Date Nite

The Kitchen's wonderful mussels.

Mel and I have started going out to dinner every Thursday. Boulder has an amazing restaurant scene and being new to town we wanted a good excuse to check out some new places. We have been doing this for about a month now and last night we finally made it to The Kitchen. This place is amazing. Apparently Organic magazine voted it one of the 10 best restaurants in America. We were equally impressed. It was definitely one of the best meals I have had in my life. We started the evening with the mussels and a bottle of Côtes du Rhône Rosé. Mel enjoyed the grilled Hawaiian Ahi and I had some amazing scallops for dinner. We finished off with a chocolate torte that surpassed my mom's and Mel tried the 20 year tawny port. I was the driver and elected not to go for dessert wine, instead a nice espresso finished well with the amazing chocolate. I think y'all should come to Boulder so we can go do fun active stuff by day and eat scrumptious food in the evenings.

The Coon

I woke up at 4am this morning, which is not entirely unusual. Today Mel woke me up with an alarmed sounding "KEITH!!!" I immediately assumed the naked kung-fu position on the bed prepared for all-out burglar self-defense. Meanwhile, it sounds as if Cota has the burglar by the jugular in the living room. There is definitely a fight going on out there. Mel is out of the bedroom and I follow behind turning out all the lights she just turned on. I come into the dining room to find Cota in a standoff with a big ol' raccoon next to his food bowl. Food is spread everywhere and it is obvious that Cota and the coon had just been going at it pretty seriously. I wish I had seen and taken video of Cota attacking the raccoon to try and protect his food. Next, Mel grabbed the dog and I watched dumbly as the devious animal retreated out the hole in the screen door. I'm really happy it was a raccoon and not a skunk. That would have sucked.

First Launch

Delta II rocket lifts off carrying Phoenix Mars explorer

This morning ULA launched their first rocket since I started there on Monday. The Delta II rocket left Cape Canaveral carrying the Phoenix Mars Explorer. The mission is to land near the North Pole of Mars and look for water ice below the soil. The Phoenix is scheduled to land on Mars in May of next year. It will survive there for the Martian summer before it freezes in a solid shell of carbon-dioxide ice during the brutal winter.

The first week of work was pretty slow, but now I am moved in and have stuff set up. The highlight was taking a two day class on the Atlas V rocket. I learned lots of neat stuff like; the Atlas V 551 generates the power of 13 Hoover dams for the 4 minutes following takeoff. Unfortunately, I can't share most of the cool stuff I learn at work, because my blog is public and some N. Korean rocket scientist could be reading.