Sunday, May 30, 2010

A Little Gratitude Here

Via Instapundit, I have been gently reminded (again) that we do in fact live in wondrous times:




Tomorrow, please honor those that gave all but always remember:

"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived."

George S. Patton

I live in a culture where the concept of heroism has been sufficiently corrupted so that not merely incompetent, corrupt (or both) men and women but even outright evil individuals and groups have risen to positions of national power.

In spite of that, we still do live in wondrous times. The fight isn't over until the your ashes are in the wind. Never, ever give up.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Return

We had a blast.

Mom sat in this guy's chair.

I sat in on the welcome aboard part of the tour and actually traded some "we had to do this" stories about construction with two Boeing engineers; if I remember correctly the younger of the two gentleman was the program manager for the SGANT system being installed on the ISS as we spoke.

Mom spoke with THREE astronauts. She has pictures to prove it, too!

I got to touch a moon rock. Still get shivers thinking about that.

Three thousand miles.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Mount Up!

Mrs. Utah has a slot at the NASA tweet up at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, Wednesday May 18th. They offered up one hundred seats and have over six hundred thousand followers. She won one! She's been following NASA since the sixties and this is the second to last shuttle mission; this is real bucket list stuff.

This was all so sudden that I didn't think I'd be able to swing (or afford) the time to go with her, but my boss got wind of what was up and kicked my ass off the job all next week. "Go with her, you moron, because we open the next project in June and we'll be back on fifty-five hour weeks, minimum."

And I was way too conservative on withholding last year, so Uncle Joe got to hold way too much of my money. The refund arrives in our account Tuesday so it's

ROAD TRIP!!!

time.

We will stop in Waco to visit my brother, and then on to Houston where we will be staying with one of Val's friends. I'm going to meet up with an hold high school buddy, too. When we last met, the Knack was bleeding edge.

Where does the time go?

We leave tomorrow at 0430. Y'all have a fine week.