Don't Hang Up Your Dancing Slippers

It has almost been a year since my last post. Don't want to rush into anything. :)

Things that have happened in the last year-ish:

Over the summer I took Cal B and Engineering Economy while I worked full time. TBE had a project that I spent a lot of time working on during the entire summer. Didn't get enough sleep all summer. lol. People from Lockheed were flying in from Houston all the time and I made a lot of new friends. CPK (the hardware we were building) flew on STS 126 in November. I was so excited that hardware I worked on for so long was now in space.

I went home to surprise my mom after summer finals. She didn't know I was coming so I made plans with a friend to get her out to dinner where I was planning on meeting them. Long story short I missed my flight and ended up coming in like 3 hours later that I thought. Our friends kept her there that long and my best friend picked me up from the airport and dropped me off at dinner. My mom started crying as soon as I put my arms around her neck. :) The break was nice. I spent a weekend at home, got to see my friends. I was happy.

In the fall I took Physics 2 & lab, Cal C, Statics, and Differential Equations. I also worked about 16 hours a week. I ended up getting sick in the middle of the semester, had surgery and had to drop most of my hours at work. I finished Physics and the lab in addition to Statics. I incompleted DE and Cal C and am finishing them up this semester. I'm rather happy to have that behind me.

One of the most awesome things to happen to me (quite possibly ever) was to get a personal invite from one of the crew on STS 126 to watch their launch. My sophomore year of high school Heide randomly emailed me and told me that she had heard I wanted to become an astronaut. She had graduated from the same high school I was going to and became somewhat of a mentor. We've continued talking ever since and finally got a chance to meet up when I was in Houston to fly on the Vomit Comet a few years ago. The entire trip was pretty awesome. I got to watch the night launch from the causeway and had an invite to a pre-launch party (I didn't get to go, but the invite was awesome!). I couldn't imagine anything more amazing than that day.

This semester I'm working full time in addition to taking Numerical Methods and Circuits. I'm also finishing up the two incompletes so my hours are up to thirteen. Thirteen hours of engineering classes and a forty hour job. Crazy? Probably. :)

Another pretty awesome thing is I got an internship working with a zero-g group near by. I get to work alongside some pretty amazing people. I'm really looking forward to working more with them as time goes by.

I hope to get back into this blog. I've started a few others but never stick with this one. Maybe now I'm back at work this term it'll stay updated. That tends to happen. :)

Hope everyone is doing well. I miss everyone terribly.

Peace, Love, and waffles,
-m