Wedding Fun

The trip back to Indiana for my cousin’s wedding was very nice.  I had just over twenty-four hours in Bloomington before heading to Indianapolis for the wedding.  I managed to have two nice lunches with a good friend, train some Hapkido, boulder in a friend’s shed, drink beer in the hot tub, hang out at the daycare, go out drinking Thursday night and almost get hit by an ambulance.

Now, the real purpose of the trip was, of course, to go to my cousin’s wedding.  It was a lovely outdoor ceremony at the White River Gardens in Indianapolis.  My brother and I were running a little late coming up from Bloomington (I blame mainly him) which was the cause for a little family tension before the wedding, but we made it there in plenty of time.  The forecast was not happy, but the threatening weather held off until after the ceremony and all the picture taking.  The ceremony was lovely, with a nice candle lighting ceremony and vows that the bride and groom had written together.

We headed back inside after photos for the reception to discover that there wasn’t enough seating in the main reception room.  This was actually planned; the reception was a cocktail party and my cousin wanted to encourage people to mingle and walk the gardens and there were enough seats in other locations for everyone. However, those of us who were late moving inside for the reception because we were outside taking pictures (the “Thanksgiving crew” from dinners at my aunt’s house) didn’t get seats in the main area.  That was fine, we sat and chatted on the window sill while waiting for the bridal party to be introduced and the toasts.  We then placed ourselves into the food line early (we weren’t at a table waiting to be dismissed after all) and moved to the other tables in the foyer.  A little while later, the bad weather finally rolled in.  A tornado warning was issued and they were threatening to evacuate us to another building for a while.  Instead, they just sent everyone out of the main room with the wall of windows to the foyer.  Which meant that we were laughing it up because we had seats this time while everyone else was standing.  The only sad part was that the cake was in the main room and I had been just thinking about going and getting some when the warning was issued.  It worked out alright though because I positioned myself to sneak in and get some cake as soon as the weather cleared.  The rest of the night was quite fun with dancing and drinks.  I left a bit before the end of the reception with my family for a ride back to the hotel room, managing to annoy my sister during the three minute car ride back.

Strawberries and a Blowtorch

Some weeks you just get to do so many fun things.

Monday morning I helped with a demonstration of the infrared (IR) camera for a school group. I was in charge of hot things – i.e. the blowtorch! It wasn’t just about getting to play with a blowtorch; there was also some science to share. For one, you could see the plume of hot air on the camera which was pretty cool. I also had two different metal pipes, one of copper and one of stainless steel. You can actually watch the copper pipe conduct heat down its length from the tip while the other one only gets warm on the tip. When everything works, that is. The first demonstration it was hard to see – turns out it’s best to stand as far away from the camera as you can. I think it had mainly to do with contrast; the conduction was easier to see when you could see the whole pipe and had my body in there also to help set the scale. All in all, it was a good morning. Kids always love the IR camera and getting to paint themselves in ice. And it’s one of those occasions where wearing glasses rocks and makes you look super awesome on the camera.

Tuesday night I went strawberry picking with a group of people I climb with.  I ran into someone else from the department while picking, which just goes to show how small Ithaca is.  It’s an amazing year for strawberries here.  The plants were full of fruit and we all managed to fill our buckets (around 4 lbs) within twenty minutes or so.  After picking all our strawberries, we made fresh strawberry ice cream.  We climbed a bit while the ice cream was churning and then stuffed ourselves full of deliciousness.  By the time I left, I was so full of ice cream that I was able to carry my bucket of strawberries and not be tempted to eat any.  I froze  a bag for the future and took the rest into the office, where people kindly helped me eat them.

It’s off to Indiana for my cousin’s wedding where fun times await!

Bootleg Postcards

I highly suggest checking out the website Unmanned Spaceflight.  The creator of the website gave a talk here Friday afternoon and I was blown away.  People put a substantial amount of effort into making amazing pictures from the raw snapshots from space exploration probes.  The website originally started with the Mars rovers and that’s what the talk here focused on, given that so much of the rover operations are headquartered here.

I wish I could somehow share the whole talk because it was really good, but I’ll at least try to convey the parts that I thought were awesome.

• The pictures were really works of art – very, very impressive.  Sometimes bits of the image were missing and stolen from another image but stitched together so well you couldn’t tell
• Not having to get your images approved by JPL is awesome – they can put a rover or person on an image to give a sense of scale.
• These images have done a lot for the public’s perception of the rover mission, e.g. this image comes from this group of people.
• The PI of the rover mission checks the website every morning to see how the previous day’s drive went because he knows the images will be available there right away.
• I’m amazed by how much space exploration means to so many people.

Back Home

I went home home last weekend for my sister’s high school graduation and life has been crazy frantic since as I’ve been playing the catch-up game like mad. The trip home was good, though, worth the awkward moments and the massive amounts of work since.

The big activities of the weekend centered around my sister’s high school graduation, of course. Friday night was her open house, which was an interesting experience for me. My mom had prepped my sister on recognizing all of my dad’s cousins whom we rarely see, but she forgot to include me in this preparation. I had a lot of lovely conversations with people who were familiar but for whom I lacked any idea of their name/relation to me. I felt a little guilty about that for a while but then decided that I shouldn’t feel too bad; I hadn’t most of the people in six years (I missed my brother’s graduation due to being in Hawaii – much more expensive plane tickets.), plus most of them didn’t recognize me at first, either. That’s what happens when you move away from your home town and change and cut all your hair off. I did feel slightly out of place at the party though – too old to be out on the deck with the high school students and too young to belong inside with all the family I barely know.

Red River Gorge Climbing

The end of my trip back to Bloomington involved a drive down to Kentucky with my old Bloomington climbing partner, Ron. It was back to our old routine – we left Bloomington Monday morning after Ron got back from work. I was semi-conscious for the drive down while Ron drank a thermosful of coffee. The trip took slightly longer than normal; it was Memorial Day and we saw at least six cars pulled over, two right in front of us. Definitely not a good day to speed.

We made it to the Red by midday and headed to Muir Valley for an afternoon of climbing. Ron has been helping develop a new wall there – de Bibliothek Wall. He has a project there that he was going to send and open up. Unfortunately, neither of was climbing particularly hard. I could feel the months of not climbing catching up to me. It was also a lovely, sticky Kentucky day. I top-roped Ron’s project a bit and had a good time – it’s a nice line with some good moves, lots of high feet and long moves. I also go to help and take a torque wrench up to check all the bolts. I felt useful and had a built-in excuse to go bolt to bolt. We also took a little side trip down to the Animal Wall so that I could play on some easy slab climbs, including a two pitch climb just to prove that sport climbers can do multi-pitch too.