11/24/08
Well, Michelle has been working hard for the past couple of weeks, but an end is in sight. But…the end got a little bit further away today. For various reasons, they extended the mission an extra day, which means that instead of undocking on Thursday, the Shuttle will undock on Friday. So, Michelle will get the privilege of spending her Thanksgiving in Mission Control. Don’t worry about us, though. We’d already arranged to celebrate our Thanksgiving on Friday at my parent’s house. And Michelle’s Mom and brother will be flying in Thanksgiving day. Looks like they get to spend their day with me. Oh, and they get to watch the UT vs A&M football game with me, too. -Travis 11/16/08
The Shuttle flight called ULF-2 has launched! And it has docked to the International Space Station! Yay! Michelle is the lead Operations Support Officer (OSO) flight controller for this mission, so she will be really busy until Thanksgiving. In fact, Thanksgiving Day will be her first day off after the flight. Yes, she’ll be working every day until then. The crew doesn’t take weekends on the Shuttle, so she can’t, either. There’s just too much to do! Me, well, I’ve been playing on the new expansion pack to my favorite computer game, World of Warcraft. It’s called Wrath of the Lich King, and I get to take my characters to new places, explore, and learn to do new stuff. It’s fun, but I played way too much of it today. I also got some chores done, I’ll have you know. -Travis 11/01/08
Happy Halloween, everybody! Yes, it’s a day late…but…I have pictures from the party that we attended last night at the home of Russell and Cassaundra Lala. My costume was a Jack Sparrow (from The Pirate’s of the Caribbean movies) inspired pirate, and Michelle’s was a Pirate wench. Here’s a link to all the pictures I took. And we’ll finish this post with a picture of just us in costume. -Travis  10/26/08
We took last weekend off from the fence project to take a trip to California for a small family reunion (more on that later), but this weekend we made progress. The posts are nice and solid (2 weeks is plenty of time for the concrete to dry), so we put the fence panels back up. It took us most of the afternoon, since Michelle is still recovering from a cold she had this week (I know, I’m a meany for making her do some physical labor, but I couldn’t do it by myself, and it can’t wait much longer!). We took frequent breaks to rehydrate and rest. Luckily for her, the battery on the cordless screwdriver ran out of juice after getting the panels up, so we will have to wait to finish. The last bit we have to do is replace the pickets that we had to break to gain access to the posts. That shouldn’t be more than 1 hour worth of work, so I may try to finish that up some afternoon after work. Here are a couple of pics of the work-in-progress.   10/12/08
The Horns won an awesome game to our rivals, Oklahoma University, today. Texas was ranked number 5 in the country, and OU was ranked number 1. The number 2 team didn’t play this weekend, and the numbers 3 and 4 teams lost. I don’t know that it’s good for the season to be ranked number 1 (since I think 4 teams ranked number 1 were upset this year), but I’ll take it. Our project (aside from watching the game) this weekend is to rebuild our back fence, since Mr. Ike decided he didn’t like it the way it was. We figured out why it fell down…the posts were only 7 feet long, and 6 feet of them were above the ground. So we bought new, 8 ft long, posts, and started digging. The digging took longer than I expected, but it would have been even longer had we not borrowed a post-hole digger from Rob (thanks, dude!). We got 4 posts dug and staked, but underestimated how much concrete they would take. It’s looking like they’re taking almost a full 80 lb bag of concrete each. We’ll wait until next weekend to attempt to put the fence panels back up. That’s going to be much easier if we have a 3 and/or fourth person to help. Beware, friends, we may be asking for help! Here’s a couple of “before” pictures:   |
08:10:45 pm, by travis 
So, of course, we hadn’t bought enough. We got 3 posts done, but need to make a run this morning to get more concrete. We only have one to do, so it shouldn’t take us long to finish this phase of the project.
XML Feeds