NASA Disney

Over the weekend, we are were not allowed to be at Ellington, working on our project, which was a welcomed break. Saturday was filled with some homework, but we did take time to see the non-business part of Johnson Space Center, or JSC 'Disney'. This is for the public and is not an operational part of JSC.

On our way over there, we passed this great sign:

It seems that every business that can, will use space or NASA in some way in their name or logo. We have also seen a "Space Station Storage," "NASA Flowers" and other great names.

We traveled first to a local Goodwill, where we picked up some goodies, but then we drove over to "Space Center Houston". Our badges got us in for free, and so we took a few pictures:

They had a risk and probability exhibit and the below picture was one of the first parts - we had to cross over a beam 'high' across the street below.

They had a shuttle landing simulator, and here is photo of me trying to land the shuttle:

Yes, I did fail each time I tried, but only near the very end and I'm sure the astronauts could have made it out alive... I really want to try to land the shuttle simulator at NASA Ames, on the VMS, or Vertical Motion Simulator, that rides on nitrogen hydraulics. When I toured it last summer, they were testing a new idea for a roto-tilt commercial airliner.

I also saw a model of an astronaut in a space chair with a not-to-scale model of the ISS in the background:

Did you know that the bands around his knees are color coded and signify that he is one of the team leads? This way the ground observers can easily tell who is who during a spacewalk.

And here is an older astronaut in another type of space chair:

This following was on the wall where they have pictures of each shuttle and exploration mission crews. It was sort of inspiring to see all the images of the astronauts and then be nudged to think "hmm...that could be me someday..." I'm still not sure if I would like to be a real astronaut someday, it seems like such a tough job.

What about you - will your picture appear on the wall?

At 25,000 ft...the air is a little thin...

NOTE: Any pictures in this post are not mine, I couldn't bring my camera into the chamber. All images are from a group that did this a few years ago, found here, which is why there are no pictures of me or my team. In roughly 4-6 weeks, I should be getting copies from the NASA photographers.

If you've flown on a commercial airliner, then you've gone up and past 25,000 ft in the air. However, you've probably never experienced what the air is like up there. Unless, of course, you've hiked a really tall mountain, though I'm not sure how high even Mt. Everest is in the atmosphere.

One of the prep steps for our flight next week is going through training in the hypobaric chamber. Friday morning we got up early to travel to Johnson Space Center and go to a 4 hour long lecture. We were lectured on everything from how your body reacts to decreasing outside air pressure, to the composition of the atmosphere, to what hypoxia is, to what causes motion sickness and how to avoid it.

For example, did you know that the composition of the atmosphere is the same throughout, though the partial pressure of oxygen decreased with increasing distance upwards. And that when you go up 25,000 ft outside of a pressurized cabin, the gas in your GI track, ears, and teeth (if you had any dental work done lately) will expand. Hypoxia is a condition that comes on when the body experiences a large decrease in oxygen. One might get dizzy, euphoric, irate, confused or just completely out of it.

After the lecture we traveled over to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, or NBL. This is the facility where the astronauts train for their shuttle missions. It holds the 40ft deep pool that contains a full scale mock up of the ISS. They were in there for a number of hours training for the next mission - whatever that may be.

We were fitted for our oxygen masks and helmets - all in your basic military green. Apparently, I have a really small face, so even the smallest mask was a bit large. Apparently they were made for men in the military and men's faces are not super small.

After familiarizing ourselves with the equipment, we all tromped out to the hypobaric chamber. It looks like this:

It is a rectangular box with blue bus seats and consoles for each person. I was seat #16. We hooked ourselves into the oxygen hoses, com mics and went over the flight pattern one last time. We finally got going and starting breathing pure oxygen for 30 minutes. This flushed out about 30% of the nitrogen out of our blood. This helps prevent development of the bends from ascending and descending.

We then 'rose' to 25,000ft at a rate of 5,000ft per minute. Basically, they just sucked the air out of our chamber with a giant vacuum pump. In turn, we dropped our masks and tried to fill out a questionnaire while breathing air severely lacking in oxygen. I got dizzy when I couldn't get enough oxygen; my brain felt really really foggy.

We gently began to descend, at a slower rate than descent, and then it was all over! We marched back to the briefing room and watch the tape of ourselves experiencing hypoxia, filled out a survey, and then took an open-book, open-neighbor quiz over the morning's lecture.

Then our day got a bit more stressful, as we had learned that the people in charge want us to do a full ground test Monday morning at 7:45am. We were not ready, still completely are not, but we had to skip the tour of the NBL to run back to Ellington field to try and get things as ready to go as possible. Please pray that everything goes well on Monday, or there is a possibility that we won't fly :(

And that is how our Friday ended, with a lot of stress. All I did back at home was curl up and take a long nap, eat dinner and go to bed, as I am now, so - goodnight!

T-5 days

Yesterday was our first day on our project and it was quite stressful, to say the least. Pretty much an emotional roller coaster all day long:

When we and all our equipment arrived at the Ellington Airfield (where the hanger we work out of is located) the orientation was intense - don't leave stuff on your table, don't take pictures of the coast guard building (they have guns, which means they win, apparently), don't get in the mechanics way, etc. Oh, and be on time. Always on time, or else you probably won't fly....

Anyways, we got through that and began to set out our test equipment. Unfortunately, they still had not accepted our structural analysis, as the person we had write it up for us did not calculate the correct loads. Supposedly there was a document that said what calcs we needed, but my team never saw it, else we would have followed it to a T! They seemed pretty skeptical that we didn't have the document, but our mentor backed us up and eventually they accepted the fact. They did, however, require some sort of structural test, so we had to load our metal cage for the microwave on the old C-9 airplane and they pulled a 9g load on one bar, with only three of the four corners srewed in. The bolt holes were our fault, one did not quite fit, but we were so nervous that the welds might not hold on the metal structure!

They did however and our whole team let out a collective sigh of relief. Our whole morning had been dominated by problems and the overhanging stress of this structural test. If it did not pass the test (if it broke or bent badly) then we were not going to fly. We also had a boatload of other issues that we didn't see until the whole team was there and we had our mentor's experienced eyes to look over everything. Apparently, everything moves in microgravity - more so than we originally thought. So the morning was also spent thinking like engineers do, trying to come with solutions on the fly. Exhausting to say the least, especially when we had to skip lunch to go to the hardware store.

PS - the C9 we tested on was the 'Weightless Wonder VI', which is the plane that Tom Hanks filmed scenes from Apollo 13 in! Granted, this probably means more to you than to me, as I have yet to see that movie...

Finally, after getting our housing structurally okayed, we were able to begin the process of putting the whole system together and wrapping the whole thing in foam and duct tape to keep the sharp edges from injuring anyone during flight. The result:

This is me looking through the bottom supports:

This is our worktable:

This is our sweet electronics set up that Hannah built to control our microwave:

And then we came home exhausted and got ready to go in the hypobaric chamber...I am kind of nervous for the event!

Everything is bigger in Texas

Whew! After a long day of traveling across the country, I finally made it to Houston, met up with my team and traveled to the home we are staying in. We are in a home and not a hotel because one of our team members had a family friend nearby who agree to stay with us. She is actually the Dean of the School of Health Professions at a university in Houston. She and her husband have a beatiful home in an development area where their are large homes on every lot. It looks like it could be one of those golf course housing developments! Also, we were greeted with the following when we arrived:

That's all for now, I will write more later on our eventful first day.

p.s. The husband is a professional magician and is currently out of town at a magician's conference....

Home Base

So, it has been a while since I finished my last post about my overseas adventures and I figured it was high time to post another. I am currently on spring break and off to more adventures (which I will post on later) but I thought I would do a short post on what my home is like. This is my 'home base' of sorts, the place where my parents live and where I love to spend my time when away from school. Those of you who know me know that I am a country girl, born and raised and as they say in the country music world: you can take a girl out of the country, but you can't take the county out of the girl!

While we don't live on a full-blown farm, we do have eight chickens, one cat, one horse, three baby goats, and two guinea pigs. Over the course of the almost 19 years we have lived here, we have had two other horses, four other goats, numerous other chickens and cats, and two sweet dogs.

We also have about a dozen and a half fruit trees, some of which usually don't produce fruit because they bloom to early, but we typically get lots of delicious apricots, peaches, purple and golden plums. While we have crab apple trees, we don't actually do anything with them. My dad does raise (farm? produce?) grapes and the vines have finally starting producing.

And the most exciting recent news: my chicken is laying blue eggs! I knew that we had two chickens who where supposed to be laying blue-green eggs, but we didn't get any until just a few weeks ago! So fun, I've always wanted chickens who lay blue eggs. And before you ask, no - they are no different from regular brown or while eggs. You just don't have to color them for Easter.

This is my cat, Coulee. She does not like strangers, so be wary when you visit....she also drinks coffee. (Also, I do not know why this is underlined....)

This is one of the guinea pigs, Harley. She has a mohawk that runs all the way down her back, and if you shape it, you can get the mohawk to start at her nose.

This is my chicken, Henrietta. She is a Rhode Island Red and for some reason is losing the feathers on the top of her head, so she looks a bit bald right now. She was rolling around in a dirt hole she had made and was in the process of shaking all the dirt off when I caught this picture.

This is my horse, Shazam. She is a pure bred Arabian horse (registered name: Shabbis Habbib) and enjoys laying down to nap in the sunshine and eating lots of hay. She is the smartest, sweetest horse!

This is one of our new baby goats, I think his name is Oreo, but I am not sure. We transitioned from having only girl goats to having only boy goats, so the names didn't all transfer over. He is a pigmy goat, so he is very small right now and won't get much larger.

I just really enjoy going home and getting out of the city, to 'feed my soul' as Dr. Reinsma would say. I long to see the stars, hear the quiet, and pet my cat. All in all, an excellent place. There is much more about my childhood home, but you'll just have to visit and experiance it yourself!

Korea = The End

Finally, here is the last blog post of my adventures overseas during summer 2009! It certainly took me long enough, but I get to close with our layover dash into Korea, which was oh so much fun!

We did arrive at the way early hour of about 5 am, so we slowly moved through customs (though there was no one else trying to leave at that time....the airport was so empty!) When we made it to the entrace to the airport, we determined that Mrs. Jones would stay behind with all our carry-on lugguage in the most convient spa located on the far end of the terminal, all the way down on the base floor. It was quite the nice hidden jewel, as she got a private room, shower, and access to spa facitilites while us kids went gallivanting off into Seoul.

First off, things are way expensive in Korea! While the airport was located about 1 hour away from the city, it cost us just under $9 each way for bus fare! (In Seattle, we pay only $2.50 each way for the lightrail) And then, on top of it all, we were so tired and all wanted to sleep on the way, but we didn't know when to get off, so Charis kindly stayed awake to poke the rest of us awake when we rolled into town. We had previously talked with a missionary who was currently staying at the place we were in Manila, but who was from Seoul, and he had given us some touristy things to try to see. Mainly he had written out a rough map using landmarks of downtown, but forgot to put which way was north....

When we finally decided that whatever the bus driver called out sounded like the name of the place we were looking for and knowing that we had been on the bus for about an hour (our prescibed time), we jumped off and found the most curious statue - a tall silhoutte of a man with a hammer just like the one outside of the SAM! And to top it all off, Seoul really felt like Seattle to me, so I was almost confused as to where we were....I did notice that every sign was in Korean :)

We wandered around for a while trying to figure out where exactly the giant statue we were looking for was place (one of a man on a horse, in the middle of an intersection, so you'd think it wouldn't be hard to find!) We did see some cool archetecture and the outside of some crazy refolding museum, an art museum, and a history museum all in the same small block area. We just passed by everything, looking very much the tourists. We were also all wearing matching red polo shirts embroidered with the Kids International Ministries logo and a Filipino flag. We definitely stood out!

After about a half hour, we decided to walk up the street a ways to see if we could find that statue. Along the way we meet a nice man, a doorman I think, who not only pointed us in the right direction (we were headed there) but also gave us a tiny origami frog he had made!

We found the statue, and the river walk that we were aiming for next to it in short order, but in the meantime, the boys of our group had found a public pay toilet. It looked like the one down by Pike's in Seattle, but apparently this one cost roughly 10 cents and let you use the facilities for 10 minutes....apparently this was exciting enough that all of them had to try it out....

After that small side detour, we found our way along the river walk and enjoyed the pretty haven right in the middle of the city. It was a very cool set up - the river ran right down the middle of the street, but it was sunk down about 25 feet with large retaining walls and a sidewalk on both sides and small foot bridges occasionally allowing one to pass to the other side of the river. Really, though, it was more like a shallow crick, 15 feet wide and 5 inches deep in parts.

My favorite part of the river walk, however, was when we stopped to take a group picture, posing on some rocks that were stepping stones to the other side of the creek. We had some funny poses, but we heard the strangest laughter from up high. We looked up and found a bunch of Asian people filming and taking photos of us goofing off on the rocks! We just laughed and ignored them, but I was so surprised!

Finally we made our way back down the river walk and headed for the palace we had been told we needed to go see. It is called Gyeongbok Palace and quite the large complex! We showed up right when they were doing a demonstration of the changing of guard during the palace's more active days; it was quite fun to see all the different costumes designating different ranks and parts of the guard. We had been taking with a greeter at the front of the palace before hand, and he showed us one of the better places to see the performance and convinced us to spend the $4 to get into the palace.

To kill some time before the English speaking tour started, we headed over to the free part of the museum that was filled with all the artifacts they had pulled out of the palace, as well as things from previous kings and occupants. It was a good way to start the experience because we went into the tour knowing some of the history (well, as much as you can get in 45 minutes of looking at objects behind glass!) The coolest thing was a replica of the water clock one of the kings commissioned that actually kept accurate time. It was an amazing piece of engineering!

We ended up on the tour eventually and our matching shirts made more than one person inquire about KIM and what our team was doing in the Philippines, which was great! Also on the tour was a couple from Poland (I think??!!) and a young couple. About halfway through the palace tour, Alex realized that he had been through it before, but had started from the back gate, which is why he didn't recognize anything for a while. I must admit, I loved all the color work and intricate details and repeating patterns, but would not have loved to do the job of painting all it! The colors were brilliant bold primary colors that created amazing motifs. Many of the sleeping buildings for the king and queen actually had heated floors, fed by fires that were burned in little doors along the underside outside. We had a great tour guide and were able to see all the best parts of the palace (or so she said :) )!

After the tour we decided to head in the direction Insadong, a touristy area of Seoul that we had been pointed towards. We had asked a couple Koreans where the closest place would be for some good, authentic Korean food, and both pointed us to Insadong. We were able to find a suprisingly cheap ($5 a plate!) place for the most authentic Korean I've ever had. We were glad they had pictures and a few English words on the menu, as we just picked was looked pleasing. And all our choices were great! The metal chopsticks (apparently that's the type they use in Korea) were a bit challenging to manuever and got hot with use in my hot dish, but over a great meal experience. My favorite part of the mean was when the waiter came to give us the bill and it was all in Korean. All of it. The food, prices, total...eventually the waiter typed up a number on a calculator and showed us how much won we owed, and we were able to find a menu and pull prices off it to divvy up who owed what.

After a filling lunch we wandered the street a bit, all getting ice cream along the way, and I picked up two great new teacups and a teaspoon! Fortuantly, Alex and Charis were paying attention to where we had traveled and somehow (I think partially by the grace of God!) we ended up on the right street to pick up the bus we needed to catch to get back to the airport. They glitch in our plan, however, was to figure out how to buy our bus pass. At the airport we had pre-bought tickets at a window, but there was no such place on the side of the street. We went over to a magazine/snack kiosk near the bus stop to try to ask about where to pay, but she spoke absolutely no English. Fortunatly, a man passing down the street overheard our failing conversation and popped in, translated, got an answer for our question and kept moving on his way. Apparently, we just needed to pay when we got on the bus. All was well and we made it back to the airport in plenty of time to make it back to our terminal. In fact, Alex, Chris, and I even got a McDonald's ice cream cone because they were less than 40 cents! So fantastic! I also picked up a bunch of Korean candy for my family because I didn't want to go to the trouble of exchanging the three dollars I had left in won.

Overall, I really enjoyed our time in Seoul and would not mind going back, at least for more than 7 hours!

As you can tell from my other postings, we did eventually make it safely back to Seattle and went our separate ways until school started again. I really enjoyed my experience overseas, both in the Philippines and Korea, and am so blessed I had the chance to see God's work going on there and to get to help out a bit myself. I loved our team and loved getting to see a bit where Charis grew up, especially since I never thought it would actually happen! I hope you have enjoyed following my long and drawn-out adventures and I thank you for your support and prayers while I was journeying!

And I took thousands of photos while I was overseas, so if you want to see any more, email me, call me, text me, facebook me....just get in touch and I can show you some!

I think I will continue to blog a bit, especially since I have an exciting NASA Microgravity experience coming up in April and I'm going back to NASA this summer. We'll see if anything else catches my eye that I feel I need to blog about!

Stranded on the Island...

Okay....so here I am, almost 4 months after returning to the states and I am finally finishing blogging about my Philippines trip. There are two reasons for this: 1) I am sending out thank you letters with links to this blog and I want to finish it for them to read and 2) I am procrastinating on my PChem homework.

The morning after my last blog post, we woke up to the usual rain and wind in Puerto, but it did look like it was not coming down as hard as the previous days, so we were hopeful about our scuba outing. When we scrambled over the rocks and got to the dive shop, we found out that there was a tropical storm headed for the island, and we might not get off it for a few days if we did not leave that morning. While most of us would not protest a few more days of relaxation, we did have one team member who had to catch a flight back to the US on Monday for her job training. We decided that we did need to leave that day, but we were able to work it so that we could still do scuba-ing and snorkling. The dive shop agreed to do only one dive, instead of two, and before we we out, all us kids packed our stuff. This way, Mrs. Jones could gather it all up, check us out of the resort, truck it down to the dock and purchase our tickets back to Manila, all while we were playing in the water.

This plan worked out beautifully, we were dropped off the dive boat at the dock and walked right on to the boat taking us back. All was well - until we got near Manila, that is. All of a sudden, we were pulling up to what looked like a cement retaining wall behind a bunch of houses. This was definitely not Batangas pier. They told us to grab our stuff and get off the boat, herding us all towards a jeepney that would take us away from there. To where, we were not sure. Eventually it was made clear that the driver would take us to a bus station where we could catch a bus back to MegaMall, where it was then just a short FX and trike ride away from home.

You have to understand that the worst part about all of this is how all of us were still in our bathing suits. I at least had shoes on, but Charis was barefoot, and all of us were wet. Cramming all of the boat passengers and our luggage into one jeepney was quite a feat - it was a bit squishy in there - but fortunately no loud music or bright lights during the ride, as the usual jeepney experiance. I don't know how well our battered team would have tolerated that....

On the upside of our unexpected early trip home, we got to go back to one of the megachurches we had visited the first week and fellowship with others, including many of the missionary families we had been introduced to during our stay.

We also got to teach in the school one extra day, which was wonderful. All the kids and teachers were surprised we were back, but let us jump right in to help. Two of my science classes got to look through the microscope that Monday. And yes, there was more blood to be looked at, though this time it was a student who donated hers....

I don't recall if I mentioned this before, but one of the sweetest, most unexpected things the students did for us was make us thank you cards. I have each one and love to remember each student as I reread them. They make me smile - there is one that says, "smile b 4 open!" down the front opening, and many have misspellings ('Olifa' was my favorite), but all reflect their genuine hearts. I am blessed to have known them.

Tuesday was a day I had been waiting for. Divasoria! This is both one of Manila's poorest areas, but also home to the textile market I really wanted to go to. I had been saving all my pesos for this trip! It took us an FX, train, and jeepney ride to get there, which meant that by the end of the trip, we had taken every form of transportation Manila had to offer. The area was very run down - there were multi-story buildings that had been taken over by squatters. It was also very dirty, as there was lots of water in the street and the night market apparently left less-than-pleasant smells for the daytime visitors. At one point in time, we had to jump from pallet to pallet to rock to get across the water in the street to the sidewalk.

We did have a missionary with us who shopped there very frequently, so we did not have to stumble around and try to find everything on our own. Since she shops there so often, she has certain people that she has built a relationship with and will typically buy from. I was introduced to those women and happily bought a few lengths of cloth from each. One woman, her name was Amy, was dressed very professionally for the area and spoke very good english. Probably the best I had heard from a Filipino in Manila. I later found out that she had gone to college in the US and was successfully working on the east coast, when her family called and requested that she come back to the Philippines to help them out by buying and selling cloth in Divasoria. Because of the family-orientated culture of the Filipinos, she came back and since then has sold fabric in the corner of a dark, dirty building.

While I had known that prices were cheap there, I was floored when I found out that cotton fabrics were typically 40-45 pesos, or roughly 80-90 cents per yard. CENTS per YARD! Stuff that was typically 5-10 dollars per yard in the states! So what ensued was what I can only term speed-shopping like I've never done before. For a solid hour and a half, I could buy anything and everything that caught my eye. I bought beautiful summer dress material, Amy Butler fabric for my sister and mother, shantung silk for myself and my youngest sister (for a prom dress), even a most unique dark green wool-cashmere blend suiting from England. I would have paid upwards of $40+ per yard in the states for that last fabric, but I bought 4 yards for $12! In fact, prices were so good that I didn't even get to spend all the money I had saved for this excursion, we had to leave before I could trade all my pesos for fabric. Ah well, I am very excited to make special garments from my fabrics!

The next day, we packed our stuff, said goodbye to the kids, took lots of pictures, and finally drove to the airport. We had a red-eye out of Manila to Seoul, taking off right before midnight. We landed in Seoul around 5 am their time, and after getting our bearings and stowing our carry ons, we were off to the city for a quick adventure.

However, I must get back to my homework, I hear it calling for me...so I will post the last of my summer adventures overseas later, when I can get away from all that I must do as a student.