Here we go again, this time in the early morning.

 Yep, I'm there. Again. Just give the #NASATweetup hashtag a follow.

We here are happy to be back after Blogger's nervous breakdown. Hey, I'd be needing a vacation, too, if I had to keep track of all these posts all by my lonesome. There may still be some hiccuping here and there with the system, but unlike so many I know, Blogger has been good up 'til now to this blogger.

BUT, as soon as it comes back, of course I gotta head back east to NASA Tweetup Number Two, where attempts to blog will be well nigh impossible for me....and where we will be, once again, cheering on these guys:

While I am headed for the spacey Space Coast, go read some stuff and see some movies. I'll give you some suggestions:

Drake Toulouse on the intersections between the Mississippi River spillways opening and the ways in which the oyster farmers will be screwed.

I told you to go see some flick.

Cliff worries that the Mark St. Pierre trial is being inundated by all the flooding river hysteria.  I most definitely see his point.  In that spirit, inundate your brains with Dambala's accounts of the trial.  You're not supposed to be looking at that big, bad river, anyhow...although, funny thing, my son's Little League organization is having an opening day second line at the Fly this morning, so I'll be hearing from my husband about the river today despite the city's admonitions to stay off the levees.  I wonder how many calls there'll be to the city about today's "suspicious activity".

NOLA Slate goes toe to toe, but not drink to drink, with Davis Rogan. Go get his Once and Future DJ album, lady, if you can find it.  Fun fact: first time I got really drunk as a skunk in New Orleans was at an All That show. Yes, that was me bouncing on that easy chair in the club to the music 'til someone had to get me to stop. Hiiiii, 1996!

And finally, the rapture cannot start without getting in your car, driving real far, driving all night 'til you see a light.



Don't strain your brain.  Be back soon.

My flood photos from the past few days.

The Mississippi River is a-rising, and it hasn't even crested here yet.

More on all this from me at Humid City.

It's hard to write about the NASA Tweetup I attended nearly two weeks ago. Somewhat surprisingly so.

"I've decided: you should stay," my husband said over the phone as I was waiting for the motorcade of the president of the United States to pass us by.  The arguments spilled out of the phone, despite the fact that I'd made the decision to come back home and not play the NASA waiting game.  They'd first told us it would be a 48-hour wait for a launch attempt after that worst right turn of the astronaut van, then it became 72 hours to the next attempt, and by then I could see the writing on the orbiter...although it didn't come until after I seriously risked my relationship with my employer by trying to change out a workday I'd already committed myself to a few weeks before.

I stood firm, though I knew that Dan still had in his head the idea I'd had to let go of in a hurry: that this was now a very rare event I would possibly be missing.  "Look," I explained. "I've met a lot of great people here.  I've had a great time despite this.  It's okay."  I was about 60% convinced at that point that I'd made the right call.  I wavered a tad when the fellow next to me overheard my end of the conversation and gave me a killer stare through his aviator sunglasses. "You have got to be kidding me," he said.  I then looked at his credentials on the lanyard 'round his neck and realized: Oh, dear, I'd wandered among those for whom viewing the launch was work, not play - it was a disgruntled journalist I was standing next to at that moment.  The scrubbed launch had made his job difficult, but he was missing the story that had been in his midst for the past day or so.

It's not easy for 150 people to drop everything and head to Florida for a few days, which is an amazing thing in itself - but when you throw in a couple of celebrity attendees, a few foreign nationals, a bunch of great speakers that included spacesuit developers, NASA's chief science officer, the flow director for Endeavour's last flight, an astronaut or two or three, a LEGO designer (there's a good reason why: check this post at Spuds In Space for more) and people enthusiastic about space travel and research from all over the country, you get a whole lot of fun.  You get the people like Barbara Nixon, who hails from Florida and had the car with the Swiss Army trunk that was ready for any emergency except, of course, for fixing what ailed Endeavour on launch day - one look at her license plate told me what she was at NASA for.  Or Karen Lopez, aka, @datachick, who brought along a bunch of Barbies that even Seth Green was interested in.  Or Dr Lucy Rogers, who came up with the best response for why she, a Brit, wasn't at the royal wedding: "I got a better invite."  Or fantastically generous and humble Rachel Maddow Show producer Tricia McKinney, who lent me the use of her iPhone when my Droid's battery died.  Or horrifically jet-lagged Sydneyite Tim Bennett, who lent me the use of a USB cord.  Or Lisa Bain, who's gonna do her best to schlep all the way back from Idaho to watch the launch, if she can...

...which brings me to the reasons why this post is so tough to write.  I caught launch fever and it brought out the worst in me when I tried to remain in Florida a couple more days in order to stay on NASA String-Along Time (aka, NSAT), and I regret that.  At the same time, I kinda agree with fellow tweetup New Orleanian-in-attendance Chris Smith - the experience feels unfinished, somehow, without seeing a launch, although the last thing anybody wants to see is a repeat of Challenger.

The official launch date for STS-134 is to be announced today at 2 PM CST.  At least one mission astronaut says that NSAT will correspond. We'll see.

From a message to parents of my son's school concerning a fundraiser:

...donations support critical operating needs, including salaries for additional teachers and teaching assistants and teacher professional development....  It is important that (said school) have high family participation because foundations often want to know if we have the support of our own families before they will give money to the school. (boldface mine)

Oh, the horror.  The continued obstacle course that must be run or else our children's education will suffer even more than it already has.  Our state is cutting funding for schools so violently and deeply that if you don't show us the money, neither will these foundations we have to beg from.

Shouldn't educators and their administrations be doing something like, I don't know, actually teaching the kids?  I'm sure having to scrounge around for funding isn't sitting well with them, either.  I almost expect there to be bouncer/enforcers walking around at school fundraising opportunities next.

Make no mistake: I personally don't mind contributing some money to the kitty, but I think of the parents who just can't and I wonder how well this argument is going over with them.

Despite my previous post, there will be some NASA Tweetup posts coming.  Didn't think I was gonna let it all slip by, did you?

'Til then, here's something to contemplate: I didn't notice this sign outside the diner I ate in on the first day of the tweetup until I overheard an entering patron tell a waitress: "That is some sign you got out there."



Obama's being blamed for a lot of things he didn't start - and for a lot of things that are, sadly and not-so-sadly, ending under his watch - and hey, anybody following the train wreck that was Dubya's two terms was going to have a hard row to hoe.  The shuttle program was already being phased out around the time of Obama's election, but the anger at its end is clearly being directed at him.

Truth of the matter is, we in the U.S. no longer have the funding, or the political imperative that used to be goading us from the former Soviet Union, to continue space exploration all on our own...and if the continued trend towards cutting education and/or passing the management off of it to private enterprises keeps on, we will likely have a corresponding diminished role in the global scientific community currently launching people to the International Space Station, but planning for greater, farther destinations such as Mars.

I was also saddened to see Fox News on in the NASA employee cafeteria near the media site, too.  The misinformation it passes on is spreading like wildfire and contributing to the general stupidity - hence the signage I saw on State Road 3 just south of Kennedy Space Center.  Not that other 24/7 news outlets are much better...a truly critical eye on the media's reportage is an asset that must be developed now more than ever before.

How can we better educate folks in this current day and age about these issues?  Will Obama actually grow a pair and start to take a stronger stand on the things that matter like the sciences, and, more importantly, will a majority of Congressional members follow his lead?  I am, currently, at a loss concerning these questions...but I know there were 149 incredible, enthusiastic people chosen to be in that tent for two days learning about exploration beyond the Earth's gravity.

I even admonished one who said, "Oh, I'm just nobody."

No, you are somebody.  All of us are.

So what do we do about it?

A vacation from this past week's vacation is sorely needed, almost no question.  Not that I didn't enjoy myself, but the highs and lows in such a short period of time have been short-circuitous to my brain and psyche.  I should have taken a huge hint from the universe when I set out on my long drive to Kennedy Space Center after having dropped my big orange cat baby off at his regular vet - after he'd already spent a night at the emergency vet's under observation and testing and seemed to be improving.

So he hasn't always been the healthiest of cats.  In his younger days, he had some major skin irritation that flared up at the back of his neck and occasioned his first emergency vet visit many years ago and a surgery that proved to be inconclusive as to what the source of the irritation was.  It left my cat with his first scar, an irregular bald patch between his shoulder blades that would still get mildly irritated, but not like that one scary night I found him meowing from pain with a huge open sore there.  Things didn't get scary again until two years ago, when my husband had to take him in for surgery again, for removal of bladder stones, and I came home from my in-laws' to this sight:

It was still hurricane season. I called his collar the cat cone of uncertainty.

My husband wasn't always fond of the cat, and that feeling was mutual in the beginning when, in our first apartment together as a newly married couple, the cat crawled out on one of the rafters in the loft in the middle of the night and started hysterically yowling in panic at his predicament.  I awoke an hour or two after midnight to my husband laughing in a manner that was almost as hysterical as the yowling because the cat wouldn't come to him.  All it took to beckon my orange baby off the skinny board he was precariously perched on was my hand reaching over the upstairs banister and a few clicks of my tongue.

Eventually the cat warmed to Dan, too, but when Dan took him in for the surgery, he didn't need to ask me to know if he should do so or not.  Despite my husband's cat allergies, he knew how important the cat was to all of us, especially me.  I'd had him from when he was two months old and my ex-boss rescued him from a neighborhood crack house where - she learned later - if the litter of the cat's brothers and sisters that was still there weren't placed in other homes, they would've been put into a trash bag and hauled out to the curb for the sanitation crews to take them away.  I didn't intend to keep him, but he was mine from the second he climbed on my bed, found my hip, and took a long snooze on it.

But last Tuesday, when I came home, I could tell my cat wasn't feeling well at all. I'd never seen him looking that bad.  He wasn't breathing well, and his ears felt cold.  He hadn't moved from his spot on the floor by his water dish since that morning.  It looked bleak, and I started to mentally prepare myself to let him go.  He'd had a good 12 years or so on this earth, this big cat baby.  If the tests showed he was in decline, then it was best for him to go to his rest...

...but he rallied the next morning.  His blood work was good.  There was color coming back to his paws and his gums.  He even tried to groom himself, they said.  I dropped him off to his regular vet with hope in my heart and turned my car towards the east coast to the hotel I'd be staying in for three nights while I visited NASA.

After my trip down there, I am now firmly convinced of one thing: any navigation skills I might have once possessed before I married Dan are now nearly lost.  My husband called me while I was still on the road and asked where I was.  "You're where?" he asked incredulously.

Hey, it could happen to you, too, if you mixed up I-95 with I-75:

I am amazed I found Florida. Honestly.

The other reason for the phone call, aside from chiding me for going all the way to Tampa, was that my cat had taken a turn for the worse.  Dan was in Mandeville with the vet who had done the bladder stone surgery. My big fluffy orange guy had already stopped breathing once and was on life support.  It was a respiratory illness he'd contracted, and even though his blood work was still good, it was highly likely he'd be brain-damaged after having suffered one cardiac arrest.  I had to make the decision - on the road, while I was trying to extricate myself from my bad navigation decisions - to keep him alive or let him go.

I got to my hotel late at night with a heavy heart.  I couldn't let him suffer any longer.

My vet was upset.  My in-laws sent me condolences.  And I came home after my trip to a cat-less house.  I miss my fluffy baby.

Rest in peace, my Leo.

Follow all of us tweeting from the STS 134 tweetup here.  It's Endeavour's final trip into space, and tweeting's the only thing I can do right now.

Just for the hell of it, I signed up through NASA's website and thought there was no way in hell I'd get picked to see one of the last two shuttle launches - and, even if I did get picked, one of them was scheduled for Passover.  There was definitely no way in hell I'd pass over visiting my grandparents, who I only see once a year now, for the shuttle.  What were the chances? Pretty piddly, I thought.

I checked my email the morning after the sign-up deadline to find that I was one of 150 chosen - out of over 4,000 signees - to view Endeavour's explosive escape from the earth's gravity to orbit around the planet.  Surprise! If I'd have known how lucky I'd be, I'd have bought a Powerball ticket, too.

At the time I found out, there was one hitch: Endeavour's original launch date, the night of April 19th.

My husband looked over my shoulder at the confirmation and exclaimed "That's great! You can't go!"

We laughed together.  The Passover seders and the time with extended family absolutely won out...but Dan said, "You know, they change the dates of the launches all the time. Go ahead and register.  See what happens."

Fair enough but for another problem - the impulse I had to scream this news from the virtual rooftops of Twitter and of the blog I maintain and those to which I contribute had to be held in check.  I didn't want to start blabbing to brand new Twitter followers headed to Kennedy Space Center that hey, I was going to go to the launch if it was moved - I felt like my place would be instantly revoked if any NASA folks saw that tweet in the stream.  Bitter herbs and matzah over the orbiter built to replace Challenger going up and coming back for the last time?  What kinda space enthusiast are you anyway??? Buh-bye, special pass to the press area.

But it's a fair question.  I grew up in Houston.  I barely remember all of us in school being herded outside to see Columbia sitting on the back of the 747 taking it to Florida - the plane did a nice circle around the city in tribute to the home of Mission Control and the training ground for the astronauts.  We took occasional school trips to Johnson Space Center and I unfortunately remember them as being kind of boring, initially: NASA didn't have a flair for making things look pretty or exciting for the tourists.  The small museum on the JSC campus had a lunar lander and a display I nicknamed Space Suits Through The Ages.  It wasn't until I won the city science fair's Earth sciences division with a project about crystals and crystal growth that I got a real taste of what lay beyond that first impression.  I also received an award from NASA that had me meeting an astronaut (Pierre Thuot, who served on Endeavour's first flight), seeing the swimming pool in which the astronauts train in full space suits, and peering into Mission Control.  I'd gone beyond that hall of space suits, and it was pretty damned cool.  It wasn't long after that that those areas I was only allowed to view for winning a science award were opened to the public.  The nation's space agency had finally figured it out.

So how did I get from gnawing on my fingernails and worrying about my scheduling conflict being exposed to the world to running off to see this spectacle after all?  I have the Russian Space Agency to thank for that.  The Soyuz launch earlier this month took precedence over Endeavour's, and instead of having an orbiter that couldn't dock at the International Space Station because a Soyuz capsule was already there (nyaah nyaah), the STS-134 launch date was pushed to April 29th.

Yes, fine, all you locals know that's the first weekend of JazzFest.  No, I can't create a Space Travel JazzFest at KSC - they don't allow folding chairs or alcoholic beverages, or even bands, in the press area.  But I have to go all the same.

I ask only one thing of all of you...recite the Shepard's prayer on my behalf as I embark on this long car journey all by my lonesome to Cape Kennedy today...that's Alan Shepard's prayer:

Dear Lord, please don't let me fuck up.

cross-posted at Humid City

Even though I was never much good at math, the first thing to pop into my head when I contemplated it was an equation:

(X + car) NY traffic = Z
X = family member
Z = the driving experience (which, depending on the variable X, can indeed vary widely)

I guess, as a late-bloomer in the driver's license sweepstakes and an even later first-time car owner, I don't see the act of driving in the same way the rest of my family does.  Being in the car with my mom, my dad, and my brother this time around was an experience, for certain.  It only happened a couple of times, the most memorable being when they were headed back to the airport on that artery from hell known as the Van Wyck Expressway, and I was a helpless passenger and captive audience for their road show.  Traffic was at a fever pitch, a couple of drivers decided to follow the ambulances passing us by on the shoulder - "That's ILLEGAL," someone in the car nearly shouted at the ambulance chasers, I can't remember who - and then, further up the road, someone in the left lane decided to change lanes regardless of whether or not there was a car there, and the car that was forced into the shoulder to avoid a wreck was ours.  The scream that came from my mother was enough to give me a heart attack, and I first thought she was suffering from one, but once I got over the initial shock, it was simply a lot of blood-vessel-busting anger at the lane-changing offender.  As she directed multiple birds at the guy who nearly held my family back from their Delta flight home and shouted a bunch of curses through the closed windows while I tried to calm her down, Dad moved the car back onto the Van Wyck and we continued making our way slowly up the road.

Much as I love my family, getting behind the wheel once we got to the terminal was a relief.  I made my way back to my grandparents' house going through neighborhoods we'd haunted some when Dan and I had lived in Queens: Corona, Elmhurst, Middle Village, and on to Woodhaven Boulevard and (relatively) cheaper gas to fill up the car before heading to the Belt Parkway and Grandma's.  My grandmother got behind the wheel to take us to a South Shore playground, where the little guy frolicked on monkey bars and swings while we suffered the high winds in the sunniest spots we could find.  An hour of that was more than enough.  The drive back featured a few of my grandma's less-than-5 MPH turns from one street to another, and when some impatient jerk decided honking his horn wasn't enough and passed her too fast going into her subdivision, the curses came flying again, only from a different source. I just had to shake my head.

Later that same night, more lone driving nirvana, this time in the Nissan my grandpa drives, which has a keyless ignition that scares my grandma so, she made my grandpa take it to pick up my parents and brother from the airport despite my dad's protestations at the smallness of the car and its trunk space.  I took the Cross Island to the Grand Central Parkway to visit a friend in Astoria I haven't seen in ages.  After we caught up in all too brief a time, I got back on the Grand Central and chanced the Van Wyck, which was moving well at 11 at night, but not well enough for the driver of a sporty black Mercedes ahead of me who tried to weave through traffic and ended up impatiently weaving on a much smaller scale in the left lane before finding an opening to the right in which he could shoot in and let the horsepower fly.  I mentally will people like that to keep calm, and I'd like to think it worked, but it was like watching ADD on wheels.  But that's driving in New York, and it's better to accept it and move away from it rather than try to direct it from your car.

The seasoned pro, however, is my grandpa, who turns ninety next year and was driving for two years before he got his license (which he got after he first flunked the driver's test because of all the bad habits he'd learned in those pre-license years).  The man is having trouble seeing as well as he used to at night, true, and having my parents and brother in the car with him on a rainy, dark night, yelling at him to get off the lines in the road  would be difficult for anybody to endure (okay, so, he probably turned down his hearing aids when they got in the car), but he reportedly drove my aunt back into Manhattan just fine after the first seder night, and he did all right taking us to the Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn despite my less-than-exact recall of where to exit the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

One particular wrong turn of his was reminiscent of his being behind the wheel when I was a kid: he missed the median in the Houston suburbs and ended up turning into oncoming traffic, and he did the same in downtown Brooklyn, where there was fortunately no traffic coming at us when he turned. My impulse to yell as I did when I was a kid (Grandpaaa, you're going the wrong waaaay!!!) was tamped down by the need to not scare the heck out of my son in the back of the car.  We negotiated around the median, weaved through some pedestrians and got on the right side of the road.  He told my grandma the next day what happened and she gave him a good scolding about how oblivious he could be...but don't we all have some of that going on?  Constant vigilance is always the key with good driving, but sometimes, one just can't help one's natural tendencies.  My grandpa sees a median sometimes at one edge of a road with many lanes, and it doesn't register as an indication of a divider to him - especially if he doesn't know the way too well.  Is it time for him to hang up his license?  Is it time for my grandma to take a cold, hard look at her less-than-5 MPH turns and hang it up as well?  Do I really want to confront them with their mortality like that yet, when they already have many reminders of it coming at them every day?

What I do know is that Grandpa, having never even heard of the Transit Museum before I directed him there, likes it a lot and wants to return, but he won't be taking the Long Island Rail Road, the buses, or the subways to get there.  Old habits die hard...and he will remember that wrong turn.  It won't happen again.  And on a future visit, I will be there with him when he turns to me and says, "I got it that time!"  When he doesn't get it is when I'll really worry.

Ah, Passover...

...that time of year when that burning question is on the mind of every Gentile leader throughout the world...



Yeah, it's tasteless, and so are some of the attempts to make, say, kosher for Passover beer.

Chag sameach, everybody.

A Happy Passover to everybody.