It Was Your Basic Adventure. Part I: But I Digress

It was your basic adventure, with your basic drama, your basic excitement, your basic brush with death. It started early on Saturday morning; I set the alarm for 6 A.M., knowing there was no way I would sleep anyway. Friday night we met in my lab in the physics building. It’s not actually my lab, it is the glass shop. I only have a key because I got stuck in the office inside the shop. I have a window, but it goes to the hall. I had an office mate, but he left, moved upstairs to the graduate student corral saying it was quieter up there. It wasn’t me being loud, it is the machines that surround the office on all sides—I must admit that it can be quite jarring to be working or trying to meet with a student and suddenly hear the thumping of some unknown machine. Sometimes I try to guess what is it, but my imagination always goes to a large green and orange striped monster (something along the lines of “Where the Wild Things Are”). Sometimes he is stamping his feet because he is hungry, other times he is crunching away at nuts and bolts or dropping sheet metal on the floor to get the attention of the mommy monster. If I get really curious, I will crack the door and peek around the corner to see what it really is; it is never the monster. But I digress.

So we met in my lab, finished up putting things together. My dad made a little Styrofoam package for the Spot tracker and wrapped the whole thing in pink duct tape (what?!--it was the only color I had). It looked a lot like an Easter Island head, as pointed out to me by Ian so I drew eyes and a mouth on it to complete the look. While he worked, my brother and Wei were busy figuring out a way to put dollar bills into small party balloons. After hunting around the lab for small pipes to ram them through, they finally had the clever* idea of simply turning the balloons inside out, rolling up the money and turning the balloon back over the roll. My mom was stamping the balloons with the rubber stamp, indicating that they had been in space. Ian and Wei then began calculating how much lift we should give the balloon and then devising a method to figure out when the balloon was “full.” Dan, Chris and Jim then showed up, helping to put the package together with the three cameras and the new GPS tracker that finally came in the mail to Dan’s house just two days before. We took the package outside to test it inside a cooler of dry ice. After unplugging the GPS and plugging it back in, it finally began to chirp, calming my stomach slightly. Although I didn’t choose the name, RALPH turns out to be very appropriate as there were many times that I felt like ralphing during this weekend—this being only the first.

We cleaned up the lab and parted ways until the morning, agreeing to meet at 8 A.M. in Primm. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so tried to calm myself by getting in the hot tub. Also, it was a great use of the rest of the dry ice. There were around 10 lbs of it and lowered the temperature in the hot tub 2 degrees. Yes, if you are wondering, it was awesome. Looked like a giant witch’s cauldron. And the calculation works out!

But I digress.

So I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep, especially since there were still some tasks that needed to be done in the morning, things that had to be loaded into the car, things that could not be forgotten. Tasks that need to be done early in the morning tend to rampage through my head like an angry orange and green striped monster, so I took a pad of paper with me to bed. Not the strangest thing to take to bed, all things considered, but I must have seemed like some sort of crazed, prolific zombie, briefly but violently coming back to life to scrawl a message on a piece of paper as I went through the next day in my mind, over and over and over again. And in the dark too. I would like to note that my in-the-dark-handwriting is actually quite good, considering.

The next morning, I didn’t even look at the list. There was no need as there was no way I was going to forget anything. The sleeping with paper trick is just something I do to try to outsmart myself into getting some actual sleep. No dice.

I don’t like coffee, so I made myself some strong tea, a whole pot of it. I call the tea “zinger” because it has all of the caffeine of coffee without the nasty coffee taste. I poured it directly into my water bottle and tried to leave. My mom was awake as well and did the “mom thing,” which is to make sure that I eat something before I leave. My mom, like her mom before her, is a genuine food ninja. If you visit and there are leftovers she has them packed in Tupperware, wrapped in a plastic bag and in your hand before you can say “no need to trouble, the meatloaf wasn’t that great.” It’s going home with you. You must accept that fact and move on. This particular morning, my mom “toasted” me on the way out the door, handing me a piece of toast spread with warm peanut butter. Big mom points were earned. Oh, and before you start thinking I am one of those poor nerdy scientists who lives with her parents, my mom was there visiting me. In my condo. So there.

My brother and I left early to pick up Wei and possibly Bo, two Chinese graduate students in the department that wanted to come along and help. They were out waiting on the corner for us. I had my brother tune the radio to the repeater we were going to use that day and we headed south to the launch site. Well, at this point, I was hoping for “launch site” and not “arrest site” or “total failure and humiliation site.”

*Let me remind you that there is a fine line between stupid and clever.