This is a good one ... SPACE CAMP!

Me at Space Camp, Summer of 1989. Do you see me? I'll give you a hint. I was on team Mercury and our visors were purple. That and i'm the only one wearing makeup and earrings (a bit of a rebel yes, that was the beginning of a very rough year for me). I was a little older than most of the kids at camp. I was on a waiting list for a few years before I was accepted to go (or so i was told). They put all the older girls on one team though so I wasn't the only one. You can probably tell in the picture that the girls sitting near me are a little older than the girls in the other rows. I actually still have that purple visor along with my notebook from space camp and a few other things from that week. The camp counselors were all astronauts themselves. My counselor was David S. He's the cute one in the back row (on the left) and if I remember right he was also a navy test pilot. Wonder if he ever made it up ...

Looking through my space camp notebook now and there is a section about the space station and it's possible configurations. It was still called Space Station Freedom back then. I guess that's before NASA realized they needed help with the money end of things and brought in international partners, hence the change to the International Space Station. Oh the foreshadowing. I knew at that point that I wanted to be an aerospace engineer but I was pretty focused on working shuttle and not station. It wasn't until I interviewed for postions on each program near the end of college that I decided to go the space station route. I interviewed for three positions: hydraulics engineer on shuttle, propulsion engineer on shuttle and structures & mechanisms engineer on the space station. I got offers for the shuttle propulsion and (obviously) the space station positions. The irony (if you want to call it that) of it all is that if I had chosen the shuttle position then I may still be working at NASA right now as it was the space station position that led me to the transfer to Houston. Oh well ... i'll never know. But had we lived in Florida when Brett's mom got sick it would have been much, much easier for me to keep my job. I still believe i'll be back someday though. Don't know how or where but it will happen. I'm holding out for a private aerospace firm to see all the land still left around this area and come put a big facility right here in the promise land. (I keep hearing that Lake City is considered "the promise land" but I still haven't figure out why) I hear there are some aerospace things going on near the airport in Gainesville. Maybe when the kids start school i'll look into working there. Then the kids can go to a private school in Gainesville. Okay ... now i'm getting REALLY off track!