden Stadt police are probably the only people in western Europe to have absolutely no grasp of written or spoken English. Nada. Not a word of English is spoken in the police station. I know I shouldn't be offended by this, because I had gotten off rather easily in Switzerland, never really having to tax my language skills. But I tried anyway, in English-French, pointing to words in my German-English dictionary and on my ticket. But it didn't work. So, I borrowed a Swiss lady who speaks wonderful English from the Marien Heim and dragged her down to the police station. She explained to them. She said I lived in a group house and that I could've dropped an envelope with my name on it that ended up in someone else's trash. Or, that we have lots of theives in our building (they tended to steal nutella and honey, for some strange and evil reason), and they could've unbagged my trash. But the police wouldn't believe me. So, I asked if I could go to court (as we know, in the US, a fine is really an summons to court, and if you pay it, you admit guilt and don't have to make an appearance). So, the way the Swiss system works is that if you don't pay the fine, you go to court, if you win, you have to pay at least 100 CHF in court costs and if you lose, you have to pay no less than 500 CHF to cover the court costs - so either way I would lose.

When they threatened to take away my ausweis (that's my Swiss ID), I finally paid the fine.

Needless to say, with the stolen passport, two bus fines, the police breaking up our parties, and the trash bag fine, I probably have a pretty large file at stadt Baden (the only more criminal offense that I never commited, but many other praktikants got in trouble for, was hanging the laundry on Sundays!!)

This story does actually have a point relative to today...

My mom got mail forwarded from the good old nunnery to me, which she read through yesterday. In it was a fine for 47 CHF and a bunch of German writing (so of course, she can't read it). That's the exact amount of a trash bag fine. So even four months later and a couple thousand miles away, someone had things in their trash that made them think it was me. Or maybe they just figured "We haven't collected a fine from Frau Cutri-Kohart in a while, maybe we should send one." I don't know.

But the worst ineffeciency of all

I have found in Houston. Unlike civilized states where they print your drivers' license on the spot - Houston mails them to you. It takes up to 6 weeks. To get a new license, you have to give them your old one, which they shred in front of you. And then they give you a piece of paper with your name and id number. This means, the many Houstonians without passports or other government issued photo id's are expected to go 6 weeks without a photo id while they wait. I explained to the drivers' license people how ridiculous this was (what if you had to fly? what if you wanted to buy a beer? what if you needed to get a job? you can't do any of these things without a valid id.)

They didn't seem to care. Ah, Texas.

"In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

(As usual, kudos if you can identify the source)

Goodbye Irwin! I drove him to the airport at 0'dark'thirty and then promptly went back home to catch an extra hour of sleep. It was a fun weekend. He made dog bark incessentally though. I got sunburned from being outside for all of 2 hours on Saturday (summer is finally here with a vengence... but our ducks still haven't hatched the ducklings yet, actually they are still mating. Did you know how violent duck mating rituals are?) On Friday night and Sunday night we met up with one of Irwin's friends (and her friends) from Rice, which was awesome. I even ventured into the city for ice cream at Amy's (like Jake's in Atlanta, but, I would venture to say, better ice cream, not as cozy a building though) and sushi. So, Joann is going to show me around Rice (since, afterall, I might be a Rice student in the near future) and we're going to go furniture shopping together. Otherwise we hung out, saw the movies (changing lanes, it was worth seeing, but not great), ate well, slept in (as usual, Irwin stayed up until the middle of the night, then complained about the air mattress because it wasn't as good as his king size bed at home, and then didn't want to wake up until 4 in the afternoon), went to Gavin's birthday party, walked around the marina a few times. The usual. It was fun, but now, back to Seattle he's gone. I will definitely have to go visit Seattle some time this summer.

More stupid dog stories....

I am so proud, I taught Apache to "sit" over the course of this week. Last night when I spilled a glass of orange juice, I also discovered that Apache can't dicern the difference between "sit" and "shit."

And for the weekend...

Well, tonight I am going to hop an overnight train to Austria, where I am going to spend tomorrow evening at the opera in Vienna. Then from there, I plan on heading on to Prague, then Budapest ...

Ooops, wrong life. Actually this weekend will be fairly busy. Irwin is coming into town tonight, so we're going to the Kemah boardwalk with some of his Microsoft-the-Satanic-Company friends and then, for the rest of the weekend, just do random Houston tourist stuff. Saturday night Gavin and Jen are having a party at their new house for Gavin's birthday, so I promised to cook something for them, and the party should be fun.

On the beach

On Tuesday night, I watched On The Beach, based on one of my all-time favorite books of that same name. This movie proves why I love Australians :) (when I was talking about the book to a couple of my Australian friends via email, they were the ones who told me that this movie even existed ... it was made by the same production company who made The Dish, another Australian movie I highly recommend).

The book was written in the '50s by an Australian author about a post-apocolyptic world, where Russia and America had a nuclear war, devestating the northern hemisphere. A deadly cloud of radiation slowly moves south, basically making humanity extinct. The book is about a family in southern Australia and a marooned Navy submarine as they wait out their last days. Anyway, the book has a very depressing ending (the extinction of all life on Earth) which makes me cry every time (rare - there are only a few books that make me cry, and only one other movie - E.T.).

So, an Australian filmmaker modernized the topic sometime in the last couple of years (this time the nuclear war starts as a result of China invading Taiwan), but was otherwise VERY true to the original book (except for occasional emailing). It was one of those movies that you were actually glad they turned the book into a movie (the only other one I can think of that I feel that way about is Harry Potter). The whole movie I was hoping for a happy ending, of course, some pocket of radiation free earth for humanity to survive. No such luck. But still I highly recommended it (for a tear-jerker).

So, anyway, it is a very hopeless ending, so, if you are not in the mood for despair, don't watch it, cause you might be convinced to go jump off a bridge or something.

Roommates...

Sounds like Sarah's having problems with her Stanford roommates. I am sure the constant flow of guests is making things quite difficult, its unfortunate. I guess we were really lucky at GT to have roommates we got along with senior year, that way, when angry at them, we let them know, instead of bottling it all up until it bubbles over. (Not like evil bubble girl who only communicated by stacking all the living room rubbish in the middle of the floor or placing dirty dishes in the enterence way, complete with nasty white board messages).

Though I still wonder about many things. Like the disappearance of over half my 12 piece pot/pan set (not accusing anyone of theft, more likely, they used it at someone else's place and just forgot to bring it back - though I admit, I did throw one sauce pan out rather than cleaning up the sludge stuck to the bottom). Just yesterday I discovered a lid to a to a lobster-pot size pot, but no pot. It proves at one time, I did have a pot that went with the lid. Even more amusing was when Sarah was in town, I was totally convinced I had a blender (Karen gave me one as a gift sometime during our college career). As it turns out, now, all I have is a blender LID. I guess things like this just disappear into the void...

(I'm thinking when I come to visit Sarah... when I actually get around to buying tickets... Our Yosemite camping trip will probably go over better than spending the long weekend on her floor).

Not a very exciting day (that's the recent story of my life). My entertainment was to see Georgia Tech featured in a Washington Post Column. It was unreasonably negative, I thought, but he actually managed to capture how most people I talk to feel about CS1301, which is pretty impressive considering his distance from good olde GT. Anyway, I wonder what my CS TA friends would think...

Yuri's Night on Friday rocked. I spent most of the time as an Vodka serving-raffle ticket selling type. It was capitalism at work "The Vodka's free, the raffle tickets will cost ya!". I served out three very large bottles of Vodka to some very drunk people (the coolest though was all the astronauts/cosmonauts... some even brought me really good Russian Vodka).

Anyway, I slept all day Saturday (come on, I was out way past my Karen-esque bed time). And ran errands on Sunday and watched movies. In the evening I met some random people-actually-my-age (graduated university in May, like me) in the courtyard behind my apartment. They were all engineers (Virginia Tech, Michigan, and Lehigh - yes, he was from Bucks County!), so we could actually have a coherent conversation about like experiences (even though they worked for Exxon). They were cool, we all talked about the fact that even young people here were all married 'cause engineers are scary-conservative like that... They were making steak, and gave Apache the scraps, so they definitely made a friend for life from her (I've never seen her eat that fast!).

Overall, it was a very pleasant weekeend, the weather was beautiful, and it was lazy and nice.

Yesterday was the reason I took a full-time job instead of subjecting myself to 4-5 more years of school.

First, during my productive 8-hour day at work, I questioned the methodology of how we do something. It turns out, after much talking, I was right and am going to change it. Whooo hooo, actual engineering contribution. Then, I received a call "Do you want to go sailing?" Since I didn't have any homework :) and I have a flexible job, I left at 4:45, strapped into my trapeize (cool sailboat equipment where you get to dangle over the edge) and had an awesome evening. THEN, I came home and took the dog that has been on my Christmas list since I was a toddler out for a walk. Oh, and to indulge, I picked up takeout sushi and a slice of cheesecake factory cheesecake (from SuperTarget) to top off the day.

Compare that to stress, sleeplessness, stress, no time in the day to do what I want, and living in a hole-in-the-wall...

So, today should be pretty good too. I have a training course this afternoon. And Yuri's night tonight. Oh, and the new NASA Administrator is going to make a major speech about his "vision" for NASA, so maybe he'll prove he's not a beancounter. Or maybe not.

Yeah, I get to go sailing tonight!

Tomorrow is Yuri's Night. (You can watch me party via a live video feed, though I won't being doing much partying, except for between my duties as a bbq-queen, which is ironic for a vegetarian like me, a Vodka pourer for toasts, and occasionally a raffle ticket sales lady... ok, so I tend to overcommit, but I like being involved, and pouring Vodka for druken space scientists will be fun!)

I learned two things last night:

1. Apache can swim

2. Apache can fit in a fishing net

So, I live on a marina, and I walk little puppy-poo-poo around the marina on a daily basis. Sometimes she gets curious and walks up to the edge, especially to peer over at the ducks (who behave very interestingly, I think its their mating season).

Since I think over 50% of my neighborhood has dogs, Apache also likes to play with any other dog we come across (most of their owners are willing to oblige).

Unfortunately, the combination of walking up to the edge, and playing with other dogs (in this case a yellow lab that happens to be the size of a St. Bernard, and still young enough to not realize exactly how big he is), and the propensity of Koharts to jump off cliffs (Cutris are a little less reckless), lead to Apache getting pushed over the several meter drop into disgusting Clear Lake.

After the first shock wore off, she swam just fine. The owners of the huge lab, of course, were horrified (since said lab pushed her in) and apologetic, and the nice young man offered to jump in after her. I made a makeshift attempt to offer to do it myself - but he was in shorts and a t-shirt, and I was in my work clothes (long sleeve sweater, khaki pants), so he seemed more equipped for the job.

I was with another women who I often walk with (so, there were 4 pet-owners, two dry dogs, one swimming dog). I was trying SO hard not to laugh. So were they (at least in between apologies).

Anyway, someone from a balcony who was watching yelled down "Don't jump in! We have a fishing net", so we ran and got the fishing net (later they told us they kept it out because they were just waiting for a day when one of these dogs went in - as a matter of fact, there is much speculation amongst dog owners about what to do if one of the dogs went in, its a very common topic of conversation. The real problem is, the marina is walled by a 6-foot-wall, so even if your dog swims, it really can't climb out without swimming to the other side of the marina to one of the ramps, which is a pretty long swim).

So, it all ended well, with the consensus that when my puppy is wet, she looks more like a rat than a dog (I agree), and she wasn't too terrified, and she stayed just as friendly to strangers, but they liked her a lot less when the prospect of petting her included her rubbing her wet yucky fur against you.

Anyway, that's my story.

Yesterday's quote came from NY Mayor Bloomsfield in response to "Have you ever smoked pot?", and its being featured in a nationalized "Legalize it" campaign.