Where did the Weekend go?

I know everyone has had a weekend where it went by so quickly you said to yourself “Where did the weekend go?” I had so many plans for this past weekend: mowing the front yard, spraying Round Up on the back yard, grocery shopping, taking advantage of Alabama’s state tax holiday and buying some new shoes and pants, get the oil changed in the Equinox, and on top of all of that go to Nashville to gather some of my Dad’s stuff to bring back to store at my house. I only got 3 things done – spraying Round Up, getting the oil changed, and going to Nashville. Going to Nashville usually wipes me out lately. It isn’t the drive, it’s the constant movement at Dad’s house that tires me out. No one stops and just sits. Now I need to take the afternoon off tomorrow to get at least the grocery shopping done. I already was taking time off to get my hair cut, now I’ll just take the whole afternoon off. I probably won’t go shoes and pants shopping. The Alabama state tax holiday has come and gone and now everything is fully taxed again until next August.

Here is the big plan for my back yard makeover

Since my back yard is so over grown with Sassafras tree seedlings, over-grown bushes and crab grass, I thought the best way to get rid of it all is to spray Round Up on the trees and bushes. Hopefully everything will die so that I can cut it down and start over. I also bought some liquid aerator called Aerify Plus to help break up the heavy clay in my yard. Once I get the dirt in pretty good shape, then I can plant some manageable bushes like azaleas or peonies and some grass.

I also sprayed in the front garden along the house. It is totally over taken by weeds almost as tall as I am. There is one nandina bush that is supposed to be a cute little 1-1.5 feet tall bush, but now it is a 5.5-6 foot tall bush. That bush is going, but I have a new nandina bush waiting in the other garden that is tiny right now and should be perfect to transplant next spring.

Hopefully the Round Up will have worked and I will have pictures tomorrow. I will have periodic updates on the gardening. I hope with my backyard makeover I can create a spot for a vegetable garden.

Woman's Day

I got up early (6:30 am) on Saturday morning to attend a Woman’s Day event at my friend Paula’s church, Union Hill Primitive Baptist Church, a primarily black church. The day was focused around serving the community. It got started with a continental breakfast and then a pep rally with a drum line and the dance team doing some cheerleading. We then split up into groups and went to about 8 or 9 different places around Huntsville that mainly serve women. Then we all came back to the church for lunch.

I chose to go to with Paula to the Downtown Rescue Mission, Women and Children’s building. I was very nervous about choosing that place to go because I am afraid of homeless people and don’t have much experience helping the homeless. The majority of my experience with them is seeing them walking up and down the main busy streets by my house because there is a different rescue mission just about 2 blocks from my house.

I’ve never been to the Downtown Rescue Mission, so I had some preconceived ideas of what it was suppose to look like from what I see on TV; but I was wrong. Here is the account of what I found when we got there. The buildings are located in the rundown part of town and are actually not downtown at all. The buildings looked well taken care of from the outside. As we approached the front door, I noticed luggage lined up along front wall leading towards the door. There were 3 women sitting on the benches talking right outside the front door. We went inside to first deliver our donations, then to serve lunch. Once inside to serve lunch, we got to see the common areas. They are actually very nice. They have TV w/cable, exercise equipment, a piano, couches, and many nice dining room tables. I was expecting to serve food in a big cafeteria with all of us in a big assembly line, but that’s not how they do it there. I found out there are 3 different groups of women: 2 of the groups (women with children and single women) are residents going through a program to get back on their feet, and the 3rd group they called transients. The women that are residents actually work at the rescue mission as part of their program. We traveled around with a cart of food stopping at each common area. The 2 resident groups had kitchenette areas with plates, cups and utensils, and the transients didn’t have a kitchen area so they where fed off of trays. Every group got the same lunch: bologna sandwiches, french fries, pie, and sweet tea.

I was a little disappointed and thankful for the trip to the Rescue Mission. There wasn’t enough work for all 13 of us to do something, so the majority of us just stood around talking to each other and the women and watching one very entertaining 3 year-old boy. The best part was that I got to see how the Rescue Mission was and that it wasn’t scary at all. The resident women weren’t scary either, but some of the transient women were a little scary.

From my obervations, the Rescue Mission doesn’t necessarily need volunteers to be physically there, they need volunteers to donate things. Since all the residents have to work at the Rescue Mission, we actually took away someone’s job of delivering the food. But when we donated all the cleaning supplies, they were so thankful and apperceive. After I got home and had time to reflect on the morning, I thought that they may like a variety of donations either monthly or quarterly. I thought about one collection could be clothes of what ever size you wear, one be personal products, one be a bra drive of what ever size you wear (I saw many women without), one be food – collect money to give as a grocery store gift card or actual food, etc.

The NASA Explorer School (NES) Workshop

If you’ve been so luck in the past to talk to me either the week before, week of, or week after either our annual week-long NES orientation workshop or content workshop, you know how I feel about workshops and how worked up I get. If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky! We do workshops every summer on various topics, and every summer I dread workshop week.

This week my team hosted a 4-day content workshop on NASA Mathematics. This has been my 3rd summer of workshops and I think it was our best. I have figured out that I like preparing for the workshop, I just don’t like the week of the workshop. I like ordering the supplies, reserving meeting rooms, requesting the photographer and buses, making the many corrections to the agenda, putting together the binder, etc.

We had 21 participants from NES schools all over the US. All of them were teachers that teach math in 7-12 grades. I discovered a new feature in Google Maps that allows you to mark points of interest on a map; so I decided to create a map with the location of our participant’s schools. There are so many fun things you can do with Google Maps, I’m sure I haven’t found all of them yet. If their stock wasn’t in the $200 range, I would buy a lot of it.

All I can say about today is….. Thank God it’s Friday and the workshop is OVER!

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On the subject of work; some of you might be thinking “what does Katie do all day at NASA?” I really work for Penn State University for the Aerospace Education Services Project. There are 3 of us in my office of 46 that work for Penn State. Here is the quick and dirty description of what I do.

1) Manager the 2 Aerospace Education Specialists’ calendar. This really means I am the person that reviews requests and recommends we accept or reject the request.

2) I enter Aerospace Education Specialists’ travel reimbursements into the system for my 2 Specialists and all the Specialists at Kennedy Space Center, Goddard Space Flight Center and Stennis Space Center.

3) I enter calendar information into our NASA wide reporting system.

4) I am the backup for the main phone in our office.

5) I am one of two people that have training on how to deal with the very temperamental multi-function copy machine.

6) I order supplies

This sounds like a lot for one day’s worth of work, but most of this is sporadic and depends on calendar requests and travel forms. I have a lot of down time right now, which gives me plenty of time to write entries for my blog.

Six Flags Over Georgia

At work last Wednesday, I was given the opportunity to go to Six Flags Over Georgia, in Atlanta, GA, and be a second chaperone for a group of 23 NASA high school interns. I had about 15 minutes to decide whether or not I wanted to go because the chaperone needed to purchase my ticket or find someone else to go with her. I thought about it and decided that since I have never been to a Six Flags before it would be a good opportunity to experience one. Since Six Flags is in Atlanta, it is about a 3.5 hours drive from Huntsville. We left Huntsville around 5:30 am and, with the time change and gas station stop, got to Six Flags at about 10:15am. I was happy to hear that the other chaperone didn’t want to go on any of the big roller coasters, so I walked around with her all day.

Here are my comparisons:

• Valley Fair has better roller coasters, but Six Flags has well know ones such as Superman & Batman
• They both have a train that gives a nice tour of the park
• They both have the same water rides
• Water park is not part of the ticket at Six Flags
• Six Flags has a ride called “Monster Plantation” that is a water ride (very fun ride when your feet are tired). Technically it is a kids ride (animated monsters in a haunted plantation), it was relaxing.
• Some of the rides have air conditioning while you wait in line at Six Flags
• Food was ok at Six Flags, but I think you are paying for the name brands – Papa John’s, Cold Stone Creamery, Starburst, etc.
• Valley Fair is definitely bigger than Six Flags!

We ended up leaving at around 9:00 pm. We got back to Huntsville around 12:30 pm.

Six Flags Over Georgia, not as good as Valley Fair!

Dad’s Got a Brand New House

Since I had no plans for the 4th here in Huntsville, I decided to go to Nashville, TN, to visit my Dad. My Dad’s fiancé Mel and her two kids (Robyn & Zak) moved to Nashville from Lakeville, MN, last week. They bought a brand new house. Since I haven’t been to the new house before, I called Dad and got directions, gave Pepper extra food, and I was off. In my estimation the trip to their new house should have taken 1.5 hours to drive, but it ended up being a 3.5 hour drive (including getting lost). He told me that one of the exits was marked with the street name, but it only had the county road numbers. So I got all turned around and it didn’t help that I thought they lived in a different city than what they actually do.



Once I got there, Dad and Zak gave me a quick tour of the house, and the 3 of us got in my car and headed to my Dad’s house. At his house we packed up pots & pans, can and box food, and kitchen/bathroom supplies. My Dad also feed the ferrets and the both of them took a shower. The water heater in the new house is broken, so they have been all going to Dad’s house to take showers. I was brave and took a cold shower on Sunday at their new house and it really want to bad.

We didn’t know where the city was shooting off fireworks so we sat on their deck and watched the neighborhood fireworks. There was one neighbor that had what seemed to be professional quality fireworks – or at least the most expensive ameture ones- and their show lasted for at least 45 minutes. We were out on the deck watching the various shows for about 3 hours.

The rest of the weekend was just helping Mel unpack the kitchen while Dad installed 3 ceiling fans. I got a bonus from all the ceiling fans going up. The question of the day was, What are we going to do with the lights the fans replaced? I gladly offered to take them since they were the style I like and the type of metal I’m trying to convert my house over to. We also did some gardening and grocery shopping.

My trip to Nashville ended on Sunday with a beautiful drive through the mountains taking the scenic highway 231. Unlike MN and WI, when you go through small towns in TN you only have to drop your speed down to 40 and the rest of the trip was mainly traveled at 65 (except for the curvy parts). It took a little extra time, but I saved on gas and it is a straight shot south to Huntsville.

It turned out to be a good weekend. I hope everyone’s was good also.