STS-116 Lights up the Sky

Property of NASA
Well, we can breathe a sigh of relief STS-116 launched Saturday night, which means we are clear for heading north Wednesday night. There was only a 30% chance of launch for Saturday night so we were pretty sure they would scrub it again, but the weather and systems both cooperated and the first night flight since the return to flight went off like a charm. Jared ducked out of our Christmas party early Saturday night to catch a little sleep before working the 3rd orbit shirt. He worked from 2am – 11 am this morning. By the time we got home from church and he was done clerking it was almost 5 pm. He headed to bed because his next shift is 1:30 am – 10am. The good news is he is done with the shuttle when it docks to the station. Some people pull those insane hours the whole mission, so he gets off pretty easy. If you did not get to see the launch (and care about it) there are some pretty amazing photos on the NASA site.

STS 116 NASA LINK

Christmas Parade

Not too many happenings for December. It’s been cool down here, which is a nice change. Actually a few days ago we had to scrape car windows.

We took Erin to our town’s annual Christmas parade last weekend. It was her first parade and she really enjoyed it. We saw all sides of Santa - Santa the criminal (riding in the cop car), Santa the steel drum enthusiast in the Caribbean band, and of course Santa the dare devil, straddling a Saturn rocket.

What was really odd to us was about ¼ of the parade consisted of ROTC legions. Every high school here has a full functioning ROTC program and we saw several legions of Jr high ROTC. They even had an ROTC Princess that rode in a convertible. The thing that really got me was the elementary ROTC, they called it “Leadership Training”. It was bizarre seeing a few hundred little kids march in step and in uniform yelling chants. I had to make sure I was still in the US, but that’s just part of southern patriotic pride.

The temp was about 55 degrees and we saw people marching in the band with snow pants on. It was pretty comical to us northerners. I also was wearing my ISU hoddie and ran into a few carnies that grew up in Cedar Rapids; they had to tell me about their adventures in Strawberry Point. We then went out to Zios, our favorite Italian restaurant, for dinner.

Besides that we leave for Iowa on the 13th and are planning on driving. The shuttle flies on Thursday so we are keeping our fingers crossed that it takes off Thursday; otherwise it will put a damper on our Christmas plans.