Road follies

Wednesday was fun -- despite the 6:30am flight, I got a 3-hour layover in Minneapolis, gave Nancy her Christmas present and had a laid-back lunch at an intown malt shop. After an uneventful flight into National Airport (sitting on the left side after dark is usually scenic on southbound approaches), I met geekchick at my hotel in Tyson's Corner. We then went out to a local diner for dinner, then over to Cathy's place with gifts in hand.

Rising the next morning with 3 hours of sleep (for the second night in a row), I headed over to NASA Headquarters, there to work out the details on some earth sciences proposal reviews for next month, and to find out what had happened to our proposal to finish the humans vs. rovers science-return study next summer. Both happened, plus a telecon in someone's borrowed office.

Rushing back to the hotel at 1pm to gather my bags, I took a wrong turn and was then trapped in horrible shopping-mall traffic for 20 minutes. Arriving at the counter in IAD at 2:15pm for my 2:45pm flight, I was told that I wouldn't make it and was rebooked for a 4pm flight. OK. But the agent didn't bother to check the departure times -- all Atlanta flights were delayed 2 hours due to storms down there. The 2:45 flight finally left at 4:30, without me. My 4pm flight left at 6pm. Arriving too late to do anything useful, I headed to my parents' house in Cobb County... stopping for dinner at an old Georgia Tech haunt, The Varsity. For the uninitiated, this is a huge fast-food establishment that can handle several hundred customers at once. It's been there since the 1920s and still has carhop service, replete with metal trays hanging on car windows. The Vidalia onion rings are worth the 3000 miles...

Down home

Friday was spent mostly squinting at numbers on property tags -- there's about 100 mostly-obsolete pieces of NASA computing equipment in my name scattered around Atlanta Hartsfield airport, part of an aircraft ground traffic monitoring and management system that's been up since the 1996 Summer Olympics. My role was as the project manager for the ground traffic system, then a NASA-developed prototype (we actually had to install their initial LAN ourselves -- for several years, many hosts in the FAA tower and airport concourses had a nasa.gov address *).

On the way back to my parents' place, I stopped at the Delta employees' store and bought a new Rollaboard carry-on bag to replace my broken one.

Back at home, the hot water heater had stopped working and was leaking... patgreene was despondent at times.

Meanwhile, I felt a bit guilty at having an evening out, having dinner with my parents and sister and 2-year-old niece. Later my brother joined us and all three siblings went out together to a local bar and swapped life-stories.

Saturday was spent packing, wrapping gifts, reviewing proposals while on airplanes and trying to calm patgreene from a distance. I arrived early at the airport and was lucky to have the opportunity to meet sisterfish125 there for lunch. Apart from her fascinating work, she's bright, charming, a pretty sight and a good conversationalist... a pleasant lunch :-).

Arriving home a bit early, I dove into housework and kid-wrangling...

Today, after church I helped Barbara load her van for her return trip to Oregon, then took her to Hobee's in Sunnyvale for brunch. Then I came home and spent the day mostly online researching water heaters... after confirming that the 13-year-old existing heater was, in fact, defunct. I'd like to get an energy-efficient tankless gas-fired water heater, like those that are commonplace in Europe and Japan, instead of a less-efficient storage tank unit. If I can afford it... the tankless units are also much smaller and can be wall-mounted, but cost 2-3x as much. Time to check eBay...