Thanksgiving Weekend 2015

2015-11-30.

Amy’s mom is having a lot of fun with her Cricut; here are some squirrel pilgrims (squilgrims).

Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws was a feast as always, with all the standard classics, and also some very interesting sweet potatoes. I don’t normally like sweet potatoes but this recipe with vanilla and marshmallows (!) was amazing. Brussels sprouts were also a highlight, as was the day-after-Thanksgiving turkey carcass soup.

On Friday we went to upper Manhattan and walked around Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, which we hadn’t visited for over a decade. It was a perfect day for it. For lunch, New Leaf in the park. Super-busy that day, with a long wait, but well worth it for a pork belly and fried egg sandwich.

Medieval art at the Cloisters is always a treat: I’d been looking forward to the unicorn tapestries after seeing the ones at the Cluny.

In the late afternoon the gardens afforded a lovely view of a golden sunset over the Hudson.

I also got to test out my “new” DSLR, a used Sony NEX-3N body, compatible with my current set of E-mount lenses. Other than that, I got to see more Leave It To Beaver than I have since childhood. Weekend was over far too soon.

Full Thanksgiving 2015 weekend album here.

Mars Exploration Teaser

2015-11-10.

Short teaser video I storyboarded and edited for NASA Office of Education’s Digital Learning Network, focusing on the theme of “Surviving and Thriving on Mars”:

Most of the footage was recycled from the 50 Years of Mars Exploration commemorative video and Mars: Journey of a Lifetime, but there were a few choice clips from other parts of the NASA B-roll library, all cobbled together with Adobe Premiere. I also had our intern make a 3D spinning Mars globe and some background textures, which I threw together into visual flourishes for the text titles with AfterEffects. Music is Fractal Planetoid by *imp*.

Autumnal Marsh in Morning Fog

2015-11-05.

Walked to Metro this morning; it was warmer than usual for early November and a light fog hung over the area, softening the trees as their leaves turned from green to brown and orange and red.

Halloween 2015

2015-10-31.

Since we moved to a townhouse, we now live in a neighborhood with trick-or-treaters, making this my first Halloween where I’m the adult giving out candies rather than one of the costumed children gathering them. There was a momentous sense of unreality and aloof benevolence to my assuming this role, as I sat on the stoop in a Minecraft creeper box head with a Costco bag of fun size chocolates.

The mask was far too stuffy with no peripheral vision, however, so I opted instead to set it beside me on the step with a flashlight shining on it, kind of a green 8-bit jack-o-lantern. We got a total of 37 children between 5 and 8 PM, Star Wars costumes most popular. I grossly underestimated the number of kids, and paced my candy output badly, running out at 8PM and having to retreat into the house and shut off the lights in Halloween shame.

(Maybe four or five kids acknowledged the Minecraft mask with glee.)

Space Technology Demo

2015-10-29.

October 7th saw a sounding rocket launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility — short ballistic trajectory up into space and back down — to test new systems for future launches. Partway through flight the rocket released a cloud of tracer gas into space, 130 miles above the Earth. We watched the launch from North Virginia.

I tried to get a long exposure of the first and second stage firings, but the arc, while clearly visible to the naked eye, was lost by the camera to the still-bright twilight. The tracer gas release was definitely visible, however: a rapidly expanding puff of green vapor which reached the size of a full moon before slowly fading away. Not quite as spectacular as the multiple plumes of ATREX, but still impressive.

Feline Non-Recognition Aggression

2015-10-28.

Our cat Amelia recently got her teeth and gums thoroughly cleaned at the vet (she was developing some gingivitis), and as the procedure is treated as surgical, she was put under general anesthesia (much easier and less traumatic for everyone involved: vet, vet techs, and cat). Turns out the anesthesia left over in her bloodstream changed her scent for a while, so when Amelia came home that afternoon she smelled completely different to her sister Martha, who responded with hisses and deep growls for the rest of the day. The vet tech had warned me about this before I took Amelia home.

And that’s how I learned about feline non-recognition aggression.

Fortunately both cats are fairly non-violent so there were no physical brawls, but Martha kept her distance from Amelia, and anytime she got close she’d give a sniff, then suddenly hiss loudly and dash away from what she perceived as a strange cat who looked like her sister but smelled like a veterinary procedure. Amelia was confused about this and seemed a bit despondent.

The aggression can last from 24 hours to weeks. In our case Martha’s hissing stopped about 3 days later and she is friendly to Amelia again.

(We didn’t even need to resort to locking the aggressive cat in a separate room or dabbing vanilla extract under their noses as some sites suggest, though we did keep their food bowls apart for those 3 days.)

Lunar Eclipse of September 2015

2015-09-30.

The so-called “Super Blood Moon” lunar eclipse was mostly obscured by clouds over our house, but there was enough of a gap to see this much before totality.

More DC-area lunar eclipse photos from Capital Weather.

Explore@NASAGoddard

2015-09-29.

Saturday was Open House Day at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I’d been there for some video work in Heliophysics and the Visitor Center earlier in the week, but I did want to return to see the other facilities which would be open to the public.

Buildings 7 and 29 were the highlight for me: the Spacecraft Integration and Testing Facility with its Space Environment Simulators, acoustic bays, and massive centrifuge; the High Bay Clean Room where the James Webb Space Telescope is being assembled; and the “Cauldron” satellite tech test bed.

Over in Building 28 were the Flight Dynamics Facility and CAVE — a holodeck-like 3D visualization environment simulating Asteroid Bennu and the OSIRIS-REX mission. The NASA TV control center was there too, and a life-size MMS model and a climate simulation server farm.

And of course there was a bouncy space shuttle. Or technically, a bouncy Shuttle External Tank.

We really only got to see a fraction of what there was to see; the GSFC campus is sprawling and there are many buildings, but I wanted to leave a bit early to beat outgoing traffic. More Explore@NASAGoddard photos here.

Weekend Snaps

2015-09-23.

Some weekend photos from after our return from Europe, as we squeezed the last of summer out of the month of August.

At Hersheypark, playing around with the SlowShutter app while waiting in line to ride the Comet.

A panorama of the library at Hillwood, home (now a museum) of DC socialite and heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Wild mushrooms on the Bay View Trail, Mason Neck State Park.

At Busch Gardens Williamsburg, the interlocking loops of the Loch Ness Monster roller coaster.

Townhouse

2015-09-18.

We bought a townhouse. After 6 years in our 1BR condo we wanted to upgrade to a bigger place, but not too much bigger. Moving day was in March, and to this day we still have a few boxes left to unpack. The old condo sold to new owners over the summer, much to our relief.

The cats are happy about this, as now they have more than triple the space to run around.

New home is a 3BR/2.5BA townhouse, near (by car) to various shopping malls and the Beltway, and walking distance from Metro, with a Metro shuttle at rush hour. It’s a good location for the price, though much less walkable than any of our previous residences. That does disappoint me somewhat, as I already suffer some middle-class suburban angst, but the location is an excellent compromise between accessibility and affordability — hard to find in this exorbitant DC-area market — and where we are is much more nature-y.

The cats certainly love sitting at the windows and watching the woods for birds and deer and squirrels.

The house is a bit older than our previous condo, but not by too much. There are a few repairs to make, and Amy and I are learning and applying some home DIY skills as we go along.

It’s still a bit strange to have things like a deck and a fence and a yard and stairs and more than one bathroom, but we’re getting used to that. More photos here.

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