Like a good boy, I was in bed by 11 pm tonight. Actually I was just tired from last night’s beer, philosophy and politics orgy at my house in Minnesota last night so good had nothing to do with it. The drive to Houghton sucked too. So by 1 am I’m still laying there, trying to find that magic “Walk Like an Egyptian” sort of pose that lets me sleep. No luck. I discovered several years ago that if I’m even the slightest bit hungry, sleep will be intermittent and really not even worth the time so I go downstairs to the kitchen to make some popcorn. Yeah, apparently I don’t hold the monopoly on insomnia this evening since at 1:30 am there were four of us in the kitchen all walking around sort of lost. Well, I guess I’ll give the sack another stab since it is back to the grind stone in less then 8 hours.

With all the rambling of work and stuff, I’ve sort of neglected posting what I would call characteristic posts if I ever named such things (which I don’t so this is all a bit acedemic). You know, when I write about things and the people who know me in real life can’t help but think that there is no doubt it is me writing since these things just seem to sort of happen. Anyway, this week has been no exception.

I rose from the dead Saturday we’ll call it morning, but it was really early afternoon. 500 miles of potholed, radar infested highway lay before me although those things weren’t my prime concern. Usually it is Bambi and her stupid friends. This time it is Joe Yooper and stray rifle bullets streaking across the countryside. Like a scene out of Iraq, across the entire Upper Peninsula I just couldn’t help but wonder how many bullets I had just driven though. That and the music was sucking leaving me with no way to drown out the chorus of voices in my head. The only thing that was keeping me mildly entertained was my windshield wipers. I have these super awesome winter wipers that can easily remove the glacial buildup that accumulates in the dog days of winter but they are absolutely ineffective at removing water from the one spot I need to see out of at speeds above 60 mph. My cruising speed in the UP is usually between 70 and 80 so I would have to periodically drop out of warp so I could renew my optical subscription to the road.

Anyway, like I said, the music was sort of sucking. I had my mp3 player, but those same songs have been following me around for a while so it was time for something new. My CD case provided little help other then the thrill of trying to find a CD while driving fast so I was left with little recourse. I stopped into the Wal-Mart in Ashland Wisconsin and $85 later emerged with a 400W power inverter, RF transducer and 12dB coax booster. That’s right kids: its laptop time. So I spend the next 6 or so hours ripping up the Midwest listening to Pendulum, Krafty Kuts and a bunch of other stuff that I was too afraid to change because doing 80 on I-35 requires some amount of attention. FYI: the coax booster is for the house.

So I roll into Mantorville area a bit ahead of schedule and go out with my friend Nate and his girlfriend. Unfortunately, Kasson has turned into enough of a police state that everyone just goes to Rochester instead where the cops have better things to do then stare you down all the time. So after a beer, we went back to Nate’s place to go rot in the hot tub. And dammit if history didn’t repeat itself again. You see, his father is allergic to barely or something like that so he makes his own wine. That last time I had it, his dad and I had to be basically drug out of the forest and tossed into a heap in the corner. This time, Nate and I polished off way too much again and ended up running around the neighborhood reliving the glory days. So at 9am when I finally stagger through the front door all dirty from jumping across rivers and running through horse stables I had this strange vibe my folks were both surprised and less then impressed with my adventure. So I hit the sack for a couple of hours and it was off to my grandpa’s for an early Thanksgiving dinner. That made for a long, but good day.

Monday came and I made the rounds visiting some people and getting some homework done.

Tuesday was a bit different story. Morning greeted me with a trip to the dentist for a checkup and cleaning. No cavities, just some warranty work. I still had some homework to wrap up after having my mouth examined so I headed to a coffee shop in Rochester to pound out a lab report. With that out of the way, I went over to Old Navy to check out what was going on there. I ended up buying this nifty fleece sort of thing and a moisture wicking shirt all for about $24. So I roll home, go for a run and get ready to go to Minneapolis to stay with my brother for the evening.

He had to work so I checked out this huge sporting goods store on 494 and 35W. I’ve been in the market for snowshoes since the biking season ended two weeks ago. Lucky me I caught the year end purge of last year’s models (like they really made any wondrous advances in a year) so I got a nice pair for about 40% off. Check ‘em out.

Ok, this post is getting a bit long, so I’ll pick it up later.

Friday 4:52 pm: I hand in my 15 page Scanning Electron Microscopy lab report with 8 minutes to spare, collect my graded exam (23 out of 22, go me) and get the hell off campus.

Next stop: the KBC for some brew and wireless internet. And so where I now sit our paths cross gentle reader, a hearty 54 minutes into a much needed vacation. Part of my academic damage control has been to compile a list of all the thruster tests I ran so I can explain why I wasn’t able to attend graduate seminar 3 times (don’t even get me started on that). Anyway, it was actually a good exercise though since I was able to figure out why Fall seemed to escape me. Over a span of 50 days beginning 9/8/05, I ran at least 32 thruster tests. I say “at least” because those are the ones I have notes or some other sort of documentation for; I know there are a few tests that happened that I didn’t write anything down.

Anyway, as previously alluded to, MTU is officially out of session until November 28th. I can feel all the squabbling and social-political crap just sort of fading into the background – finally lost in the noise as it should be. Thank god. So for the first time in about 5 months, I’ll be making my back to good old K-Town tomorrow. I figure it is probably time for a Proof of Life for the ‘rents since sure someone answers my cell phone, but there has to be at least a seed of doubt that it is actually me as opposed to someone who just sounds a lot like me.

I guess someone found the winter switch because in a span of about 12 hours, winter has returned to Houghton in full force yet again. Yes, I too am controlling my shock. Ok, it’s under control now. Along with the copious amounts of snow that fell last night (basically shutting down the entire UP with MTU being the ever present exception) there was something else precipitating around the house: trees. Yes folks, not only was it snowing water, it was also raining trees. You see there is this ancient semi-dead tree in the yard that incidentally arches over US 41 and this heavy, wet snow was too much for certain segments to handle. The 70 mph winds a couple days ago didn’t help either. Usually when the tree is feeling overburnded it merely sheds a couple of small branches; sticks really. This time though, it launched a 4” diameter mini-tree at the mailbox. Luckily the porch intercepted it before any federal offenses were committed, but I have a nagging feeling that tree is going to cause some other problems in the not too distant future. Despite my best efforts though, I can’t figure out a good way to have it land on the Uphill 41 . . . research continues though.

In the other all consuming realm of my life (school), I’m still attempting to wrap up some academic damage control. Although I have yet to completely put out all the fires, at least I know that they exist. Sure there are still a few people trying to step on my face, but there are so many feet there the best they can hope for is an ear or a small tuft of hair. I should be back onto my game by Friday, that or I’m totally screwed but at least I know what needs to be done to keep my little earth rotating.

Ok, sorry for the delay in finishing this but I spent a lot more time doing academic damage control then I thought I would have to; the take home exam I had didn’t help things either.

Where was I now . . . oh yeah, Princeton at the IEPC. When we arrived on Saturday I wasn’t really sure what to expect out of this whole deal. The Joint Propulsion Conference out in Tucson this past summer completely sucked (to put it mildly) so I guess I didn’t have real high expectations. However, as I alluded to in my previous post, it was by far the best conference I had ever attended.

On Sunday night, there was a welcoming reception at some museum on campus. The pieces on display there were absolutely ancient dating back to the dark ages. As with most receptions, there is always free beer and wine as well as a crazy assortment of appetizers consisting of things I’d never eaten before. I’d love to tell you what I had, but I’m not even sure. I liked most of it but there was some sort of foul cheese that everyone loved but made me want to blow chunks.

Monday came around and the conference opened up with an award ceremony which honored some of the pillars in the Electric Propulsion field. Sure I felt like a total hack sitting among the gods in the field but at the same time we’re all on the same side so it was almost like a family. Technical sessions started on Monday as well and I attended several fascinating talks about discharge channel wall materials and discharge oscillations. Already I could tell this was going to be a good conference. That evening there was a Halloween masquerade ball for the attendees. The room it was held in was absolutely beautiful and the live jazz band they had playing was very good as well. It was rather amusing and cool to watch some dusty old rocket scientists dance away the evening.

After the ball, they had some telescopes set up to look at Mars and stuff but we opted to make the 20 minute hike over to the actual observatory.

On the way back to the hotel, we snuck into Princeton stadium where I played my first Ivy League football game.

Tuesday brought more technical sessions as well as a Manhattan boat tour. We boarded coach bus around 6pm and headed off to some dock in New York City. From there, we boarded an immense dinner boat that was lavishly outfitted. Luckily, I was dressed for success (shirt and tie) so I didn’t feel all that out of place. The food served was, you guessed it, fantastic. I was absolutely stuffed and would have probably had no problem floating to shore if I had fallen off. One thing I will say though, that boat was certainly hauling ass. We managed to see basically all of Manhattan, parts of Brooklyn as well as make it over to the Statue of Liberty all in about 3 hours.

Wednesday was even more technical sessions. I caught a few in the morning but the afternoon session didn’t really have much I was into so I went off and worked on my presentation since I had to have it done before Brad left on Thursday. By 5pm I had it pretty much done and revised so Brad and I sat down in the hotel bar, had a pint and went through it. Now that is my kind of practice session! Just a random aside, the Nassau Inn was the hotel I was staying at but a long time ago a certain group of people stayed there while they were signing a little piece of paper called the Declaration of Independence (that was signed across the street). Anyway, Wednesday even was the formal banquet that was held in a building that could only be described as some sort of Harry Potter castle. Keeping with tradition, the food was again phenomenal as was pretty much everything else. After dinner, they played a movie “Mars and Beyond”. It is a forward looking Disney film from 1959 that explained some the of then current plans for Mars exploration. The highlight is when one of the people who won the medals on Monday was seen in there with van Braun.

On Thursday I caught a few more technical sessions but the afternoon was essentially free although my talk prep sort of expanded to fill that void. We went out that evening with some of the other grad students from Princeton and University of Michigan, but I had to turn in early so I could put on a good show in the morning.

Friday came along and I was all locked and loaded for my talk. Although I spoke to fast in the beginning, I sort of relaxed a bit and returned to a more normal talking speed (for me anyway). The turnout was very good for being one of the last talks in a week long conference. Eddie Choueiri (who was host of the conference) attended as well as Yevgeny Raitses both of whom are very well respected in the field and I was lucky enough to have both of them talk to me independently after my talk. So that was cool.

That pretty much concluded the conference proceedings leaving us on the east coast with a departure flight scheduled for Sunday evening. What to do then? Yep, go to New York City . . . .

I’m not even really sure where to start with this so I’ll explain why I’ve been largely absent from the real world and how that culminated in this entry. Every two years, all the rocket geeks that work in the in-space electric propulsion (EP) field get together to swap ideas, network and just get out of the lab in general. The conference alternates from a European location to a US one every other time and this year’s was held at Princeton University.

This was by far the best conference I’d ever attended though. They pulled out all the stops and kept us busy, well fed and entertained the entire week. My talk wasn’t until Friday morning so I was able to spend the first part of the week attending other technical sessions and interacting with industry people as well as graduate students from other universities.

I was going to get further on this tonight but I still have a ton of other work to do. I uploaded some pictures though. Check out the IEPC/NYC 2005 photo gallery.

Presentation is done.
Went very well.
Now, off to New York City for the weekend.
Back in Houghton very late Sunday night.
cya

So much I want to write, but no time yet. Soon though I will regain control of my life. until then, look at this cool picture of the Princeton University campus.

Ok, back to Hall thruster discharge chamber physics and how it controls my life in ways I don’t yet understand (aka workig on the presentation).