Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Day Twenty Seven - Jam Session

June 25th


Back to work. Okay, that's not too exciting. Sooo, after a really good dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse, we headed over to Sandbar (I know, we go there a lot, I mean it takes me 10 steps from my place).

On Monday nights they have a local band playing, but it is also an open jam, so anyone who wants to play with them just needs to show up ready. One of my co-workers plays in a band back home, so we all went to watch him play guitar with them.

Here's the band:


And here's Ken playing:


He sounded great and we had a really good time watching the whole thing. I'm also really glad a good amount of us were there to support him. To say he was excited would be an understatement. :) It was also at this moment that Elliot said I was not very good at tweeting, most post being not funny or amusing at all. Sigh. I'm working on it. (You can follow us @RB_Probe for all the latest happenings.)

During one of the breaks, another guy asked if he could play a few. He was pretty good, but was also talking non-stop about his website and his songs you could buy on iTunes, blah blah. He was apparently touring the country and crashing bars, all by his lonesome. (If you want to look him up, his name was Justin James, I think).


Day Twenty Six - Hang Ten

June 24th

Sunday, no work today. Kate really wanted to play ultimate frisbee, but the impending Tropical Storm and it's wind weren't making that look very possible. But after lunch we did wander out to the beach and throw it a few times; you threw it, and then 4 seconds later it came right back to you. Really windy.

That didn't stop LeeAnne and I from taking these awesome pictures after dinner though:



Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Day Twenty Five - Gulp!

 June 23rd


A Saturday night with LeeAnne! Whoo hooo!

We decided to go to Cocoa Beach Pier, and watch one of the bands playing there. So I walked from my condo, and take a look at all the seaweed that showed up from the storm (the beaches were pretty clean before this):


At one point we wandered out to the Tiki Bar at the end of the pier, and a pelican was perched right on the railing. He wasn't interested in what was going on out at sea, he was interested in the young boy who was fishing. And what was on his line. Which the boy was gracious enough to share with him. Gulp!







Now who wants a Bahama Mama?


Day Twenty Four - Watch out for Rocket Fuel!

June 22nd


Today we got invited to join in on training at Astrotech for the building where we will move the spacecraft and fill them with propellant (our tour guide calls this 'commodity'). Before we entered the building he noted that there were four windsocks located on all four corners of the building. It seemed like this was an important piece of information, but I didn't understand why, and it wasn't explained. Huh.

Moving on:


The main fueling room. If you notice that square on the floor, those are drains so that if anything spills during fueling in the middle of the room, it will flow towards those drains. Of course, some of the 'commodity' will be things like liquid oxygen, which pretty much evaporates immediately. You can see the orange stain here where a spill had happened before.


Obviously you have to be able to get your vehicle inside the building to be fueled, and some vehicles are very large, so you must have a gigantic garage door. You can see the size here as illustrated by LeeAnne (and I just missed the top of the door, it goes on a few more feet).





In case you need a refresher on crane training :)

 Then we walked outside the building, and were directed to notice the emergency shower. This is for if anyone gets 'commodity' on them, they run outside and can shower here.


At this point there was discussion again about the location of the wind socks. So I finally asked "and why is that important?"

"So that if someone comes running out to use the shower, you can be upwind of them and not get it on you".

Ah ha. I, sometimes, am an idiot.

:)

Added bonus:

Later that night I had a Google+ hangout with Matt and the kids. The kids were crying so in an effort to cheer them up, we added some fun in.






Monday, July 2, 2012

Day Twenty Three - Not Much

June 21st


Not a terribly eventful day, and it appears that I didn't take any pictures. Whoops. So here is another one of the RBSP "Picture of the Day". This one involves removing the harness from Spacecraft A (this connects the spacecraft over to the ground equipment racks in the room where I work so that we can provide power to them). We remove the harness so we can do fun stuff like spin them and swing them around and such.


On another note, I went over and visited some family that lives in Merritt Island. I got a chance to see one of my cousins who I don't think I've seen in probably ten years. He just graduated from college and is continuing on to study for his graduate degree in Architecture in Hawaii. It was really great to spend some time with him, yet another bonus of being down here for part of the summer.

Really boring post, but I promise (!) the next one will be more fun. I swear. Pinky swear.