The Think Tank

We are on the ground in Orlando. It is about 75 degrees and pouring down rain. Fortunately, the current conditions and forecast for Cape Canaveral are much better than here, so this crap shouldn’t effect the launch. Keep your fingers crossed!!!

Updated:

We Are staying with our friends Ansel & Tiffany in St. Petersberg, which is about 90 minutes west of Orlando. Neither Joel nor I had met Tiffany, our gracious host, before tonight, so we both owe her a great debt of gratitude for allowing us, a couple of perfect strangers, to crash of her floor.

Joel and I had a conference call for work literally minutes after we landed in Orlando which lasted about an hour, so after that we picked up our car and headed for St. Petersberg, grabbing some dinner along the way. We got to to Tiffany and Ansel’s a little after 10pm and visited for a while, then they took us out on the town to a local bar with so with some realy good beers. We came back, had some more drinks and hit the sack around midnight.

Tomorrow we are planning om going to the Kennedy Space Center for the day before heading out for the shuttle launch at 4:30am. There is a 80% chance that it will launch on time, so we are Very hopeful. If it does not launch tomorrow night, there is a 90% chance that the weather will permit a launch on Sunday night, and then a 80% chance for Monday night. So no matter what day it goes, we stand a great chance iof seeing it.

Ps: the picture above is of a sports memorabilia store we saw in Houston near our gate. As good Blazer fans it’s always good to see Clyde recognized!

I will update more tomorrow.

Joel and I are on the way to Florida for the Space Shuttle launch scheduled for early Sunday morning. It is the last night time shuttle launch scheduled, since they are retiring the shuttle this year.

We are laid over in Houston for a few minutes. I will post updates and pictures regularly, so check back often over the next few days!

Relishing that fact that I found myself with nothing that had to be accomplished yesterday, and mindful of how unprepared I am for the Seattle To Portland bicycle ride that Joel and Tim and I are planning on doing in July, I figured it was the perfect time to take a prolonged ride through the Springwater Corridor.   I’ve heard many people talk about it and several friends and workmates use it regularly, but I had never been on it personally.

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A freak “snow storm” blew through town on December 29th which none of the local weathermen predicted. By the time the snow stopped falling we had about three inches at our house, which is a pretty decent accumulation for us Portlanders. The city pretty much shut down, but fortunately it was short-lived. The streets were clear the next morning, and the last remnants of the snow were completely gone by the day after that.

As for the photos, the street lights around the neighborhood played hell with the lighting and cast a yellow hue over most of the shots. I tried to clean it up as much as my meager skills allowed, which is why it has taken me so long to get around to posting these shots. I hope you enjoy them!

Hi All…  I just discovered a very cool thing: WordPress has a Gallery2 plugin which allows me to easily integrate with our Gallery site.  This gives me the ability to very quickly and easily insert photos into posts and pages (along with some fancy new features like the image frame seen to the left), as well as treating the whole Gallery site as if it were page of this blog.  That means in addition to typing friends.thinktankgallery.com into your address bar, you can now go to thinktankblog.org/gallery or click on the Think Tank Gallery page link at the upper right, and it will take you right there.  It also offers some other very neat things that are most likely meaningless to you, but have me all a twitter at 1:30 in the morning.  😉