I have so so so much to say. I am going to at least make an attempt to be less erudite than usual. And maybe I'll even work on limiting my use of parenthesis. I know this won't satisfy all your curiousity (especially you Granddad!), so I'll try to call and chat more later.

If you really want to amuse yourself today, Nick (my roommate), set up a web cam of his pet bird, Belle, in his bedroom, so you can watch Belle all day doing whatever it is parakeets do, here

The Right Stuff

I spent all last week out at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California (that's between San Jose and San Fran, on the Bay). I was there to do Space Shuttle Approach & Land training at the Vertical Motion Simulator. I'm training for a position called "NASA Subsystem Engineer for Approach and Land" and the folks training me thought that watching the sim runs and participating would really help hammer home a lot of what they were teaching me (and they were right!)

Its a motion simulator, and like most of these, it rolls, pitches and yaws around a fixed base. But the reason it was so cool, and the reason we fly all the way out to California for it, it also slides up and down a 60 foot high rail, while sitting on another horizontal rail (30 feet) that in can slide across. It makes it feel incredibly real! I took some pictures and they are posted here.

For a few weeks, twice a year, they set up the simulator to train astronaut crews how to approach and land. Different pilots come out and "fly" the simulator in half day increments, so, needless to say, I saw a lot of astronauts (since I don't work with astronauts too often, I'm still a little starstruck... of course, you can't let that show, oh no, have to stay professional...) For the first couple of days, it was real work. A lot of little things turned up in the simulator which weren't matching what shuttle guidance would "really" do. So, Tina (who has been training me) and I worked a lot of issues. I was so proud of my piloting background, because I was able to sort out a number of little quirks (with the weather forecasts, for instance) intuitively, which made me feel useful to Tina.

After that, though, I was able to sit back and watch the sims. I watched most of them from the control room. I did get to sit in the "jump seat" (that's the seat behind the pilot & commander's seats) a couple of times, and THEN I got to sit in the right seat (the pilot's seat) while one astronaut flew his whole training sessions (I didn't mess up too badly -- one early gear deploy, but that just made things interesting for him)! That was also the first time I flew the simulator myself (with the motion on). All the astronauts were playing this game, to see how close they landed to the touchdown targets on their last landing, with a slightly complicated scoring method. I won't explain the details of the scoring, but a single-digit score is considered extremely respectable. I think the winning score at the end of the week was about 2, and a lot of the pilots were getting between 5-10, with several scoring between 10-20. Anyway, my landing scored a 7.6! Apparently right after I landed, the pilots in the control room were joking about firing someone in the corps to hire me instead (this was the second time this joke was made, the first was while I was in the jump seat and won "button pusher of the year" award by spotting a warning light and they commented that most mission specialists in that seat miss the lights sometimes). That was awesome (though, admittedly, a little bit lucky on my part)! On one day, one of the most senior astronauts came out to fly, I mean, the man walked on the moon! It was awesome to hear his stories while he was practicing - it was like a scene from Space Cowboys (complete with the "ah dang")! After that, I got to fly a couple more times, and it all basically rocked.

The Non-Work Fun Stuff

I've put pictures of all the non-work fun here

The first night I was there, I saw Jen O and her beau, K. She suggested we go out to sushi, and so we went to what I am now calling "my sushi place". Why, you ask? Because Sarah took me to the same place several years ago. Now, once I've gone to a place for 2 of my 3 trips to the Bay Area, it is now officially a tradition. For the record, Karen and I also have a tea house in Edinburgh in Scotland where we traditionally go after climbing Arthur's Seat (we've been there twice together, and Karen's been there a third time with her family).

A couple of days, we managed to escape the lab early and get out on the town. Tina (who's about my age, and as it turns out, has a number of common friends with me, and scary coincidences, like knowing a guy from Newtown who is working at Penn State for the awesome professor who offered me the research assistantship with DLR in Germany just a few weeks too late for me to accept!) and I headed into San Francisco one night and drove through random streets to the Cliff House, where we walked on the beach, saw (and touched) the Pacific Ocean, and otherwise climbed on the rocks until we got a good view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Afterwards, we went to fisherman's wharf for clam chowder (yum!!!) and to watch the seals (which are suprisingly like dogs in their barks, their playing, their cuddling, and their laziness).

On Friday afternoon, a few of us went to hike Mission Peak, which was awesome. It was 6 miles roundtrip, 2500 feet up, then 2500 feet down. As is usual, I was about 15 minutes behind my companions by the time I reached the top. It did remind me that I really need to go out and find myself some hills to climb to prepare for Longs Peak and Peru. Ah, boring flat Houston.

March on Washington

Well, for the first time ever, I marched on Washington. Well, me and over a million other people. Something inside me says that this should be a required activity for high school civics classes. (Actually, one of the many chants I heard during the March: "What does democracy look like?" "THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!") I hadn't exactly told everyone the reason why I was going to Washington, because, well, I know some people around are religious-onservative types, and why try to explain when all it will do is start arguments that I shouldn't have at work. So, anyway, when in doubt, I called this a "family obligation". Why? As best as I can explain it is that I have family members that are professional feminists. Well, because my Aunt Di is Vice Prez of Ms. Magazine and my Aunt Ellie is an uber-feminist (I mean, she has honorary doctorates in it!) and her organization was a sponsor of the march. To top that all off, my high school girlfriends, Maayan, Melissa & Sharon were all going to be around!

So, I tried to be useful. I was hoping to be able to pitch in more, but it was going amazingly smoothly. I spent early Saturday in the Feminist Majority offices ordering pizza for the volunteers, getting change for the t-shirt sales, doing other random stuff. Then, we headed off to a VIP reception at the National Geographic building (coolest lobby EVER!). Lots of annoying speaches were given by important people (Congresswomen, actors, etc.), but the food was good, and I made myself useful making sure all the volunteers and the pro-choice picketers (they were countering the anti-choice picketers with their disgustingly graphic signs) bottles of water, stuffing flyers etc. The biggest excitement is when I turned around and saw Tyne Daly from Judging Amy and Cagney & Lacey standing right behind me (she had a pink streak died in her hair too, it was awesome)! Amy Brenneman was there too. There were other celebs, too, but I watch Judging Amy every week, so that was too cool. They also marched (picture here).

Afterwards, Maayan, the twins, and I went to the D.C. Armory for some entertainment (unfortunately Planned Parenthood's rally apparently "stole" Anie Difranco). I helped sell t-shirts, and ended up making a midnight run the Mall to drop off the leftovers. I also purchased what I was going to wear the next day, my "Don't mess with Texas Women" hat!

Onto the March. I put my photos up here and there are a bunch of photos on the Feminist Majority page here. Of course, we got up way too early (only 4 hours of sleep the previous night). We promptly made ourselves useful signing people in (I don't know how they were going to manage to sign in a million people, but I easily signed in 500 myself, and they said there were about 2500 people doing the same thing). Someone at work asked me about the "type" of people that go to these things. Well, I can tell you now that it was all types. The usual suspects, the families with kids, the happy couples, the college students, the former hippies, the respectable yuppies, the old Catholic ladies from Canada, Maayan's friend Mike from school who was looking dashing in his bright pink "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirt. All of them looked like they were having way too much fun shouting things at the couple hundred bible-thumping anti-choice types on the sidelines ("Pro-life, that's a lie! You don't care about women's lives!" was the chant for that segment of the march. There were some volunteers holding up yellow caution signs to the marchers that said "Warning: Crazy fanatics ahead", it would have been really funny to be one of those people). I was lso amused by the folks who hung "Another statue for choice" sign on every random statue along the march route. The police didn't seem so amused by the guy who did that to a Scouting monument, I don't know why...

While I was signing people in near the front of the line (near the honored guest checkin), some random person walked up to me and said "You're a Cutri, right?", and I said, "Yeah", and she gave me a yellow sash. I was very confused, but the lady said that she had worked for my Aunt Ellie for 20 years, I guess she's seen a picture of me or something. Anyway, we eventually started marching in the throng of people. I have never gone 2 miles (around the Mall, the Washington Monument, past the White House, and down PA Ave.) so slow in my life! (Over 3 hours) I could've marched in the front of the line with my nifty yellow sash, with the Congresspeople, Whoopi Goldberg, Moby (I wonder if he would've remembered me from when he visited NASA), etc. But I was having fun with Maayan and Sharon and Mike and I didn't want to desert them. We finished the March just just in time to watch Aunt Ellie's war cry on the jumbotron.

Let's just say that I slept well on the plane back to Houston. The final total: three time zones and crossed 5500 miles.