Sunny, but low-stress

Weather's nice today... sunny and about 60F, eventually... and I have little going on today at work. I'm tempted to take a half-day off, except that I have no idea how I'd spend it, at least after lunch with dawnd. No plans for tonight, nothing firmly scheduled this weekend, either. Partly this comes from not planning one's social calendar until 2-3 days beforehand. I'm used to letting work define my schedule, then fitting in family events and time with Pat, then ad-hoc filling in of the remaining schedule gaps as time approaches. While often effective work-wise, this sometimes leaves me socially empty-handed on weekends...

How things change...

An email today... checked in with a friend JF at KSC today, with whom I had lost contact for a couple of years. We used to work on vehicle health management together... the PITEX project, for the X-34... his group did the avionics hardware and mine did the diagnostic software. He was the co-conspirator that in the fall of 1998 smiled and waved and smuggled five of us up to the next-to-top floor of the Shuttle Launch Control building for the John Glenn shuttle launch. Now... he's KSC's Deputy Center Director for External Relations. Understandable, in a way, because JF is great at estabishing rapport with strangers. But now he's the guy escorting the President on the top floor during Return To Flight last summer, worried about errant NASA staff below him...