on space shuttles and Space Mountain

Ok folks, let's recap.

First off, I need to recommend that everyone begin carrying pocket-sized notebooks around, because mine is now officially my best friend.  It's even gained VIP status as part of the "things to grab walking out the door" pile with my sunglasses/chapstick/cell phone/keys/Harry Potter book.  (That last one is only sort of a joke.  The last movie is only three weeks away, people!)  Not only does carrying a tiny Moleskine make me feel like an artsy hipster-type, but it also ensures that I don't lose my grocery list, or forget what was going on in my brain on May 16th.  What happened on that day, you ask?  Well, May 16th is when this went down:

Not my picture--my camera's not this good!

And this:

This one IS mine.  You can tell because I squealed when I took it.

So the STS-134 Endeavor shuttle launch--the second-to-last American manned space launch--was originally scheduled for April 29th.  On April 28th, Ricky mentioned in passing to me that he had read about the launch in the news and they were predicting that over 700,000 people would show up to see it.  Our conversation went something like "Wow!  I didn't know we were so close to the last launch."  "We'll have to see when the last one is.  Maybe we can go." "I'm sure it won't be for another year or so.  I'll check."

And so I did.  When I got into work a few days later, I discovered that the STS-134 launch had been scrubbed due to mechanical issues only a couples hours before launch time (blastoff?) and was postponed for two weeks, putting the launch date right after Ricky would finish finals and before his internship in Miami.  Then I discovered that the STS-135 launch (the last one ever!) was scheduled for late June, which would be in the middle of Ricky's internship and which we wouldn't be able to work around.  After some excellent spontaneity on my part, and overjoyed agreement on Ricky's ("Aren't you glad you married someone as fun as me?" I boasted), I took the scheduled day off work and we decided to drive the four hours up to Titusville, FL.  Obviously, we wouldn't be able to get tickets for the "official" viewing sites so close to the launch date, but the little city across the river from the launchpad--Titusville!--has parks up and down the river where people can watch the launches.

I was still a little nervous about the 700,000 figure--there would be less people that would actually show up this time, of course, because most of people that had flown in from all over the country for the April 29th launch date wouldn't be able to turn around so quickly and come back.  Nevertheless, Ricky and I planned to get to the riverside at least 12 hours before the 8:56:28 a.m. arrival time, because we are geniuses...and also because we fought a crowd of two million people when we went to Obama's inauguration and had no desire to do so again.  Ever. :)

Sunday the 15th had me so excited I could barely make it through Nursery.  I went barreling around the apartment when we got home, making sure we had the tent and the binoculars and the camp chairs and the Wheat Thins and the iPods and the GPS and the Mapquest directions in case the GPS failed and the Disney passes (!) and the extra food laid out for the very cross-looking cat.

Ricky is either making tuna fish sandwiches here, or karate-chopping them.  Possibly both.

AND WE WERE OFF.

Robin, do you remember when we went to Rugged Wearhouse and I bought that Star Wars shirt?  SO PERFECT.

 

This picture is only to show you guys that I've been practicing my one-eyebrow raise.  It's still a work in progress, but you'll notice the forehead wrinkles only on one side.  That's right--be intimidated.  Also, let's have a moment of silence for my wonderful Costa Rican honeymoon sunglasses that broke three seconds after I got out of the car.  Sigh.

I couldn't help but take pictures every time I saw a sign for Titusville.

This stretch of road was gorgeous and empty.  I took at least four pictures of various signs, but you get the idea.

Ok, one more.

It was pretty bizarre when we arrived in Titusville.  The whole town looked as if nothing had been renovated or built since the beginning of the space race, and Ricky and I were a little creeped out.  Even the McDonald's looked like it had just been puked up by the 1960s.  I wish I had taken pictures, but I was too busy bugging my eyes out at how very "Twilight Zone" it all was.  Once we got closer to the river, the high-rise, modern, supposedly-better-to-view-the-launch-from hotels started appearing, and I felt less a time traveler.  

I was sure we were going to have to pay in solid gold for a parking space near the park--from everything I had read online, businesses would charge around $30 (usually more) to park in their lots on launch day.  However, because I am probably magic and totally should've gone to Hogwarts, I found a totally free curbside space right across the street from the river and made Ricky park there.  (Ricky will tell you that he found the spot and I'm just taking all the credit, but we all know how he exaggerates.)  We had planned to go to Spaceview Park only because they have the live countdown from the mission control room, but by a happy accident we wound up finding an empty stretch of riverbank only a block over from Spaceview, which was already crowded with tents and chairs and trees and people.  We decided to sacrifice the countdown audio for the better location and the squishy grass underneath our tent.  (Tree roots--don't try to sleep on them.)

The view when we arrived--we're about 12 miles away, which as close as you can get without tickets.  See the dimple in the tall bush on the left?  The launchpad is basically directly over that dip.

Ricky's more righteous than me and stayed in his church clothes ALL SUNDAY.  There are probably few things less attractive than a well-dressed man pitching a tent.  It's like James Bond meets Indiana Jones.

It's a good thing I have the dexterity to both help with the tent and take this unfocused iPod picture at the same time.

Once we had the tent and the camp chairs set up, there were a few more families that had arrived, bringing the total up to seven or eight on our stretch of riverbank.  We were nearly as close to the water as we could get without being in marsh.  It was pretty surreal looking up at the moon above the launch site and knowing that, forty years ago in the same place, people watched a shuttle begin to bridge that distance.  Ricky and I played iPod games, read books, and ate snacks until about midnight, when we fell asleep.  I slept well, surprisingly, considering I went to sleep afraid that we would wake up to dozens of people crammed into the bank in front of us, but I woke up around 5:30 to loud voices and this:

That's our setup in the foreground.  This still wasn't as many people as were crammed into Spaceview Park a block over, so we were relieved!

I also woke up to this:

That's empty bank in front of us, people!  As it turns out, everyone who showed up was very respectful of those people who had camped out all night for good spots.  Go figure!

Ricky woke up to this:

...only with a more maniacal, sleep-deprived expression.

Poor guy. ;)

SO READY FOR THIS.  We'll pretend I was looking in the right spot.  Ricky and I disagreed about where the launch site was...turns out he was right.  Notice the girl behind me re-reading the first Harry Potter book--she was from Ohio and had just gone to the HP theme park 45 minutes away in Orlando.

We didn't bring anything but our sleeping bags because we weren't expecting it to be cold in the morning, but it was!  This is Ricky, braving the elements.

Waiting the 3 1/2 hours until 9:00 was torture.  I was so excited.  I didn't even want to leave to find a bathroom after I woke up, which in hindsight was pretty ridiculous, because obviously they weren't going to launch the shuttle two hours early just because they knew I wasn't watching.  Our unaided view was pretty bad--like I mentioned above, we couldn't even see the launch site, so the binoculars were a definite must.

Kids had been playing along the riverbank for the hours up until the launch, but about 10 minutes before launchtime people started standing with the kids along the bank under the pretense of, you know, now deciding to actually watch their children.

The kids by themselves were cute, though!  Notice that they aren't even tall enough to break the horizon line.

Well, I surely hadn't come all that way and spent all night there for some tall grown-up to stand in my line of sight, so Ricky and I grabbed our chair covers and put them down on the muddy ground right by the water so we could sit without being in anyone's way.  No one said anything, because they had seen us there all night--people did, however, come up and kindly request that the other standing adults sit down so that the people behind them could see.  They did.  It was all very nice.

Like I said--right on the edge.

Horseshoe crabs!!  Only one was still alive, but I had never seen them in the wild.  We had a bunch when I worked at the SC Aquarium, but this was pretty cool.  The kids thought they were stingrays and kept poking the dead ones with sticks.  We also saw a few dolphins in the distance, so we must've been pretty close to where the river empties into the Atlantic.

You could feel the anticipation the closer it got to 8:56.  The people with smartphones were on the NASA website, watching the countdown, and one man behind us counted loudly down from ten...we didn't believe him until we saw the smoke and flames explode from around the launch site.  Again, I was looking too far to the right, so it took me a split second to find the right spot--luckily, I only barely missed the initial plumes of smoke clearing the small group of trees in front of the launchpad, but I still kick myself a bit for not listening to Ricky.  (Yeah yeah, life lesson, whatever!)

After a moment, we saw the shuttle rising, silhouetted against the flames and smoke, and it was literally the most incredible thing I've ever seen.  My heart was pounding, beating so hard for no reason other than being a part of that tremendous moment.  I was smiling so hard it made my eyes water.  The cloud cover was pretty heavy, so we maybe only had 7 or 8 seconds of visibility, but those seconds were worth every amount of effort we put into getting there.  Every around us cheered and clapped and it was amazing.  The complete lack of sound from the shuttle made it even more awe-inspiring, like watching a movie scene in slow motion with only the background music playing.  It took a long time for the sound to reach us, but when it did, the ground shook and all the kids thought that was the coolest thing.  Ok, EVERYONE thought that was the coolest thing.

I took this minutes after the space shuttle broke the cloud line--you can see the shadow of the smoke trailing along the path to the left above the clouds--but the initial smoke plume still hadn't cleared by the time we left.

And here's THE VIDEO.  Ok, it's pretty far away, so you really can't see much, but still.  They tell you to "watch, don't record," which was the best advice of the day, so I was paying 100% attention to the binoculars in my hands and 0% attention to the camera between my knees.  The coolest part about the video is the sound!  You can't see much, but you can hear it, and you can see my hand shaking.  I'm wary of how Blogger handles the quality of these things, so if it's terrible, I blame them!

 

To quote from my Moleskine: "I JUST SAW SOMEONE GO INTO FREAKING SPACE."  Man, I am so articulate.  Speaking of being articulate, I'm not even going to apologize for saying "Oh my gosh" over and over and over, because I seriously had no control over what was coming out of my mouth.  It's just a good thing I don't have a foul vocabulary, because you would've heard it.  I'm pretty sure a guy behind us dropped an s-word at launch within earshot of at least a dozen kids, so either that's proof of my argument or he's just a tool.

To round off the excellent morning, we totally lucked out with traffic.  We were also expecting serious traffic jams getting out of this tiny town--previous visitors had said three or four hours back to the highway was the norm, so we had actually planned to hang back and wait for everything to clear out.  However, since we parked so close, Ricky and I had very short pros/cons discussion and decided to try and make a break for it.  We had everything packed and back in the car in five minutes, and we made it out of the town in another 15!  Most everyone was parked bumper-to-bumper in the aforementioned commercial lots (which did wind up charging $30/car--we saw the signs!), so the roads were still pretty clear even though we hadn't dashed immediately to the car after the launch.  We ran into some bottlenecking at the highway merge, but again, no more than 15 minutes of slow-moving (not even stopped) traffic.  IT WAS GREAT.  I was thrilled, because getting out earlier meant we had more time to spend at Disney!

We stopped at a gas station to buy me new sunglasses (you never, ever want to be in Florida without sunglasses) and set off for Orlando!

I could barely handle my own emotions at this point.

The Disney post will have to come later, because this one took way longer than I expected (pictures are such a hassle...you guys are lucky I love you so much).  I have an exciting lineup that I need to get through:  Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Epcot, and--finally--our recent Costa Rica trip.  Whew!

on summer

Guys. Guys.

I am done with my first year of grad school.

In two days, Ricky is done with his first year of law school.

...

Is this real life?

Those are legitimately grown-up things.  People halfway through graduate school were the people I got all shy around at age 13 because they were so unbearably adult.  And don't even get me started on law school.

(It's not as grown-up as parenthood, though.  If someone even mentions the word "baby" suggestively in my direction, I start windmilling my arms like a cartoon character and run from the room before the idea somehow finds its way into my uterus and grows there.  Really, I'm still working on remembering to clean the litter box.  You go, moms.)

I've forgotten all the exciting things that have happened in the past couple weeks, but be on the lookout for updates on the space shuttle launch (!!) and a Disney World trip (!!) in the near future.  My camera is on its last leg, I think, so all my pictures may be of the blurry iPod variety, but I could basically just write "We saw a space shuttle launch and went to Disney World" and pictures really can't make that statement any more awesome.

In the meantime, here are some blurbs from my head.  Think of them less like a randomly compiled list of things I didn't really plan out beforehand and more like a pensieve with all my carefully chosen thoughts swirling together for your perusal.  (See what I did there?  Only 63 days until July 15th!)  My "gratitude notebook" I carry around in my pocket has also become a "random thoughts" notebook, so I'll pull from there a bit.

1. You know who's a decent guy?  Our President.  I don't care if you love or hate his politics, but you have to respect the man for trying to accomplish things while the rest of Washington is throwing tantrums like babies, especially when those things involve making reasonable compromises across party lines to get the job done.  Not many politicians do that.  Just saying.

2. Ricky and I are thinking about adopting another cat!  Zelda's been getting restless and I worry that she's bored while we're gone all day.  Good moms make sure their children have friends, right?

3. I found out today that Scrabble is being expanded to include slang words for the first time.  Is nothing sacred?  Words like "grrl" and "thang" (which are being added to the official Scrabble dictionary) will never be on my playing board.  Never. 

4. I finished the "probation" period at my job, got a raise, and am now officially full-time!  Sweet!

on things I forgot

The bad:  Ricky and I, on our first year filing joint taxes, are being audited.  (Anyone who has ever teased me about keeping all my receipts can now marvel at my incredible foresight.)  We did everything by TurboTax's book, so I'm going to have a bone to pick with them if something goes wrong!  Maybe the IRS will go easy on us since we're brand-new adults.  I mean, really, it's only the second year I've ever earned enough money to legally necessitate doing my taxes.  Good thing Ricky and I are squeaky-clean taxpayers, right?  Right.

The awesome:  Ricky got an internship at the State Attorney's office in Miami!!  (Two exclamation points aren't really adequate, but I'm physically incapable of typing more than two at a time.  This has been proven by grammar science.)  This is a huge deal, especially since Ricky would love to work as a state prosecutor after law school (think Law and Order) and Miami is filled to the brim with criminals to prosecute.  Because of my job here, I won't be able to go with him, but he'll stay with my grandparents (who conveniently happen to live in Miami) during the week and then drive the two hours home on Friday.  It's not a perfect arrangement, but it's totally feasible and a great opportunity for Ricky! 

Since I'm here, I may as well tell you that we also bought a (much-needed) new mattress, with many thanks to today being tax day and having fantastic sales.  Ricky could sleep on a rock slab for the rest of his life and still wake up each day fresh as a daisy, but I'm like the princess and her stupid pea when it comes to mattresses.  Hopefully our new squishy mattress will do the trick.  One of my favorite things to do when I shop is compare the price to something that everyone has/considers a "must have," and usually that comes back to Apple products (don't pretend like you aren't someone who knows someone who needs to have--and will totally justify spending hundreds of dollars on--the latest gadget the day it's released).  I feel like it really puts into perspective where your money is going.  Today, our money went into a long-term investment that is the price equivalent of a 16GB iPod touch.  I am satisfied.

on forts of epicness

Well, friends, I have four pages I should be adding to my term paper right now, so you know what that means: time to update the blog.

Are we three weeks into April already?  Yikes.  I guess that means we'll have to backtrack a bit!

 For those of you who aren't familiar with the LDS General Conference (yes I did just link Wikipedia thank you very much but here is the legit source), it's a broadcast held on the first weekends of April and October and it is awesome.  So awesome that living room blanket forts for the Saturday morning session are completely justified and almost mandatory.

Yes, Ricky and I are super cool.

(The whole tent idea came from when I lived in the Basement--Jules, Lizbeth and I were planning a camping trip and did a dry run with the tent in the backyard over General Conference weekend.  One of the neighbors noticed and told our landlord that we must've confused General Conference with King Benjamin's address.  LDS humor!)

The night before, I took Ricky to his very first hockey game at the Florida Everblades stadium.  I heard on the radio that they were playing the Charleston Stingrays--the team whose games my family used to go see on military nights--and I couldn't pass up the chance to see a bit of my childhood!  

The Everblades put on a good show, but the Stingrays won by a single point.  My loyalties were divided, obviously, but I was definitely entertained by the three burly men across the stadium--the only Stingrays supporters there--who would jump up and down and yell every time the Stingrays scored.  Did I mention hockey is my favorite sport to watch?

In more recent news, Ricky and I are almost done with our respective first years of graduate school!!  I have a paper to turn in and a final to ace, and Ricky has week and a half left of class before a grueling week of finals.  I still can't believe we're so close, but I'm surely not complaining.  I'm so ready for the summer and the beach and Disney annual passes.  (YES.  DISNEY.)

Also, speaking of graduate school, I have another story for you.  Second-year graduate students have the opportunity to apply for teaching assistantships, wherein they teach a few classes of freshman composition and get a tuition waiver for their graduate courses.  I was interested, but was told by my composition pedagogy instructor that I couldn't be a TA with a full-time job--major bummer!--and I dropped the issue.  Imagine my surprise when I get an email this week from the head of the English program, explaining that she heard about my situation and wanted to know if I would accept a partial TAship (teaching one evening class and having tuition for one of my classes waived) instead!  When I told her that would be perfect, she said that she would go ahead and tell the registrar I would be teaching the Thursday night class.  I wasn't sure what to do at that point, because students interested in a TA position are supposed to fill out an application and submit a sample syllabus and I hadn't done any of that.  I still haven't figured it out, mainly because it hasn't sunk in yet that this is seriously happening.  I AM TEACHING A CLASS OF COLLEGE FRESHMAN. (Edit: It is incredibly embarrassing that I misspelled "freshmen"--in all caps, no less--while freaking out about teaching a class on the basics of writing and grammar.  Really, Katie?)  I keep coming up with these lesson plan ideas and running into Ricky's study (a.k.a. the second bedroom) to blather on about them.  I'm hoping that we'll somehow magically end up back in Buena Vista after I graduate and someone will let me teach at SVU.  (Please?)

I also got the Mysterious Benedict Society box set for free using my Borders Bucks!

If you haven't read this set, you're missing out--especially if you like Harry Potter.  They're clever and well-written and leave you wanting the fourth book to be released tomorrow.  The gorgeous cover artwork should be an indication of the quality here.  (Yes, I am a book-cover-judger.)  I've been on a huge children's lit. kick this year, and this series is my favorite so far.  A Series of Unfortunate Events is a (very) close second.

I'll leave you with this.  Are those butterbeer cupcakes?  Yes.  Yes they are.

on freedom

My prison sentence at Borders is OVER!


Sometimes I feel ungrateful in that excitement, because I was really lucky to have a job when many people don't.  However, working a liquidation sale is like being Prometheus, chained up and having your liver eaten out every day.  You would assume that customers at a bookstore would be cultured, intelligent, civilized people, and you would be wrong.  In fact, from the way they blatantly ignored all posted signage, I'm not quite sure if many of them could even read.

After two 60-hour work weeks (between the publishing company and Borders), I was woefully behind on my schoolwork and struggling in my sleep-lacking grumpiness to not hate every driver on the road that wasn't me (with no success).  Wednesday, after dealing with one too many customers who didn't know how to calculate 40% of $10.00, I finally snapped.  I left a note for my boss, gone for the night, that I would no longer be available to work after this week.  She called me yesterday to let me know she had found people to work my shifts tonight and Saturday so that I wouldn't have to come in at all. Ever.  I think this was a ploy to make me feel guilty, but I surely do not.  I did stop by tonight to pick up my pay stub and a few books, but I'm not planning on dropping in again anytime soon--the welcome from my coworkers was a bit frosty.  Go figure.  (For those of you who are firm on the "two-weeks notice" curtesy, I did inform my boss weeks ago that I had another job and that I would continue to work at Borders unless it affected my schoolwork.  In that case, I would be gone with very little notice.)

Would you like to know how I spent my day, free from my cage behind the retail register?

I woke up, and--free from the "you have to look presentable for customers" retail dress code--threw on an old tee, workout pants, and flip-flops, and drove to my publishing house in 10 minutes.  When I arrived, I toasted a bagel, chatted with my coworker about how cranberries are harvested, popped in my earbuds and loaded my favorite Pandora station before tweaking some graphics in a client's newsletter.  After I proofread a newsletter for another client, I invoiced a few orders, boxed up a few more for shipment, grabbed some salad and read a chapter of my latest children's book selection.  Lather, rinse, and repeat all through the afternoon, and finish with a lively office discussion about "Hoarders" and how gross it would be to find a dead cat buried under all your garbage.  When I got home, Ricky and I drove to Borders, bought a bag full of books, and I spent the evening looking at guitars on craigslist and doing the housework I haven't had time to do since before spring break.

My new job is very independent.  After rules and regiments at VMI, and micro-management through the corporate chain of Borders, being able to answer my own questions and design my own layouts and prioritize my own to-do list is still a novel idea for me.  I don't even have to answer the phone!  (I have never had a job where I was not the first in line to answer the phone when it rang.  Sad--and annoying--but true.) 

In other news, my Facebook sacrifice for Lent is peachy.  I got a free copy of "Finding Neverland," one of my favorite movies, through redeeming my Disney Movie Rewards points.  I re-discovered my love of folk music and Simon & Garfunkel.  I now own the graphic novel of Sense and Sensibility.  I watched the BYU/Florida game and felt like BYU deserved to lose because they refused to use the brains in their heads.  (Poor freshman missing that penalty shot, though!  He's never going to forgive himself for that one.)  My professor talked about a great Mormon friend she had in graduate school and how she couldn't stand the "small, mean, prejudiced people" that belittled her friend for practicing a faith they didn't understand...and for being a liberal, feminist, rational, religious woman.  My professor doesn't know I'm Mormon, but at the end of the semester I'll have to remember to thank her for teaching tolerance to a class full of professor-hopefuls.

on handwriting!

I should probably make a note that my gratitude log will now be kept daily in a notebook.  Blogging is too impersonal for this kind of thing.  Plus, it's hard trying to remember everything at the end of the day--it's like I spend all day being a pessimist and then I have all these good moments at the end.  Hopefully carrying a pocket-sized notebook with me will help me see the good things as they happen!  I'll probably still post a few on the blog every week.  It's a learning process.

on day six

1. OUTBACK STEAKHOUSE.  Ricky and I went there for an impromptu date night.  That pretty much covers all three, but you know.
2. Ricky did the laundry so I wouldn't need to when I got home from work.
3. I bought a copy of Jeff Shaara's The Last Full Measure for a few bucks today--I won't get around to reading it for a while, but I'm excited!  For those of you who haven't read Michael or Jeff Shaara's historical fiction, you're missing out.  It's excellent.