Serious updates abound!
Anna is now 18 years old. I'm writing this entry because I suggested she go and read through it when the three of us were all together in Houston the week of Oct 27 where we all met up to sell our Houston house after owning it for 24.5 years. It turns out that, yes indeed, the move was "one day inevitable."
How did we get here? Well...
After my 2015 detail with NASA HQ, I returned to my old job in the ISS Program Science Office (in OZ) down at JSC. We were fine, I suppose, but I was a bit restless after having that HQ experience. My job was no longer really challenging, and then in 2018 I received a call from HQ Chief Scientist's Office asking me to consider coming back. This time my intent would be turning the one-year detail into a permanent position. I wanted the three of us to go up together for the year, put Anna into 6th grade there, and give it a test run.
In a nutshell, I convinced my management to let me go, and we packed up back to the same apartment complex in Pentagon City I did my detail in 2015. After a year I was offered a permanent position and Paul decided to close his clinic (it was the right time, he was ready), and we put our Houston house up for rent, with Anna enrolled at Gunston Middle School, then purchased our new (to us but 85 years old) Arlington, VA home in Dec 2019.
Turns out we survived the longest government shutdown in history under the first Trump term (at the time, anyway) and then we moved into our new house on 7th St S just in time for the world to go through one big historical event nobody asked for: COVID-19. The big lockdown. Just a day or two after our return from a Dubai event we three were invited to (and had a blast)! It felt like the airport shutdowns were chasing us across the globe...
Anyway all the fun and shenanigans between COVID and the present day, in which Trump has returned for a second term because Americans are afraid of Pronouns and are addicted to Reality TV- this time to destroy our democracy because he's a sad, bullied toddler- are documented on my Facebook page (and oh boy all over the media).
The world has significantly changed since my last post. Well, I mean that was almost 10 years ago. I've changed too. I just turned 50! We've collected 2 dogs (Oreo in Nov 2015 and Hershey in May 2020, COVID dog) and KC is still around. Been fighting hormones and an additional layer of belly fat, more gray hair, and oh yes I left the civil service to join private industry: Blue Origin in April 2022. Turns out when Jeff Bezo's space company calls to ask if you'd be interested in being the chief scientist of the space station they're building (to replace the ISS which is retiring in 2030), I guess you have to think hard about that. With the right package deal and lots of tears, I said goodbye to my dream job, my brand, my identity and job security and thought "welp I give this three years and this will either be the best thing to happen to my career, or I'll be out on the street! This could go either way!"
It's now 2025 and I'm still employed at Blue for now. I've survived a few rounds of layoffs and am still chugging away on the space station called Orbital Reef, though it's unclear what the future holds. As it turns out, job security is an illusion. I am finally understanding what it means to risk losing your livelihood at any moment the company decides to do it, and the level of anxiety that forms the foundation of Americans' bad sleeping habits. With Elon Musk and his grifting cronies being put in charge of "Government Efficiency" after Trump won the 2024 election (Backstory: he lost in 2021 to Biden so we had about 4 years to shore up our democracy and prepare for the worst if Trump's criminal trials failed and the American voters were so sick of high post-pandemic prices they figured "who cares" if he's a dictator? Democracy is a privilege, and we don't need it!!"- it turns out that government jobs weren't secure after all. Many of my friends and colleagues across the agencies were flat out fired without cause (how can this happen? Because Congress Republicans lack gonads and the Supreme Court this summer basically turned the role of President into King) so I guess job security isn't really a thing. Even my NASA colleague who took my role when I left for Blue was flat out fired and the Office of the Chief Scientist was shuttered. And she bled NASA as much as I did and this was an extreme example of SUCK.
Anyway, here we are. Most of my family is MAGA (ughhhh why? Because they're afraid of gender neutral bathrooms)? It's disheartening and has destroyed in 10 months everything Paul, Anna, and I have worked so hard to build over these years. All the things that we 3 embody are being destroyed: women's rights, science, immigrant families, civil service, healthcare/wellness, veterans, small businesses, free speech, and higher education. We embody all of it. It's under complete destruction daily and it will be hard for this country to come back from it.
Still our kiddo headed out to Colorado State University this fall (we're so proud of her) to major in food science (yeah girl, we LOVE FOOD!!) and hopefully do something with her career that benefits humanity. She didn't go alone, but with her immigrant boyfriend, Ernesto, who we also love, and who is majoring in Mechanical Engineering.
Stop there and realize the weirdness about our kiddo going to CSU. This wasn't forced by us (hey it's cheaper and closer to go to a great Virginia university!) but she fell in love with the campus during one of our visits a few years ago and that was the beginning. We're super excited to be bouncing back and forth to/from Fort Collins! I mean, especially given this post and this post. Spoiler alert: we're totally paying for her college like I said we wouldn't do. Oh well, blame the hormones.
She just came home (to Arlington, VA) for her first Thanksgiving visit and now she's on her way back to FOCO. I'd post pictures but this blog is so old I'm not yet sure how to connect my iphone photos. In the meantime, we are still hanging in on Facebook.
Oh and check out Anna's instragram page anna._.bakes07 She's had her own little baking business all through high school and it's been amazing!
