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On Monday night I get in a final workout before I finish packing and head for Los Angeles International airport. I meet up with a government employee as we are both on the same "redeye" flight from LAX at 11:30 pm into Chicago at 5am (on Tuesday). When we arrive in Chicago our 7 am flight to Fort Wayne keeps getting delayed in 15-30 minute increments. Finally the flight is cancelled as it's departure time approaches the departure time of the next flight to Fort Wayne at 11 am. Thus we've sat in Chicago's airport for 6 hours for the flight. By the time that my co-traveler and I have checked into our different hotels and called the destination facility, we both here that there has been a failure during testing and further testing is suspended. And the more inspection of the failed unit that is performed the more failures that they find. This is not looking good. We both go into the facility for a 4 pm meeting and things are not looking good at all.
On Tuesday night, after my first day at the facility, I go for a long walk. I just start walking up and down streets and don't pay too much attention to where I am. Some areas are residential and some are commercial. I've been walking in a commercial area for the last 10 minutes when a guy in a truck pulls up alongside me and says, "You were walking on my private property and I'd appreciate it if you don't do it again".
I haven't the faintest idea what he's talking about, but I just say, "Oh I'm sorry. I'm a visitor here out for a long walk. I won't go back to that area again". I don't know what area that would be, but I say it anyway. As the guy and I are having the conversation I keep walking so that he has to crawl his truck along at 4-5 mph. I think that he thinks that I'm going to stop, but I keep walking.
But he repeats a number of times, "I've had things go missing so I'd appreciate it if you don't walk on my property. I don't know how you got there because you almost had to cross a creek to get there past the train tracks".
And now I'm really confused because I haven't been anywhere near a creek or train tracks. I want to say to him, "What did you think that I was going to steal? You're Dale Earnhardt license plate frame, your spitoon, and your welfare checks?" But I say, "I didn't know. But I'm just out walking and I won't go back there again. I'll go walk in another direction." And he keeps driving alongside me as we're coming towards the end of the Lowe's parking lot. But then he stops, watches me for a while as I cross a street or two, and then turns around and leaves me alone.
On each day of work we start with a 7:30 am status meeting. On each day the status of the unit gets worse as (possibly) more cracks are found. One would expect these 7:30 meetings (4:30 am Pacific time) to be difficult, but they are not. In fact, despite taking the "redeye" flight and having disrupted sleeping patterns, I do not feel tired at all and I do not find myself dozing off at all.
On Wednesday I am told that I should fly to Washington, DC to brief colonel Stockton on spacecraft events and this set of sensor events. I have volunteered this action and my bosses are now taking me up on the offer. There are reservations made and I'm almost in the mindset for the extra eastward travel. But then a mid afternoon teleconference with a vice president and the program director with the quote, "...would be a complete waste of time", indicates to me that I will not be going to Washington, DC and I will be staying on Fort Wayne.
On Wednesday I get in an aerobics workout with a co-worker on the various exercise machines that the hotel has. For the most part we both concetrate on our workouts, but we have some conversation about work and the news that is playing on the television. But at least there are no confrontations with truck drivers.
On Thursday as I'm coming to the work facility for a 10 am meeting (after flopping between one facility for the 7:30 status meeting and another facility to sit with measruements people to get electronic data) it starts to snow. The snow is coming down hard and nearly horizontal as the wind is strong. A lot of the onsite workers are huddled around windows watching the first snowfall of the year - the earliest that anyone can remember. But 15 minutes later the snow has stopped, the clouds have given way to blue skies, and the sun is shining brightly.
Thursday is a long and productive day as I finally get electronic data of the event to process. I am now set up to leave the onsite personnel alone and review the data for "a smoking gun". From the 7:30 am status meeting until I decide to quit for the day at 6:30 pm, it has been a good day and has passed rather quickly.
On Friday morning I pack my things up, check out of the hotel, and head for the 7:30 am status meeting. Afterwards as a number of us are brainstorming, a different Northrop Grumman vice president comes by on his way home from Washington, DC. We clue him in to what is going on and then we go about our business as he has higher level meetings and gets a tour of the failed sensor and the facilities.
Near 1:30 pm I head for the airport to catch a 3:50 flight from Fort Wayne to Chicago. But it is not to be as the monitors show the flight delayed until 9pm. I bounce back and forth beteen the Unied and American ticket counters as I try to weasle my way onto an American flight at 5pm that is oversold. With some hard lobbying by Curtis of United and Kool Aid (her nickname) of American, I am able to go standby on the 5pm flight. But Kool Aid takes me aside and says, "Don't worry. It's oversold but you'll be on it." And she gives me a wink of the eye. Thus I get on the 5 pm American flight.
When I arrive in Chicago I head for the first departure to Los Angeles and see three of my wo-workers just in front of me in the line. They had seen all of the delays from Fort Wayne and decided to drive to Chicago. But it's a dead heat as we bth end up in this line within 2 heads of each other. Realizing the dead heat, all four of us start laughing and joking and this gets us in the mood for the rest of the evening.
Though we cannot get on the first flight out, we head over to the next flight out. The gate agent takes our tickets and says, "How many different reservations do you guys have?" It turns out each of us have many many many reservations on many different flights as we are trying to get home. But the gate agent sees how much difficulty we have had, sees how we are taking it in stride and joking around, and wants to participate. Thus she upgrades all four of us to first class with no mileage price.
The flight is smooth and after viewing "The Devil Wears Prada" again, we arrive in Los Angeles. And even more stunning is that my luggage - first on United, then American, then back to United - has made it.
It is so good to be back in Los Angeles, to be behind the wheel of a technology-laden yet brutish World Rally Car, and to lay down for sleep in my own bed just after 2 am on Saturday morning. It has been a 22 hour day.
On Saturday I get up near 6 am and head for work. The streets are still wet from last night's rain (before I returned to Los Angeles), so I'll have to get in a bicycle ride later when it's dry. There are a fair number of people at work but I try to be productive, answer emails from the previous week, and make progress on trying to find a root cause of our test failure.
When I get home I go out for the aquarium ride. As I'm going around the aquarium I see a sorta co-worker and I stop and say Hi, introduce myself to his wife, and talk with his cute kids about the size of the fish in the aquarium. After a few minutes I continue home on the bicycle. After a quick shower I do the laundry and go grocery shopping and relax for the rest of the day. I jump between the television, the computer (for paying bills, updating finances, and playing), and books/magazines. Phone calls from Person T_U and Person C_T confirm that there will be no outing tonight - I'm operating on four hours of sleep after a 22 hour Friday. In the midst of the day I get an email from a Ray Manning on the east coast who wants to buy raymanning.com. As my first bargaining position, I politely tell him via email that I have no plans to sell my domain name.
On Sunday I get out for the aquarium bicycle ride, but I have to take a detour becasue of the running of the Long Beach Marathon, Half-Marathon, and 5k races. But it's stil a good ride. Then I prepare for a critical MotoGP race from Estoril, Portugal. I have a premonition (that I've had for a while) that the current world championship leader, Nicky Hayden, is not going to finish this race. And, sure enough, on the fourth lap his teammate makes a little mistake, gets up on the curb, and falls - wiping out Nicky Hayden in the process. This leaves Valentino Rossi to go on to take the world championship lead for the first time this year with one race to go (despite two engine failures, a chunked tire, and a broken or fractured race during the year). It has been a strange MotoGP season and it is not over yet.
The majority of Sunday is spent working on data reduction and processing for the recent sensor failure, though I do write a few scripts for ResourceScout to grab infant death data from a database. Near 5 pm I get out a lift weights for the first time since last Monday. I reduce the weights a bit to account for the 6 days off and promise to start progressing up this week. It's a good workout.
The weekend again ends with the viewing of "Desperate Housewives".
On Monday I'm up a little after 5 am to go walking before work. And then the storm hits. My day is filled with teleconferences and meetings. There is no time to process the data that I have. And I see that my entire week has filled up with daily sensor problem status meetings and other reviews. After 4pm I leave work, hit the weights fairly hard as I start increasing the weights, and then process data. I make some good progress and by 7:30 pm I have written a script to process a lot of time history data for many accelerometer channels of data. Later I try to make sense of the data and draw conclusions regarding the exact test timeline. I'm in bed to read for a while just before 10 pm.