Emily Update and General Catchup - Sept 2005

Emily makes sure all the flowers smell ok before planting.

Hope this finds you well and enjoying fall. Some of you have heard parts of this already so I’m sorry for any repetition, but it’s been a long time since I’ve sent an update, so I wanted to make sure everyone was covered.

I’ll start with some details about our upcoming visit to Michigan. We’ll be arriving on Oct. 7 and staying till the 11th. We are thinking about having an “Ann Arbor day” on Friday (10/7), so if anyone in that area would like to meet up for lunch, dinner, or anything in between, let us know. Saturday we’ll have to be watching the Michigan game – I’m seeing that we’re playing Minnesota at 1:00 – though we have not yet decided where. I’m sure my parents wouldn’t mind us taking over their house if anyone wants to come over there to join us… Sean and I will be at my friend Tracy’s wedding Saturday night, so any Emily visits during that time will have to be cleared with my mom. I think Sunday evening is being set aside as extended-family-dinner time, though again, I’m sure my parents wouldn’t mind if others dropped in to see us. As far as I know, any other time, including all day Monday, is still open. Any takers? Feel free to e-mail or call. As usual, we’re going to try our darndest to see as many of our long-lost friends and family as possible. However, if we miss anyone, we will be back for the holidays – Christmas in Massachusetts and New Years in Michigan!

Helping Mommy peel the wallpaper

Now, for what’s been taking up our time… No, it’s not all Emily, though she is keeping us on our toes literally now. She didn’t actually take her first steps till she was about 15 months old, but by the time she was about 16½ months she was ready to walk everywhere unassisted, and has pretty much been running ever since. At almost 19 months-old now, she learns new words daily, repeats EVERYTHING she hears, and comprehends things that just amaze us. Some of her current favorite activities include identifying animals and their sounds and doing those big wooden puzzles. Emily’s class recently moved up to the next room at daycare (all the children move up together in the fall, just like in regular school). She seems to be adjusting fine, and is even falling into the routine of napping when all the other kids sleep after lunch (she rarely slept in her previous room).

Speaking of Emily sleeping, most of my “free” time (read: Emily sleeping time) lately has been spent doing things around the house. We finally finished all our kitchen projects – we now have new cabinets, counters, floors, and recessed lighting, and we painted. We tore the old nasty flooring out of our master bathroom and have painted and put down a new floor. Later this week, we will install a shiny new sink, light fixture, and baseboards to finish putting that room back together. Yesterday I started removing the ugly wallpaper border from our main bathroom. Once that’s done, I’ll repaint and finish up by getting a matching shower curtain, towels, etc. Sean did a ton of work landscaping the area in front of our house and, once our sod is delivered on Saturday, that will finally be done, too. The place is looking really great… just in time to sell. We hope to put our house on the market the end of this month and see what happens. We had a realtor out last month who astounded us with what she thinks we can get for our place ($525,000), so we figure that that would give us enough money to buy a place here in Pasadena which would cut out our hour commute saving us gas money and sanity. We looked at some houses in Pasadena last weekend and were pleasantly surprised to find that we could actually get a decent sized (for out here) house with a bit of a yard for a mere $600,000 - $700,000. That’s a lot of money, but it seems like even more when I think of it in terms of being almost ¾ of a million… Such an overrated place, LA… We’ll let you know when we find our dream place, or at least the place we’ll call home for the next couple years.

Amazing what you find in San Fransisco: A ladybug poses on a stick for Emily's amusement.

Anyway, beyond all the house and Emily stuff, Sean is starting his second semester in AnimationMentor.com. In his words, it “basically amounts to a degree program in advanced character animation, developed by animators from Pixar (Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Bugs Life...) and ILM (Star Wars) to essentially prepare me for a career change in the next two years to become a character animator at a film studio. Not sure where or whatever, but that's the plan. It's really intense, and time consuming, but it's just a total blast to do!” I am also considering taking a class at UCLA this semester to finish my Certificate program in Astronautical Engineering, but I am kinda waiting to see what happens with my work situation. Which takes me to my biggest concern lately – the new NASA administrator has announced big funding cuts to all centers, including JPL. So, since JPL’s money is being cut, they are taking back some of the work they contracted to us so they don’t have to lay off their own people. This greatly affects my department since we rely solely on JPL for our work (not many people have satellites to fly…), but Sean’s department has a lot of web work from other, non-JPL areas, so they are fine. The result is that unless we can grab some work from somewhere else, our four person navigation team is losing one guy 9/30 and probably another by mid October. I’m one of the two that will remain, possibly even “the last one standing” depending on who I talk to, but even that is not completely reassuring since the work that we have left is flying TOPEX, which is limping into its 14th year in orbit. So, basically, if TOPEX dies, so does our nav team. Not the most fun situation, but the good news is that in addition to being able to move back to Pasadena, selling our house should leave us with enough money to cover us if I am out of work for a while.

Whoa, that was sort of a downer, so I’ll end with something infinitely more exciting – I’ve attached some pictures of Emily for your viewing pleasure! There are a couple shots of her “helping” us get the house ready and one from our recent trip up to Berkeley where we found a ladybug in the park. Fun times…