Greetings from Houston!
Dec. 8th, 2002 11:10 pmMade it! (Finally.)
The day started early, and it seemed - for a while - that circumstances were conspiring to keep me going at about dead slow. At around 8:15 am, I went to the store and did the report and a postal audit, the results of which depressed me until I called Drew and he explained how I'd missed about $800 of "accountabliity."
Once home, I did a bunch of packing and ran off a number of checks that have to be sent off tomorrow. Finally, around 10:30, I got in the shower. While there, it occurred to me that, if my flight was at 1 pm, then we really had to leave Pagosa around 11 am to get to the Durango airport in sufficient time to check in, etc. So I raced through the last few minutes of packing and got out the door around 11:15.
Once at the airport, the young lady at the America West counter told me the flight I was scheduled to take was canceled, and she started to reschedule me on a flight combination from competing airlines. Her first solution got me into Houston International at 12:15 am, which simply wouldn't do. Finally, she hit upon a combination - United Express to Denver and Continental from there to Houston - that got me in to IAH about 30 minutes after the time I was originally scheduled to arrive.
Things went swimmingly. The only bad taste during the trip was getting "randomly" selected in Denver for a pre-boarding search. I was secod-to-last in boarding the plane, and I was in not too good a mood. So far, my luck in getting "randomly" selected for in-depth security screening is astoundingly good: twice in two trips.
Getting the rental car went well, and I arrived at the Pearland house at 9:15 pm. We did a little shopping and had a couple of small sandwiches for dinner. Dwayne is out somewhere washing and drying the bedding for the bed I'll be sleeping in, and once he gets home, I'll hit the hay.
Tomorrow's schedule calls for me to be at the so-called Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (where astronauts train to do EVA in one of the largest "swimming pools" in the world) to provide crew support. I'll have to rise around 5:30 am local time and leave within an hour to get to the NBL and take care of any badging issues, but I expect no surprises in that area (and anyway, I've built time into the schedule to account for any, should they occur).
Cheers...
The day started early, and it seemed - for a while - that circumstances were conspiring to keep me going at about dead slow. At around 8:15 am, I went to the store and did the report and a postal audit, the results of which depressed me until I called Drew and he explained how I'd missed about $800 of "accountabliity."
Once home, I did a bunch of packing and ran off a number of checks that have to be sent off tomorrow. Finally, around 10:30, I got in the shower. While there, it occurred to me that, if my flight was at 1 pm, then we really had to leave Pagosa around 11 am to get to the Durango airport in sufficient time to check in, etc. So I raced through the last few minutes of packing and got out the door around 11:15.
Once at the airport, the young lady at the America West counter told me the flight I was scheduled to take was canceled, and she started to reschedule me on a flight combination from competing airlines. Her first solution got me into Houston International at 12:15 am, which simply wouldn't do. Finally, she hit upon a combination - United Express to Denver and Continental from there to Houston - that got me in to IAH about 30 minutes after the time I was originally scheduled to arrive.
Things went swimmingly. The only bad taste during the trip was getting "randomly" selected in Denver for a pre-boarding search. I was secod-to-last in boarding the plane, and I was in not too good a mood. So far, my luck in getting "randomly" selected for in-depth security screening is astoundingly good: twice in two trips.
Getting the rental car went well, and I arrived at the Pearland house at 9:15 pm. We did a little shopping and had a couple of small sandwiches for dinner. Dwayne is out somewhere washing and drying the bedding for the bed I'll be sleeping in, and once he gets home, I'll hit the hay.
Tomorrow's schedule calls for me to be at the so-called Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (where astronauts train to do EVA in one of the largest "swimming pools" in the world) to provide crew support. I'll have to rise around 5:30 am local time and leave within an hour to get to the NBL and take care of any badging issues, but I expect no surprises in that area (and anyway, I've built time into the schedule to account for any, should they occur).
Cheers...