A couple of weeks ago, ERAU held the second Activity Fair this year in the Activity Center, where people can join many different variety of groups (such as fraternities, Break Dancing Club, Hawaiian Club, etc.).  At that time, I joined the Swing Dancing Club, College Republicans, and the Sweatervest Club.  Yes, the Sweatervest Club, although I am ashamed to admit that I, in fact, do NOT own a sweatervest!!  I’m hoping to find one on sale somewhere soon… haha!  What made me interested in this odd club in the first place took place last semester, as I was walking through campus to go to class.  I noticed a bunch of people in sweatervests gathering around a bench.  One of my friends who is also the president of the club, Mitch Mannering, called out a totally random compliment to me as I passed, which totally made me more confident.  Another one of the members shouted another one to me.  I thanked him, kind of confused, and then I saw the sign one was holding that said, “Free Compliments, Courtesy of the Sweatervest Club”.  Underneath that, “In an Effort to Improve Student Life on Campus”.  I laughed at the cleverness, and so when the activity fair came around this semester, no one had to ask me to join twice!  Just on Tuesday, I was having a hard day because I didn’t feel very good about a test I had just taken.  In an effort to waste time until my next class, I went to check my mail, but ran into the Sweatervest Club having Free Compliments day!  I joined them, giving compliments to students walking by, and I definitely felt much better.

If Michael Jackson went to Riddle, he would have been giving free compliments with the rest of the club. 🙂

As for the Comedian portion of this blog (well, Comedian/Magician anyway), I just got back from the Andy Gross show that was held in the DLC (the Davis Learning Center) Auditorium.  He was really witty and hilarious the whole time.  He did everything from the “pick a card, any card” trick to the “pull-a-dove-out-of-a-hankerchief” trick.  Well, he subsequently threw the dove against the nearest wall because it “bit” him, making everyone squeal in disbelief, until we all saw that it was a fake dove!  Thank GOODNESS!  Overall, I could not stop laughing!  Embry Riddle has VERY entertaining comedians that come every month or so.  I thought that it was a good choice to bring Andy Gross.

Avada Kadevra!  Er, I mean, abra kadabra!  Here he is!  (All Harry Potter fans understand that it is actually quite difficult to remember the classic “magic words”, when the famous spell from the books is so similar!  Oops.)

Well, that pretty much sums up the highlights of this week!

“Never take life seriously.  Nobody gets out alive anyway!”

I know many people have a favorite animal, and many share penguins as that favorite animal, but I LOVE penguins. Some may say I am even obsessed due to my huge collection of Penguins. I thought it would be fun to do a blog on my collection and share all my penguins with you guys. I took a lot of pictures, but I forgot a few of my other penguins! 🙁

Let me first introduce my collection of stuffed animal penguins! I bought three at a garage sale (of course I washed them) and I was given the big one for my birthday and one of them is actually a penguins bank 🙂

There is my penguin shower curtain and the black and white towels! (there were no penguin towels anywhere! I have searched a lot, trust me)

Penguin seat cover, I just got it for Christmas from my boyfriend's little sister! 🙂 It is super comfy!

My penguin ear rings! I am actually missing my jeweled penguin ear rings, they are really pretty and a lot fancier. You may be able to see the panda and monkey ear rings...I only got those because there was a deal for "buy two, get one free" and the last penguins available were the ones a part of the monkey and panda ear rings.

My penguin night light<3 When it charges, the belly turns orange.

There is my penguin snow globe I just got for Christmas from my "mother-in-law" and my racing penguin I got for Christmas from a senior I take care of.

This is my favorite penguin, Antoine! 🙂

 

Those are all the pictures I took, but I am still missing my penguins puzzle, shoes, book cover, Christmas ornament, and mini snow globe. 🙂

Part II:

This is a continuation. Part I described what a Rocket Scientist was like as a child and ended with a description how excited I was to go to Space Camp…

Years later my desire to work for NASA continued and I pursued and was offered a high school internship position at the Johnson Space Center during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. The high school internship was a lot like a scavenger hunt where we had to complete simple engineering projects, as well as set up our own tours and interviews with NASA employees. I met a few astronauts, as well as Embry-Riddle Prescott Alumni and Flight Director Norman Knight, and saw things that very few other people ever get a chance to see, like Mission Control, NASA robotics and moon rock laboratories.

This was my vantage point of Space Shuttle Mission Control when I sat behind the Flight Director desk. From this spot I was able to observe a training session for the mission that summer.

This is a picture of me in Space Shuttle Mission Control with the flight director desk behind me. This was taken during my high school internship

I had the opportunity to meet and take this picture of Space Shuttle Flight Director, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Prescott Graduate, Norman Knight during my high school internship. In the first picture I am standing next to his desk in Mission Control.

This is a picture of me and other high school interns next inside the NBL at JSC.

A second picture of the NBL from my internship.

A third picture of the NBL from my internship

This is a picture of me in the Quest Lab on the 3rd floor of the building that houses Mission Control, where I spent most of my time during my high school internship.

It was during my junior year of high school that I found Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and made it my first choice. I had to see the school that had a better Aerospace Engineering program than MIT and Caltech. I visited both Embry-Riddle campuses before I eventually decided on the Prescott campus.

To me, walking onto the Prescott campus felt like walking into my new home. I found that the people around campus and the people in town were exceptionally friendly. It didn’t take me more than a few seconds to fall in love with the landscape surrounding the campus either. In every direction I looked I could see mountains, and directly across the street from campus the Granite Dells stood majestically enticing me to hike and climb through them. The variety of the landscape was nothing like where I lived in Texas. In a thirty minute drive I was able to see a pine forest, high desert, awe-inspiring rock formations, mountains, and a lake. It was so breathtakingly beautiful.

This is a picture that I took from my dorm in 2008. You can see Hall 5 and the Dining hall on the right and the other dorms just below the horizon.

I was also excited to see all of the new facilities at the Prescott campus. In just the past few years the campus received the new King Engineering building, Academic Complex I, and the Aircraft Experimental Fabrication building. In addition, the new library and cafeteria were under construction when I visited. I walked through laboratories that nearly made my eyes pop out of my head. I saw incredible senior design projects that inspired admiration and respect. I spoke to professors that were so excited about the classes they taught and the success of their students that they were almost bubbly.

Later when Embry-Riddle came to a recruiting event in my hometown, my Admissions counselor not only remembered my name from my brief visit to campus, she remembered details that I had told her of my trip and other things we had spoken about. It was a great feeling to know that I was a person, rather than the number I was to the other universities that I had applied to.

Going to Embry-Riddle also played a key role in helping me to receive a paid position as a co-op at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. I received a call from the center offering me the position after I had given them a resume at the Embry-Riddle Industry and Career Expo months earlier. An interesting thing to note is that the other applicants were each interviewed over the phone before they were selected, while I was selected simply based off of my resume. Now I am a NASA employee on leave without pay until I return for my next co-op rotation and eventually to start my career after graduation.

These are the Spring 2009 DFRC Co-ops. I'm sitting on the sign on the right end. The girl four people to my right, Brittany Wells, is also an ERAU Prescott student. She will graduate and return to the center to start career this May.

This is another cool picture of me being goofy in the cockpit of the NASA 747 that carries the Space Shuttle back to the Kennedy Space Center after it lands in Edwards, CA.

Although I’m now 21, my 6-year-old self is still very close to my heart. I think that if I was able to meet her today (in a situation akin to what happened in the Disney film The Kid) she would be very excited and proud of what we have achieved. In addition to inspiring Mattel to create a Rocket Scientist Barbie and working on a project that one day becomes a NOVA documentary, one of my life’s goals is to always remain true to my six-year-old self; true to the six-year-old that decided she wanted to be a rocket scientist.

I'm finishing this two part blog, the way I started it, by remembering the aspirations that started on this trip to Space Center Houston when I was six years old.

Part I: The Beginning

“To thine own self be true.” – William Shakespeare

When people ask me how old I was when I figured out what I wanted to be, they usually aren’t prepared for my answer. I was six years old.

It all started when my family, residents of a suburb north of Houston, took a trip to the Johnson Space Center. My mom was into letting my sister and me dress ourselves even at the ages of 5 and 6. If I recall correctly, I was wearing a blue dress with white lacy socks and patent leather black shoes, while my sister was wearing a baby pink poodle skirt outfit that my cousin had sent her and white Keds.

This is a picture of me at Space Center Houston when I was six years old. It was taken on the historic day when I discovered my calling in life.

It was on that historic visit that I found what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life. As we left through the turnstiles that kept track of the number of visitors to the center, I proudly proclaimed to my parents, and anyone else who was exiting at closing time, “I am going to work for NASA one day.”

My parents thought it was an adorable childhood phase that I would one day grow out of. I never did. Well, there were a couple of times that I thought I might want to be something else. When Men in Black came out, the first PG-13 movie I saw in the theaters (a big deal to nine-year-old me), I wanted to be a Woman in Black. There was another period of about a month in the second grade when I was convinced that I’d be a paleontologist, and about 6 months in 8^th grade when I was exploring the idea of being an architect. Despite all of this, I continued to feel as though I was supposed to work for NASA.

When I was in the 4^th grade, I was the commander of our playground’s hemispherical jungle gym which was my spaceship and a couple of my friends and I would go on planetary exploration missions out of our ship to evaluate the alien life around us. I also turned my room into a spaceship in fourth grade. I got a large sheet of black plastic that I placed over my window and poked holes in it so that the constellations would shine into my room during the day when my lights were out. Then I replaced the lights in my ceiling fan with 25 watt blue lights.

I think the whole thing kind of weirded my mom out a bit, but she decided it was harmless and allowed me to continue entertaining myself with my own intergalactic missions that I conducted in my room. I was always really good at entertaining myself, and pride myself on continuing to have a strong, healthy imagination.

I was always a really nerdy kid. Starting in first grade at my elementary school, each class had a day and time once a week to visit the school library and check out books. It didn’t take me very long to find the science section. Each week I would bring home books about animals, dinosaurs, planets, etc. My mom grew very concerned. She called a conference with my first grade teacher about it.

“Kerianne keeps bringing home these books that are way over her reading level, and I’m afraid that she doesn’t know where the books that she can read are,” she told my first grade teacher.

At the next library session my teacher made me check out a Clifford book, and wouldn’t let me get the book on arctic seals that I wanted. I was so mad. When I got home, I jumped off the bus, stormed into my house, sat next to my mother, opened the book, and read the entire thing in a very deliberately agitated manner before closing the book and looking up at my mother in six-year-old rage.

“I have all the picture books that I need in my room, and I want to read science books. Why won’t you let me read science books?” I demanded of my mother.

“You can’t read all of the words in the science books,” my mother said in a cautiously apologetic tone.

“Maybe I can’t read all of the words, but I can read most of them, and I can figure out the rest, plus I can learn a lot from the pictures,” I said.

My mom and my teacher never made me check out another Clifford, Bernstein Bears, or other popular children’s books ever again.

In second grade they had this really cool interactive CD kit about the solar system at the book fair, and I begged my mother for it.

“There’s only one left!” I urged her.

I was exceptionally disappointed when it was gone the next day. My hopes and dreams were dashed and my need for knowledge of the solar system would never be satisfied. My mom told me years later that seeing my disappointment just about broke her heart, and she thought about giving me the CD then, but was glad when she could see my reaction on Christmas morning. That was a really cool CD. I found it when I was cleaning out a bunch of boxes over winter break and although it had never seen an operating system newer than Windows 95, I couldn’t bring myself to toss it.

All through elementary school I really wanted to go to Space Camp. When I was 11 I put together a MS PowerPoint presentation on the reasons why I thought my parents should send me to Space Camp. I felt I was pretty justified in my requests and somewhere between the adorableness of their 11-year-old with her PowerPoint and the desperate desire I expressed, my parents agreed to send me to Space Camp. I was so excited that I was counting down the days every day for 2 months.

Then after Space Camp, I practically lived in my flight suit for the rest of the summer. I still have it in my closet at home.

This is a picture of me, my sister and my cousin the summer after I went to space camp. I am the one in the flight suit from space camp and awesome sunglasses :). My sister is the one in the cheer leading outfit, and the normal looking one in the middle is my cousin. She's now a professional dancer on the New Jersey Nets dance team. I have never really been normal, but I'm as normal as my mother could get me to be. If it wasn't for her, I'd have no social skills or fashion sense (I might even still wear those horrible sun glasses), and my only hobby would be homework. 🙂

Stay tuned for Part II where I will tell you about how I found Embry-Riddle and started working for NASA…

So, after the big snowstorm that hit Prescott, things have pretty much gotten into a groove around here.  School every day, church, hanging out with friends, and volleyball are all a basic part of my life.  So far, so good!  Classes are going really well, and I’m excited to start volleyball again.  First, though, I just have to say that I have gotten two hundred percent better at skating than I was before last week!

This is where I was about ninety eight percent of the time.  Hey, it was my first time okay?  Here Teri is being a sweetheart and helping me up… for the twelfth time. 

Here are a lot of the girls who came.  Not that I actually spent a lot of time with them… I was mostly clinging to the wall for dear life!

Our suitemates!  (These are the girls who not only made me feel better when I fell, they were kind enough to hold my hand sometimes!)

Just so you know, I actually made it to the middle of the rink without falling more than three times.  So there, skates.  Domination!

School is really fun too.  My classes are getting more and more interesting as the semester moves along, especially Psychology.  It is so fascinating to me how our brain works and how we perceive certain things.  I thought that I was unique, but apparently a lot of humans have the same reactions and thought processes.  Go figure… my whole life was a lie!  Haha just kidding.  But it really is interesting.

On top of school and ice skating, volleyball spring season started today.  All my teammates and I are going to be in really good shape for next season!  Bring it!  🙂

So that’s my life in a nutshell as of this moment.  But who knows… there is always a change around the corner!

“All life is an experiment.  The more experiments you make the better.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

After more than a month, I am finally getting back into the grove of the semester and have found some time for a nice blogging sesh  🙂  Thinking back, the winter break seems like it was forever ago!  I was reminiscing about hanging out with friends and wearing summer clothes during the winter back home in SoCal when I decided to share it with you guys instead of hording it all!   The last time I shared the story of a great Thanksgiving and my Amish beard.  This time, it seems fitting to share about Christmas, my shenanigans over break, and the best day of the year: New Year’s Eve. 

This year, for the first time, I did not want anything for Christmas.  My parents kept bugging me and asking me over and over what I wanted, but I just did not have anything that I really needed.  Of course, WANTING something is a different story, but my parents (like most parents of teenagers) just would not lighten up to the idea of buying me a Corvette.  🙁  Sad, I know, but life goes on.  Due to my desire for gifts that are far out of the price range of gifts that any teenager should receive, my parents and I could not come to a conclusion on what I would get for Christmas until about a week before the 25th.  I was looking at my old ski/snowboarding gear since I was going to be using it when we traveled up to Mammoth mountain later over break.  When I tried it on, I found that it was far too small for my size.  Apparently I have grown since freshman year of high school!  Who would’ve guessed…

Anyways, I asked my parents if a whole new outfit would be within their price range for the holidays.  When they said yes, I immediately got to work.  I looked at all the deals at stores and online.  I must have looked through at least 2000 jackets before I found a couple that I liked.  After narrowing it down to two different sets of jacket/pants, I finally decided on a white and black colored outfit.  However, no matter how hard I looked, my size was sold out.  I told myself that the green outfit was just as good, and settled on getting that one.

Christmas day was a weird one for my family.  I could not sleep the night before, and ended up sleeping in until around 3 pm, when my family told me we were going to dinner with my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents in half an hour.  After spending almost 8 hours with family, my parents, sister and I arrived home.  We started opening presents just before midnight.

When I opened my presents on Christmas night, I couldn’t help but smile as I pulled my new snowboarding outfit out of the boxes.  However, my parents threw me for a loop.  I had opened all of the boxes that had my outfit inside of them, but I still had a few more presents to open.  When I opened the first one, I was shocked to see the pants of the other outfit that I had seen with my own eyes to be sold out.  I ripped through the last two or so boxes and minutes later, I had the entire “sold out” outfit strewn out in front of me.  I simply could not believe my eyes.  I was speechless, and according to my parents I had a look on my face that was so priceless that it could only be called the look of “a kid on Christmas morning”.  If I had to guess, my expression probably looked like this:

On a different note, my uncle asked me if I could help him with his work over break.  He makes a living cleaning fish tanks, and a nice living at that.  It is amazing how much people will pay for others to clean up after them (or their pets).  Anyways, our job over the break was to remove all of the tanks in every Rubio’s grill in Southern California (except for one).  By the time he asked if I would be interested in helping him, there were only 3 or 4 tanks left to remove.  Each tank held about 100 gallons of water and it took us about 2 hours to disassemble all of the parts and get it on the truck to move.  It was a fun job and it got me up out of bed most days, something I was much too lazy to do on my own.  🙂

Now I know you have had the question “Why is New Year’s Eve the best day of the year?” stuck in your minds for a while now.  The answer: December 31 is my birthday, thats why!  This year for my birthday, I decided to just have a few friends come over and we would go to an arcade called Nickel, Nickel!  It is an arcade where you pay a small fee to get in, and all the games take nickels instead of tokens or quarters.  After hanging out at the arcade for about 3 hours, my friends and I headed back to my house for some epic NES battles and rice crispy treats!

After we finished bringing in the New Year with huge smiles and joyous attitudes:

My friends and I decided to go sit in the jacquzzi for a while.  It was so cool that night that the steam just made it nearly impossible to see us  🙂

The last part of my vacation was my trip to Mammoth Mountain.  It is an 8 hour drive from the beach cities, so after the long trek, my family arrived at our temporary home.  The snow was so-so, but it was still a ton of fun just to get out on the mountain and ride.  I also got to try out my new gear, and it was extremely comfortable so the trip was a complete success!  😀

I 

The road outside my apartment last Thursday. Maybe a few brave souls with snow and ice experience didn't mind braving the weather, but I, a born and bred Texan, decided to play it safe and chill out at home.

Back in Houston it never snowed, and I can't describe how magical it was to wake up to 3 inches of snow on the ground. It was actually the first time in my life that I had woken up to that much snow.

With that much snow on my back deck I decided to build a snow man. This Monday when I went back to class, my Psychology professor asked who had built a snow man during our days off. When I and a few others raised our hands she declared, "Look around everyone, these are the fun people."

Snowman again. Notice the NASA hat and Aviators - only a Riddle student would build a snowman like that.

And there is me in next to the snowman to prove that I was there.

My account of the Snow Days as documented  last Friday (my internet has been acting up, but all has been resolved):

In the past two days it has snow more in Prescott than it has in any other semester that I have attended Embry-Riddle. As a result today is the second day in a row that the campus has been closed for inclement winter weather.

If you know anything about weather forecasters, you may, like me, tend to take all of their predictions with a grain of salt. Since my time at Embry-Riddle, weather forecasters have predicted snowfalls in excess of 4-6 inches several times. My excited anticipation of a snow day was tangible on these occasions, only to be destroyed as throughout the night , the forecast changed to predict less and less snow until I awoke to a light dusting and a full day of classes.

Needless to say when the forecast predicted snow for the latter part of this week, I wasn’t going to fall for another weatherman crying wolf. No way! I went to bed unconvinced and prepared to go to my 7:45 a.m. class on Thursday morning.

When my alarm went off, it wasn’t the only beep my smart phone made. I had just received an email from the Executive Vice President Frank Ayers that the classes were canceled until 10:35 and that an update would be issued around 8:00 a.m. I was shocked. I jumped out of bed and ran to my deck to find 3 inches of snow.

So I asked myself, what would any self-respecting college student do now that they didn’t have class? Go back to sleep of course!

What did the update say? Due to extensive snow fall and dangerous driving conditions all classes would be canceled for Thursday, January 21, 2010. So I decided to build a snowman.

I used a spatula and spoon from my kitchen for the arms, my NASA baseball cap for a hat, the lid to a small pan for a smile, and my aviator sunglasses for the eyes. I named him Al, a facetious ode to Al Gore and the conviction with which he pushes his “Global Warming” beliefs.

Then I did something I never do. I spent the day watching movies. And it was wonderful.

Faced with a second day free of responsibility, I don’t know to do. Today is going to be a day of indulging hobbies.

I know I’m writing this after all the snow days, but I busy trying to carefully drive through it on those days! Since I’m a California girl, I’m not used to the snow, I still act and look like a child when I see it! I have only seen it fall once for a couple seconds and only been in it a handful of times- so for me, this was AMAZING! I live in Prescott Valley so I did not get hit as hard, but it was still oh so beautiful!<3

Wednesday January 20th, 2010. My Car, the day before the BIG storm! The front windshield was worse and very icy, so I had to get some water to get it all off! I had an appointment I had to make it to.

 

Wednesday, January 20, 2010. This was the day before the big storm as well. Stairs at my apartment!

 

Thursday, January 21, 2010. Right outside my apartment. This is in Prescott Valley, it was very pretty outside, I felt like playing in the snow!

 

Thursday January 21, 2010. Right Outside my Door. So much lovely snow<3

These pictures were taken last Wednesday and Thursday. I couldn’t get pictures on Friday because I was driving down to Phoenix during the huge storm!! It was pretty scary to drive with all the snow and then as I got down the mountain, it became heavy rain! So, it was a crazy experience and good thing I’m a live! 🙂

Part of me is happy the storm is done, but I do still love snow and definitely enjoy snow days! 😀

Let’s pretend I had this post written 2 weeks ago 😉

It’s been a super long time since I last wrote a blog post. That isn’t to say that I haven’t had time to…it just never feels like the right time. In my last post, I wrote about most of my Christmas Break. One of the few things I left out was seeing Avatar, twice (which still wasn’t enough), once in regular 3D and then the next day in IMAX 3D. Needless to say, I’m obsessed with the movie. I even found a 30 page book on the Navi language, including Phonology and grammar rules. It’s amazing to me that someone spent years of research and development to create a language for a movie! I guess it makes sense once you’ve seen the credits roll by twice; I’m pretty sure there’s several thousand names. I later found out that Avatar is literally the movie Pocahontas with different names and some insanely good graphics. Here’s a link to the plot duplication, ahem…coincidence: http://bit.ly/7Yb7TS.

I also went to the San Diego International Auto Show over the break. I think I’ve gone every year for the past four or so years, and there’s always a surprising amount of change every year. Some cool feature cars were ones with solar panel roofs, the same Lamborghini’s that never need to change because they’re just that awesome, and the indoor jeep track was neat. It’s entertaining to watch people freak out when the car they’re driving is balancing on 3 wheels on a 45 degree left-right slope. They also had a section with about 20 Camaros covering over a 40 year span. One of my favorite “vehicles” was an off-road wheelchair with…tank tread! I’ll try to write another post in the next couple days to cover our amazing snow days.

Here are a couple of pictures:

Is an explanation needed?

Off-Road Tread Wheelchair

I have been feeling really low for a week now. I think I got the flu initially. I had high temperatures and head-splitting headaches. To worsen it, it happened during the snow days. We got two of them last week on Thursday and Friday, thus a four day weekend as well. Except Dave, everyone at the house went to Flagstaff on Thu. The weather was so bad; they couldn’t come back till Saturday.

All that time, I was taking Tylenol, Thermaflu, Ibuprofin and a lot of fluids. I got done with a 24 pack Gatorade in 3 days. It was bad. L I went to the healthness center after four days of torture and self care. The doctor said I am on the way to getting better, so things should be fine in a day or two. Yeah, right. For two days, I am not able to eat anything. Nothing stays down. Hopefully, some more self care should solve it in a day or two.

To add to the pain, there was a structures quiz and HW. I managed to get the online quiz right but I was in no way capable of completing that HW. I bombed it real bad. I went to the Optimization class and found that the homework is postponded!!! What? There was homework? So, now I need to get done an upper level math course HW in a day. That is going to be great fun to watch.

Anyways, being sick alone taught me some things.

Real friends are very few.

They will help you when you need it, not when you tell them.

Don’t take medicines when the stomach is empty (I didn’t know that!).

Sometimes you just need to rest.

It made me think some of my long term goals and I have decided to graduate in 7 semesters! That is a whole semester of savings. However, I will also miss Riddle sooner L L

Let’s hope for the best! God bless you all!!