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when i landed at the denver airport and went to rent my reserved compact car, they said 'compact?! no no no. you can choose between this large array of SUVs'. i was pretty pissed at first, but i soon understood their reasoning. i went skiing yesterday and i heard people saying things like 'the snow isnt great because it hasnt snowed in a long time - i guess 2 days is a long time for this area!'. and then it started snowing. there are only 2 roads that go to the ski places. one of them is some mountain pass that closes every time it snows, which is apparently almost every day. so it was closed. the other is through a long tunnel. it is in fact, so long that it qualifies for some regulation where hazmat trucks have to go through one at a time with no other cars in the tunnel. what this means is that all traffic going through the tunnel has to stop when a hazmat truck is going through. and as far as i can tell, almost every truck is considered 'hazardous'. so we are sitting in the car completely stopped for about 2 hours waiting to go into the tunnel, while the snow builds up all around us. we finally ge through the tunnel only to be greeted by the road being trimmed down to one lane due to the large array of accidents causing further delays. the visibility was about 1 foot. i had visions of my old car. i was glad that i was not in the compact.

Yesterday I tried to change the oil in my car. Caitlin has access to the NASA garage and said she knew what she was doing so we went there. the first time we tried my car looked too confusing so we had to abort and look it up on the internet. so we went back to try again. this time it was also confusing, despite the internet. there was one pan that looked like an oil pan, but was not near the filter, and some other random bolt that did not really look like a pan, but was near the filter. Caitlin unscrewed the one that looked like a pan and it soon became apparent that it was my transmission fluid that was draining out of the car. not being prepared for this course of events, we didnt put the plug back in but let it drain all the way out. we then undid the other bolt, which was in fact the oil, and changed the oil. i left my car there and caitlin took me over to autozone to buy some transmission fluid. then came the question of where to put the fluid in. the manual did not show a fill for it, so it was back to the internet. all the internet had were a bunch of posts along the lines of 'where do i fill transmission fluid in my mazda3?' with no responses. the only thing we could think of was to fill it through the dipstick hole. the manual said 8 quarts so i out in 5 and then measured it just to be safe. only to find that it was already way over full. so i tried to drain out some and as expected, could not contain it and it all came out again. so we had to go back to autozone and buy more transmission fluid while the woman gave me the 'first batch not enough for you?' look. so i dumped some more in and thought it was OK and then the check engine light came on. some guy in the garage said to add more transmission fluid. i was a little bit suspiscious of this since i would think the transmission fluid level would be indicated by the transmission light, not the engine light, but he turned out to be correct. the point is that it was the longest and most expensive oil change of my life.

In an effort to save money, NASA appears to turns off the heating system when the center is not open, such as today (MLK Day). Since I dont work directly for NASA and am instead a contractor, I dont have off today and had to come into work. my normally freezing cube is even colder than usual. Not even my new space heater could make up the difference. I am wearing gloves as I type this.

due to 1950s building construction, my cube is freaking freezing. everyone else has space heaters but when I have asked for one in the three months I have been here they are always 'out of them'. Today I was in a meeting complaining about how cold my cube was and some woman said 'oh, do you want a heater? we have plenty!' So I followed her back to some room and she gave me one of the many available heaters.

Every Friday and Monday NASA has these colloquia on various sciency things. I always go because they are pretty interesting, but I always here these discussions along the lines of 'what are you doing going to THIS thing?' 'oh, i just want to take nap'. and sure enough, within 10 minutes of the guy starting, everyone in the room but me is asleep. The most recent time one guy started snoring so loudly that the speaker had to stop talking and someone had to walk across the room and wake him up. And that presenter had flown all the way out from California.

i was driving around in the costco parking lot and it was really windy and there is no mechanism to keep carts in the cart coral. so i had to stop at an intersection, not because of some dude, but because there was a squadron of shopping carts speeding by. i was just waiting for them to pass, but then they all paused momentarily at the stop sign and then turned around the corner and homed in on my car. being adept at these sort of maneuvers, i moved out of the way and continued on my way only to be confronted about 20 feet later by a second wave of carts moving significantly faster. i swerved out of the way of these just in time to see them all run into the side of some million dollar bmw. satisfying!

so i went to the warehouse to pick up my mattress. when i asked the guy about a ups delivery for me he said 'oh no, we didnt get anything like that. there is no way that could possibly be here' and then some intern looking dude pointed to the box that the guy was standing right next to and said 'i am pretty sure that this is it right here' to which the first guy reponded 'oh yeah, we got that box, it is right here' and pointed to the box. so i dragged it outside and attempted to cram it into my car. it would not at all fit and was also 130 lbs. soon a steady parade of loading dock employees started to show up with suggestions as to how i might cram it into my car. and then a bunch of questions started to arise such as 'which lab are you taking this to, i can just bring it over on my forklift for you' to which i had to respond 'oh, i am taking it off-site for something'. and then there were a series of questions along the lines of 'man, this thing is heavy, what exactly is in here?' to which i said 'oh, that is just some high density foam.'if i got any further questions i could say that it was space foam that nasa developed (according to the tempurpedic commercial anyway). eventually, when nobody was looking, i just opened the box and form-fit it into my back seat. i was not entirely sure what to do with the box so i folded it up and threw it in the dumpster, but then it unfolded and expanded enough to open the lid to the dumpster which i am pretty sure went against a number of signs stuck to the side so i ran away.

i ordered a memory foam mattress from costco and had it delivered to my office. the ups tracking info says that it has already been delivered but i havent received it so i asked some dude in my office about it. he said 'oh, you are not supposed to get personal packages shipped here. especially if it is big and bulky. it probably got flagged and intercepted and is being scanned and x-rayed.' if anyone asks me about it i will say that it is a large block of space foam that i need to test for various properties. the problem is that it is vacu-packed into some small box so if they open it up it will expand to mattress size and nobody will ever be able to get it back into the box again and i wont be able to fit it in my car and will have to sleep in the conference room.

the cube i am in had been vacant for some time before i started so it was the 'storage cube.' as a result all available surfaces were covered with random junk when i got here, which i have been slowly removing over the course of many weeks. one of the more curious items was a plastic scientific looking container with a silicone wafer suspended in it and some wires sticking out of it. it was covered in some oil like substance and was leaking all over my shelf. my theory is that the oil like substance did not originate from there, but instead from one of two opaque plastic tubs, each full of a slightly different looking oily substance. i was pretty content to just let it sit there but today someone else noticed chemical smells wafting from my cube and saw it and freaked out. so i had to call some sort of haz-mat team to come deal with it - which turned out to just be some guy with a bucket. fortunately, most of the junk on the shelf had been 'contaminated' which meant that the guy took it all and effectively cleaned my shelf off for me.

I am down the hall from the hubble group at work. on one side of the hall they have all these articles framed from journals and magazines about the hubble. on the other side of the hall they have framed an assortment of articles from tabloids such as "Hubble photos proves existence of Heaven", "Hubble telescope finds ghosts in space" and, my personal favorite, "NASA Scientists find image of Jesus' face in distant galaxy"