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Day 3- Of Rockets, Old Friends, and Old Memories….

Well it was a really great day. I didn’t get to watch the live stream on Rockets 2015/Houston. Unfortunately i was busy around the house, and then couldn’t remember my log in, so I will figure that out tomorrow and watch some then. I did get updates from Steve though. He said all went well, recovery was at about 80% so that is actually pretty good. They sent up 12 today. There are 14 more planned for tomorrow. They only saw one alligator and one rattle snake, so that is good.

Even though I didn’t watch myself, my sister-in-law did and she said the live feed was having some difficulty. Hopefully that is resolved now and will be better tomorrow. Of course, she was still able to watch several, so it wasn’t too bad.

It will be a long, hard day for the crew tomorrow, starting early and ending late possibly and then a late and long drive home to Fredericksburg after they pack it in for the day. Keep them in your prayers so all goes well and everyone returns home safely, both the SystemsGo crew and the students of the schools attending.

I attended the 60th wedding anniversary of some of my parent’s best friends, Mr. Dennis Lange and his lovely wife, Mrs. Shirley Schnerr Lange. It was held in Doss, TX at the home of their daughter and her husband, Peggy and Clyde Crenwelge. There were about 100 folks in attendance and all enjoyed wonderful BBQ, beans, potato salad, and German chocolate cake. It was a wonderful celebration and an absolutely beautiful place to have it.

It was so much fun to be out there again and with friends we just don’t get to see or spend much time with anymore. Even their son, Jason Lange, who lives in Seward, Alaska was able to be in attendance. That in itself was a treat for everyone. He and I visited and caught up on each other’s lives and families. And of course reminisced about old times when we were kids running around out on the place. We all had a lot of fun back then. It was fun walking down memory lane and remembering all those old times and stories. I have to admit there were a few I had to think about, but, yes I do remember.

Of course, it is the water fights and playing hide and seek in the dark while Jason made scary cougar screams that I think I remember the most. Probably because they were a regular occurrence every time we went to the Lange’s house. You never went out there without at least one, if  not two changes of clothes, even in winter. Those were the days.

Congratulations Dennis and Shirley, what a wonderful 60 years you have had together. Thank you, Peggy and Clyde for the tour of your gorgeous home, hopefully we will all get together again soon. Thank you Jason for the visit and the trip down memory lane. It is too bad you and Rhonda don’t live closer, I am sure we could have had a lot of fun together still.

Well I warned you that some days would be more on a personal note. Thank you for indulging me today. Tomorrow, will be more on Houston Rocket launch, day 2, and perhaps Mother’s day.

www.systemsgo.org as always is the place for more information on this program. Take the time to get your school involved, the future of your students will be greatly benefited.

TGIF -Day 2

In the interest of keeping this ongoing and up to date, I pause to enter a snippet for day 2 of my new blog. Spell check doesn’t like that word, oh well, too bad, it works for today.

It is a cloudy, dreary, yet mostly rain-less day in the Texas Hills. It looks cold but is instead muggy and warm. Apparently it is the same down in Clute where our SystemsGo team has been setting up for tomorrow’s rocket shoot for the Houston area. Lift off begins tomorrow through Sunday. Good luck to all the schools participating in this weekend’s event, may all tests be successful and recovery be 100%.

I understand that most of the set up that could be done today was completed by around noon. All was going well. Only complaint she had, was that love was in the air with the resident Love Bugs and they were all borrowing Chelsea’s truck to “play” and she was not appreciating that very much. On the bright side, if that is the worst of things, then I do believe they will all do well, team and bugs alike.

May I say though that if an alligator grabs your rocket, please just let him keep it. A message to the launch and recovery teams, if Chelsea falls in an alligator inhabited marsh while a looking for a rocket, save her and leave the rocket!!!

That was just for you, Chelsea, I knew you would appreciate it, just a little miscommunication flash back from years past. Hope you all have a great time and things go really well.

If there are any updates forth coming to share from that shoot this weekend, I will try to share them, but quite often they are super busy and details are limited and sparse. I do not know for sure if the video link will be available for this shoot that will be available at the Fredericksburg shoot next week. If it is, it should be available on the SystemsGo website I posted yesterday.

www.systemsgo.org

Ok, just to prove that I do write other than just blogging, here is a poem I wrote back in March and haven’t shared yet.

Spring Unfolds

Spring unfolds
Amid chill, warmth, and wet.
Temperatures yo-yo between hot and cold,
As rain in short bursts,
The parched earth strains to hold.

Nature rallies to Spring’s efforts,
Exploding with new growth and color;
Vivid greens blanket the prairies
And open like an umbrella,
Covering the trees.

Vibrant yellows, pinks, purples and blues
Create a patchwork quilt,
Across the hills and fields,
As flowers lift their faces
To the warmth the sun yields.

The world becomes a brightly colored canvas;
Changing and growing each day,
As a painting unfolds;
More beautiful and grand
For all mankind to behold.

Ginger
3/27/15

In The Beginning

This is basically a writer’s blog, with the main writer being of course, me. It will be a way to share writing and keep myself busy doing some form of writing, hopefully every day. At some times it will be things I have written and want to share. At other times, it will be interesting things I am involved in that I want to share with you, whomever you may be that decide you want to read my words of wisdom, or perhaps not. You see, there I go, sometimes things may be really serious, other times they may be completely goofy and off the wall.

I will give you a little preview of next week’s blogs. I do intend to share some highlights from the SystemsGo Fredericksburg Rocket Launches in Willow City. If I can figure this out and add pictures I will try to do that too. I am helping with recovery again this year, and am super excited to help. It is always a blast. There will also be a live video link so you can come out and watch in person or from the safety of your computer at home.

If you have never heard of this, it is part of the STEM program now available in area high schools. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math and is designed to start our children in future careers in all these now heavily technical fields. If you listen to the radio you may have heard ads by the US Navy backing this program (STEM), they are highly interested in receiving candidates that have had prior training and education in this program because our military has become very hi tech as well. This program benefits our youth whether going the college and job route or the military route. If you have a junior high or high school age student encourage them to get into the STEM program at their school. If your school has not yet developed a program, encourage them to do so, because these are the big jobs of the future.

Skills learned in the different areas required by STEM and programs like the rocket program and other programs in STEM encompass more than just the four core classes you hear in the name STEM. Students in these programs, learn skills in mechanics, welding, PlasmaCAM, wood working, and other hands on building skills. They learn grant writing and proposals in order to fund their projects. They learn business skills, presentation and marketing, research and analysis, design and development, materials, inventory, and product ordering and so much more. Most of all they learn critical thinking and how to work both on their own and as a part of a larger group that each contributes a vital piece to their project in order to have it completed and successful.

I personally have had a nephew, niece and 2 daughters that have gone through our local program and they have all benefited from it greatly. My nephew, is top management at SpaceX in McGregor, TX, my niece is in Avionics Electronics  in the US Navy, one daughter is an Aviation Structural Mechanic for helicopters in the US Navy, and my older daughter is studying Electrical Engineering at Texas Tech University.

This week several of our program graduates, the SYSTEMSGO coordinators, and several volunteers are headed to Clute down by Lake Jackson, TX to help several Houston area schools launch their rockets. Next week the team and many more volunteers will be here at Hillview Ranch in Willow City, TX to help over 30 Texas high schools attempt to launch over 80 more rockets. It is well worth the time to watch, not only to see the rockets fly, but to see the joy in the students’ faces as their project of 1-2 years in the making, comes to a successful end. To clarify, even if the rocket doesn’t fly, it is still a success in all that the students learned to get it here, and in what they will continue to learn from analyzing what went wrong that prevented it’s flight. The hard work that is done to get them to this point is the true success and is a catalyst that will help launch them into their future careers.

Ok maybe I did know what  to write about today.

Houston launches are this weekend, May 9 & 10.

Fredericksburg launches are next week, May 14-17. Come watch them or watch online at the SystemsGo web page. Directions and details are also on this website.

http://www.systemsgo.org/announcements/rockets-2015-fredericksburg-launch-details

Watch this crazy blog for more updates.