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Houston Miscellania
So, we're in Houston. In August. I have never really had an opinion of LBJ before, beyond a vague empathy with his obvious feelings of guilt over Vietnam, but I now violently hate the man.
Texas isn't really as bad as I expected. Slightly more skirts, more makeup, more fancy hairdos. I'd like to do a rigorous survey, but a lot fewer people in DFW during our layover seemed to be reading than those in SeaTac. Those cool automated defibrulator devices are all over. What that means I really don't know. On several occasions I've been amused to watch a culture clash between fast talking northern (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xmurf or dymaxion) and laconic NASA southeners, one side annoyed with the needless pauses, the other annoyed at the interruptions. I still hate southern accents with a passion.
I'm starting to acclimate to the humidity, but it remains fairly surreal to me. It feels and smells like a greenhouse. The almost daily thunderstorms that pass by are pretty weird, too. The cloud formations here are just incredible. Huge, towering cloudscapes stretching away to the far-too-distance horizon. The flatness is annoying, mostly. You can't see anything from the ground!
Monday night, after we knew NASA was going to let us fly, we had to get the air tanks refilled. We were tired from the all-night effort preparing for the hardware review, but we set out for the paintball store we knew would provide even higher pressure air than we needed. It was closed. Unneeded teammeber were dropped off at the hotel, leaving just a driver (me) and a navigator (xmurf). We find a fairly local army surplus store that offers 4.5kpsi air without too much trouble. Except that they won't fill our tanks for a vaguely defined reason. It seems to have something to do with our regulators. They're too big, or we have too much padding taped to them, or something. They are neither coherent nor competant on the matter. We now have one hour before the last paintball store in Houston closes and they're on the other side of town. Complicating things are the instructions we have to get there. They are based on the Sam Houston [Park|Toll]way, aka Highway 8, which is a circle. We were on a north/south section of it, yet the direction we had said both east and west. Our destination was roughly diametrically opposite our current location, so I head in the most convenient direction (clockwise). We got to the area of the paintball store with 8 minutes to spare. We follow the direction we have and end up circling on tiny residential/industrial streets with much squealing of tires. (It was a lot like the final phase of a hidden transmitter hunt, actually. I never expected those skills to be useful, much less in getting me into freefall!) We were on the phone with the paintball store, begging them not to close, asking for better directions. We just couldn't find the last street we needed to turn on. Finally, after traveling the length of the penultimate streets three times, the guy on the phone mentioned that the street we were looking for didn't have a street sign up because of construction. We zoom down a tiny dirt path with construction signs and find the place with 2 minutes to spare. The excitement kept me awake almost the entire drive home.
We went to Saturn Park today. Seeing what was once a fully functional Saturn V rusting away as a lawn ornament almost made me cry. They can't even be bothered to protect it from the elements. Obscene.
We stopped by Space Center Houston, which turns out to be a horrible bastard of a tourist trap and a science center. But the gift shop had some decent items hidden away, including an ISS expedition one plastic toy which I just had to buy. It includes a toy Soyuz! I was bouncing up and down when I found it.
Texas isn't really as bad as I expected. Slightly more skirts, more makeup, more fancy hairdos. I'd like to do a rigorous survey, but a lot fewer people in DFW during our layover seemed to be reading than those in SeaTac. Those cool automated defibrulator devices are all over. What that means I really don't know. On several occasions I've been amused to watch a culture clash between fast talking northern (
xmurf or dymaxion) and laconic NASA southeners, one side annoyed with the needless pauses, the other annoyed at the interruptions. I still hate southern accents with a passion.I'm starting to acclimate to the humidity, but it remains fairly surreal to me. It feels and smells like a greenhouse. The almost daily thunderstorms that pass by are pretty weird, too. The cloud formations here are just incredible. Huge, towering cloudscapes stretching away to the far-too-distance horizon. The flatness is annoying, mostly. You can't see anything from the ground!
Monday night, after we knew NASA was going to let us fly, we had to get the air tanks refilled. We were tired from the all-night effort preparing for the hardware review, but we set out for the paintball store we knew would provide even higher pressure air than we needed. It was closed. Unneeded teammeber were dropped off at the hotel, leaving just a driver (me) and a navigator (
xmurf). We find a fairly local army surplus store that offers 4.5kpsi air without too much trouble. Except that they won't fill our tanks for a vaguely defined reason. It seems to have something to do with our regulators. They're too big, or we have too much padding taped to them, or something. They are neither coherent nor competant on the matter. We now have one hour before the last paintball store in Houston closes and they're on the other side of town. Complicating things are the instructions we have to get there. They are based on the Sam Houston [Park|Toll]way, aka Highway 8, which is a circle. We were on a north/south section of it, yet the direction we had said both east and west. Our destination was roughly diametrically opposite our current location, so I head in the most convenient direction (clockwise). We got to the area of the paintball store with 8 minutes to spare. We follow the direction we have and end up circling on tiny residential/industrial streets with much squealing of tires. (It was a lot like the final phase of a hidden transmitter hunt, actually. I never expected those skills to be useful, much less in getting me into freefall!) We were on the phone with the paintball store, begging them not to close, asking for better directions. We just couldn't find the last street we needed to turn on. Finally, after traveling the length of the penultimate streets three times, the guy on the phone mentioned that the street we were looking for didn't have a street sign up because of construction. We zoom down a tiny dirt path with construction signs and find the place with 2 minutes to spare. The excitement kept me awake almost the entire drive home.We went to Saturn Park today. Seeing what was once a fully functional Saturn V rusting away as a lawn ornament almost made me cry. They can't even be bothered to protect it from the elements. Obscene.
We stopped by Space Center Houston, which turns out to be a horrible bastard of a tourist trap and a science center. But the gift shop had some decent items hidden away, including an ISS expedition one plastic toy which I just had to buy. It includes a toy Soyuz! I was bouncing up and down when I found it.