Ding, all done! My presentation at the Life in Space for Life on Earth is all done! It went well but dang, 10 min goes by so darned fast when it's your turn up there. Now the world's space agencies are better informed about the microbiological studies and advancements we've made on ISS. yippie!
I saw some familiar old faces in the crowd, and afterwards, several of those faces came over to say how proud they were of me going from X (their lab, whatever as a student) to Y ("look at you now!"). I do think it must be weird for anyone who's worked with me in my former life either when I was a student or when I was an engineer just recently to see me wear grown up clothes and use big, smart-sounding words while throwing in some agency-level blah-de-blah too. I have come to realize that the role I'm in right now is full of agency-level "stuff" I had NO IDEA even existed when I was an engineer, just keeping my head down to stay on schedule/budget/solve technical issues for spaceflight hardware. It's definitely eye-opening and I am soooo happy to have been an engineer first because now it helps to make sense of the work I'm doing now. I have some really useful insight in situations where I think I need to speak up on behalf of the process I knew as an engineer. Most folks at the agency level have also been engineers, or scientists, or whatever, too but maybe they've been out of it for so long that they forget or don't want to speak up for some reason. As the new kid, I can say "forgive me for asking a stupid question, or proposing a route that sounds silly, but..." and then I can put it out on the table the most obvious stupid things. Which sometimes helps.
Or maybe I'm rambling.
Anyway my work in Italy is almost done! Tomorrow's a field trip to tour the city and then Saturday is an Exercise Countermeasures workshop which should be interesting at the least. Since that's definitely part of my past, I've already run into people I first met over 10 years ago, as well as the big name scientists I cited in my master's thesis.
Things are good on the home front. I call at least twice a day. Yesterday I poorly miscalculated the time difference and called Paul at 3am! Har-de-har-har. Oops! The only problem Paul has is that Anna has started screaming her head off, terribly, when he drops her off at school. The week before I left she was doing fine adjusting to a new classroom with new teachers but it was going well. One day last week Nanna let her stay home to play, and now I'm gone and the result of the whole shake-up is a 3-year old screaming while attached to her daddy as he tries to leave in the morning. Yesterday I talked to her teacher who says she stops the screaming when Paul leaves, and participates in all the activities through the day. But during downtime and transition between activities, she "whimpers" (no tears) and asks when is Daddy coming to pick her up. I suspect things might be helped if she were at least in the same classroom as her best friend, but since the school didn't set up her class that way (now I think what BASTARDS) I can't even use that to soothe her. Bleh. We've tried to reason with her and get her to "not cry" ahead of time but no joy. Hopefully things will settle with her soon.
Well, off to exercise. Since there's no gym here I've set up a work-out schedule based on our boot camp exercises, in 1-minute intervals. I set the timer on my Ipod so the alarm sounds like I've hit the jackpot :) It's a motivator.
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