A day in HARBOR

that's High Altitude Reconnaissance Balloon for Outreach and Research

It began last night, when deciding not to have a slumber party at WSU I just showered and went to sleep in my clothes to facilitate a 2:30 ish wake up time. Because the team had to meet at WSU by 3:30 am to depart for Duchesne, Utah, about a 3 hour drive. The whole drive was dark, cold, cloudy, and rainy, much to our dismay, but it's a darn good thing we didn't turn back because once we came out of the canyon and as the sun came up all those things disappeared. It was a perfect day to fly a giant helium balloon! After some hot cocoa and donuts at the airport we had a hurried balloon worshipping session (that's just what it looks like as we steady the thing while inflating it with helium) and got it off into the atmosphere before 9am so the FAA couldn't have a fit with us.

We then drove to Roosevelt, where there is conveniently located a satellite of, well, Utah State University, but it's okay because one of their staff and a student were with us. Still was fun to parade in there with all our purple shirts on. The computer people watched it with their computers, and some of us watched it with our eyes, until the GPS transmitter (aka BATS) indicated the thing was now falling back down to earth (after reaching a height above 92,000').

I guess they did a quick flight prediction and found a bunch of Google maps in the area we thought it would land and started driving that way. So after this, we stopped receiving data from BATS long before the thing hit the ground. That's bad. There was a lot of communication that tried to happen but mostly succeeding by way of MY cell phone, which included new flight predictions, good and faulty GPS locations, and shortage of maps in the actual fall zone to name a few. Some of us met up and we tried to chase the other group but with such limited communication out there in the Utah wilderness it didn't work well.

We ended up an hour down this dirt road with still no sight or GPS of the equipment, when what happens but one of the trucks dies. This is also bad. Cell phone coverage was sooo sketchy someone suggested we try texting, which did work, and we asked for some phone numbers to get a tow truck. Although what ended up happening was (eventually) we went to the Ford dealership in town and gave them the GPS coordinates of the truck we left in the wilderness and they'll go get it. We reorganized ourselves into 2 cars and shortly thereafter who do we meet on the road but the other chase group! They also had no sign of the equipment and said they'd keep looking for a few hours.

We went back to town and then to the airport to move the equipment trailer when what do we realize the trailer keys were still in the truck . . . oops. It's okay. We then proceeded to Heber where we had a nice Mexican dinner (thank you!) and then on home. The other group called while we were eating and said they were unable to locate the stuff or ever get a GPS transmission from BATS. So we have a pretty big area to search where it could have landed (although one [very unlikely] explanation why it stopped after 11,000' is that it unwonderfully happened upon an airplane) and someone realized somewhere that we didn't actually put the "please return to WSU" labels on anything . . . oops again. A friend from the airport will do a flyover tomorrow and team members are willing to go back up another day, like Saturday, to go looking again. But if anyone happens in the Utah wilderness off of U.S.88 past Ft. Duchesne and finds a couple boxes with a parachute, please return to WSU!

Hence
Launch: check.
Flight: check.
Landing: uh, hmmmm.
Recovery: definitely UNcheck

"Waking a Dream" jamming to poetry

This is a poem my sister's husband wrote, and we made a song out of it. Totally made up (except for the words) so post your comments again!

Another test 1.....

We've been jamming for a while, my sister and I, this is in reminiscence of one of our first jam sessions. Please write your comments! What you like, don't like, etc. on all of these

testing... 2...3...4...

Testing... 1...2...3...

I'm working on it

So I have a job, I went back to the planetarium and Dr. Palen was real excited to put me back on the list. This was three weeks ago. Somehow I'm still not on the system. It's weird. I thought it went straight through, because I went to the info desk for an unrelated matter and my name showed up as "hourly," so supposedly it was all good. Oddly though, I was never able to clock in for the first week, so I gave my hours to the secretary and she was confused why I couldn't clock in so she made some calls and it seemed like it would take about a week more... so I continued. The next week I gave her my hours again because I still hadn't been able to clock in. And then this week my boss and secretary and someone in payroll were madly sending emails because it was the end of the pay period (and they want to pay me). One of them was entitled "pointless paperwork" and I was instructed to go to a certain website and fill out a job application. For the job I'd already been working at for two weeks. Uh-huh. Interesting. It was very strange writing a cover letter saying why I should get the job seeing as I already had it! I was summoned to the payroll office yesterday to fill out more paperwork thanks to the Department of Homeland Security. Then I had to go back today so they could see my passport (don't ask me why I need a passport to work on campus!) and so HOPEFULLY tomorrow I get a paycheck... I'm still working at any rate.

And about the title of this post, I working on getting my mission pictures into some kind of organization... here's a teaser:

2 items

1st item
Yesterday I ate boiled eggs for breakfast, pancit canton for lunch, and lumpia for dinner. How Filipino of me :-)

2nd item
Today I went to the pool. It bit me. Happens every time. Even after a two year break! I think it made up for lost time because the gash in my toe is quite large/deep--took 20 minutes to stop bleeding. But I should be fine :-)