up in smoke and gasping for air

So CA is on fire again. Everybody shocked? Luckily the fires are not in Santa Clarita but they are down near Glendale and Pasadena. Maurio got an extended weekend due to horrible breathing conditions. Here's some pics of our air quality.





We celebrated Ashley's birthday!(or should I say Ashaley's birthday)











Ha ha those poor dogs.. so loving and patient, they will do anything.

And we worked our booties off on the lawn (which still has holes and needs constant love and work)

Lawn before



Lawn after

Nic does L.A. (like Debbie did Dallas) : Part2

The day after Universal City we decided to hit up a few interesting places. The first was china town.











we found a wishing fountain and everyone landed a coin in a bowl labeled with the object the wished for except Maurio. Ashley got health, Nic got Vacation, and Maurio missed money.




We ate at a very traditional Dim-Sum restaurant. No English letters anywhere in the Establishment and only a little spoken English. It had very good food but neither Nic, Ashley nor I had any idea what we were eating.






The next stop was Koreatown. It had very good looking food but we were all too full after the Dim-Sum bar to eat any. We looked at the shops and were all thoroughly convinced that if you passed out and woke up in Koreatown without ever visiting you would not realize you were in America.






Nics vacation was almost over and we had one more thing to do. Spend more time at the beach! Alas, it was already evening by then.....but we didn't care.





Afterwards we went to Ye Olde English Pub and had some more badass eats. We had a blast with Nic and there are many, many more pictures of the places we visited, some places not mentioned here,but these told the story well enough.

Nic does L.A. (like Debbie did Dallas) : Part1

We had a great time when Nic came down to visit last week. We celebrated his first night with some of our favorite California wine (Tutu)!! Don’t ask me why but we don’t have a picture of all three of us :(



Some of us were a little too young (and lacking in social skills) to drink.....



On the second day we went up to Solvang and Santa Barbara. Our first stop was some BBQ and Beach walkin' down Santa Claus lane.








Next we hit up Solvang, went wine tasting, and toured the shops!






We are officially banning Solvang for a year, by the way, we have seen those Dutch Bastards way too much this year....though we love the Bakery and the wine. We also had some all you can eat sushi. We will never EVER ban Hibiki....not in a million years. Yay spicy Tuna Chips!

On our way home we saw us some dolphins (not pictured here) but we will always have the memories...until we forget.

The next Day we hit up Burbank (with El Torritos for lunch) and some other not so interesting places. We went looking for the Santa Monica Pavilion but found a 3 story Borders instead. We saw a book called "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies". The best in literature, coming soon to a local store near you!

We also went to Venice Beach in Santa Monica where all the freaks and hippies hang out. We had a blast people watching.







After a tiring day of watching people and running around Venice Beach it was finally time to eat some Bugs. We had been waiting for this one for awhile.

First we had the sea worms (pictured below)....




Then came some Frog Legs.....



Then the large women...I mean then the crickets...



And then some scorpions on shrimp toast to wash it all down....



All of it was very good. It made our 'ginies tingle.

On our way to Universal City we found another restaurant from the “Bizarre foods” in L.A. episode. Oki's! We had some Oki Dogs to top off all those bugs we ate (no wonder I peed out my ass that weekend).



Try not to picture Goatse



Aside from it being on Bizarre foods this was some good hangover food.

Then after long hours of my GPS sending us to every ghetto between Hollywood and Universal City we arrived.

Getting ready for something new at Work

Here is a video of the new mars science lab. I will be working on the landing radar for the "sky crane" in the video. The sky crane is the large rocket section that lowers the mars rover to the surface. It starts working about 0:38 seconds into the video. I, along with many other scientists and engineers, will be assembling and testing the radar that determines how far above the surface of Mars the rover is. This will help the crane choose a good location to let the rover down while not crashing into the surface. This is a big move for me because, until I start the Mars rover, all of my career (4 years) has been spent in research and development. I haven't done much with flight programs until now.

Happy Forth of July!

This weekend we repainted our kitchen cabinets.

when we moved in the kitchen was white and the paint was peeling horribly, so Ashley peeled all the white paint off and left the kitchen a discusting salmon color. Heres the pic of the kitchen white

We did not take any pics of the salmon colored kitchen but you can see in the pic where the paint peeled off by the window.



Here is a pic after we painted







Well now that is done... until we demo and put in a better kitchen.

Next will be the lawn.





At least we know somebody is excited about it!

New pics of the pups

Sleeping

Half Asleep

Reading

Playing

Yeah! Ears Up!!

Being a Corgi

JPL on a weekend

So, here we are in May and JPL had its open house this weekend so Ashley could come with me and see what JPL is all about. The lines were long but we did get to see the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and robots that hover in unison at fixed distances from each other for an interferometry project(It is way cooler than I made it sound).
here are some photos.

Here is the clean room where the Mars Lander is being assembled.


In the photo above the pieces behind the yellow and black fence is the body of the MSL Rover. The wheels are located behind the red ropes in the middle left of the picture. In the bottom right is the rocket section that will carry, and land, the rover. That is where the radar will be housed. The RADAR determines the altitude and terrain to let the computer know when it is safe to place the rover on the martian ground. The RADAR stuff is what I do for a living (I have had very little to do with MSL so far though)

The picture below is a close up of the apparatus that will land the rover.The red boxes are thrusters that will help the whole thing hover above the surface of Mars and find a good place to place a very expensive golf cart.









This next picture is a close up of the rover body. As you can see there is not much there. All the rovers guts are currently being tested. Each piece is rigorously tested in many different thermal, radiation, and kinetic (vibration) environments to ensure this little guy works when he gets to mars.





This is a close up of the wheels. Not too impressive because there is nothing near it to relay the size of them.



Here is a mock up of the finished rover set to depart October 2012 or so. You can see from this picture it is pretty large. You will notice that it does not have any solar cells. That's because its science equipment and sheer size necessitated the long lasting efficient power of plutonium.



MSL has a laser on it that burns up rocks and uses a spectrometer to figure out the make up of the surrounding rocks. That's only a few items among its laundry list of scientific equipment.

The hovering robot pictures did not come out very well. The building is pitch black with little lights to represent stars and even with a flash everything looks dark.

So now, what everyone had been waiting for, corgi pictures!!