Happy Anniversary...

... to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins!!

I think that someday I might like to go back to Huntsville to do the Advanced Adult Space Academy thing. I did the weekend/basic one a few years ago with my friend M (it was Toni's birthday present to me that year). In Advanced, participants get to do the scuba underwater microgravity simulation. :-)

The most fun part of the basic Adult Space Academy weekend, IMHO, was the Five Degrees of Freedom chair. You get a good feel for how hard it is to do simple tasks in zero-g. Your feet are about five feet off the ground, and the chair allows freedom of movement in five of the six directions, including rotationally. Try tightening a nut with a wrench while suspended like that! Sir Isaac was on the right track. ;-) I also learned that hearing the astronauts breathing isn't so much their spacesuit ventilation system as the work they're doing. :-)

Yep.

Go climb a roof.

I keep telling soaring_phoenix that one of these days, I'm going to put some eyebolts in the second floor eaves along the side of our house where the dryer vent emerges.

( low-res GIF of side of house - being illustrative, not artistic )

Several years ago, we came home in the middle of the day after running errands, on a day when Toni was also doing laundry, and I went upstairs to restart the dryer for her. I heard a light tapping and scraping behind the dryer, as if the noise was coming from the vent hose. I pulled the dryer away from the wall and a small songbird (don't remember what species) hopped out. Enlisting Toni's aid, we closed the laundry room door and spent the next while trying to catch the bird under a blanket. The poor thing was panic-stricken and went crazy in the confines of our small laundry room. Once we finally caught it, I released it out the front door (where it promptly headed for the dryer vent of the house in front of ours, across the common drive).

Concerned that birds were going to be a recurring problem, I asked my father to cut some chicken wire and bend it into a screen, which he stuck in the dryer vent opening outside. To date, it has successfully kept any more birds from trying to nest in the vent hose. However, the screen also acts as its own lint filter. Periodically (usually noticeable when the dryer begins to behave less efficiently), I need to go up on the garage roof and clean the lint from the screen.

I don't mind heights. I've been to rock-climbing gyms and even rappelling in the Hoosier National Forest. What bothers me is lack of stability (or at least feeling like I'm not stable), and the 45-degree angle of the garage roof is not exactly confidence-instilling. We usually put a ladder against the gutter along the side of the garage, Toni holds the ladder, I climb to that roof, and then I scoot up the roof to the second floor wall where I can reach the dryer vent to clean it. We have a ladder tall enough to reach, but it won't help avoid that roof section, given where the dryer vent is. I would love to put in some eyebolts and run a line up so that I can hook in with a climbing/rappelling harness. :-)

Going up the roof section isn't even the worst part - it's the shimmying back down to the top of the ladder.

Who am I?

(Nabbed from geekchick.)

If you had to pick somewhere between three and five things that you think are essential to understanding who you are, what would they be?

For me:

1. I try not to play too many indirect communication games here on LJ. Granted, I'm not much for confrontation, either, especially regarding negative stuff, but I will do it if it's important to me. Related to this, I think, I don't define friends (either IRL or the LJ meaning) based on my partner(s). If I think you're worth associating with, I make that decision on my own, not based on your association (or lack thereof) with a partner of mine.
   
2. I am an unrepentant flirt. Sometimes with intent, sometimes without. I also currently am crushed on a few people, and, if I haven't let you know, I probably just haven't gotten my toe out of the dirt yet. Feel free to ask. I tend to fall for brains and geekiness. Appearance comes later. At the same time, I have an eye for beauty that I am concerned gets the better of me sometimes (for example, I get concerned I'm going to get whiplash in public spaces in the summertime).
   
3. I'm extremely contradictory (maybe a better word is inconsistent), and I worry about this making me hypocritical.
   
4. I'm probably as straight as one can be on the Kinsey scale. I'm also confident enough in my own gender and orientation that I see no value to machismo-esqe behavior, and am pretty atypical for a straight male in many ways. So I've been told, anyway.
   
5. My personality runs at a pretty even keel, mood-wise. I can get excited in both positive and negative ways, but most of the time I'm right in the middle, favoring the happy side. The Eric Idle song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life should be one of my mantras. I also have a fairly thick skin, most of the time, and am offended by very little (I have few sacred cows). Again, though, I can be hurt, and even I don't always know when I'm going to react poorly to something.
   

Now, wait a minute!

Who's In Your LJ Orgy Movie?
LJ Username
Sexual Pref	StraightGayBi-Yes Please
Ringmaster	cjsmith
Dominating One	cathouse_blues
Submissive One	medusas_secret
Loudest	gasslight
Sitting In The Corner By Themselves	indyansel
Video Sales	$2,700,582,904.26
This QuickKwiz by mrbungle1975 - Taken 20 Times.

Sitting in the corner by myself? NOT.