New Work Opportunities!

Another reason for the lapse in blog posts lately is that we're in a bit of a transition period around here while Billy and I both adjust to exciting new opportunities at work!

Billy was recently named the Science and Operations Center Test Team Lead for the James Webb Space Telescope.  He has been working as a member of this team since he began working at STScI almost exactly five years ago, and in the past few years he has taken on an increasing number of supervisory roles.  He and his team work on making sure the "ground segment" portion of the telescope will work properly-- or, in other words, they test all the computer systems that will control the telescope and make sense of the data it collects.

I think Billy was a little unsure about how the news of his promotion might be received, since most of his coworkers are older than him and have been working on the project longer.  However, it sounds to me like the transition has gone very smoothly.  But since it's my blog, I will speculate for a minute: I would guess nobody who works with Billy on a daily basis could possibly be surprised when smart people put him in charge of more things.  Putting Billy in charge of things is what smart people should do.  And if you are a person who has to do smart things, and someone has to be in charge of them, you want Billy to be that person.  His work ethic came to mind a few weeks ago when my professor was emphasizing of a passage about a bull fighter from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. He writes, "Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line.  The others twisted themselves like cork-screws, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger.  Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling.  Romero's bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time."  Billy keeps an absolute purity of line in everything he does.  This is such a part of him, actually, that he sometimes fails to recognize that other people resort to twisting themselves like cork-screws in their attempts to achieve the effects that he achieves naturally.  But the spectators who get to spend a lot of time around him, like me and his coworkers, can easily see the difference.  I'm very fortunate to have a husband who is so smart, and who works so hard, and is employed by people who continue to foster his excellence.  To say I am proud of him is such an understatement.  I admire him and learn by his example so much every day, that most of all I am happy for him in moments when he is rewarded for being who he is.

For my part, I've picked up a new part time job with the Special Collections department of our library system.  As you may know from my earlier posts, the University of Maryland holds the personal archive of Katherine Anne Porter, one of the authors whose writing figures prominently in my work.  The libraries have received funding from her literary trust to digitize a portion of her personal correspondence.  Eventually, the hope is to secure outside funding so that all of it can be digitized and hosted on a sophisticated online database.  They've hired me to work as the graduate assistant on this project, so I'll put in about ten hours a week.  For the next few months, it will be my job to organize and itemize the letters, prepare them to be shipped out for digitization, check the letters and the digital files for quality and accuracy when they return, and help to get the digital images posted to our library's KAP site.  Thereafter, I'll get to help with helping to create web interest for the project and its contents. For this portion of the project, we'll only be starting with the letters Porter wrote to her family members, which is roughly 5,000 pages of correspondence.

Those of you who are interested in my academic work can already imagine how unbelievable this opportunity is for me.  It will provide me with invaluable access to the Porter collection, a chance to learn more about archival research and digitization, and help me get my foot in the door in the field of Digital Humanities studies.  Since I'm approaching the point where I'll have to nail down the topic of my dissertation, the timing is also perfect.  One of the most thrilling things about archival research, for me, is the likelihood that you can discover a tidbit of information at any given time that will radically transform your understanding of the subject.  The opportunity to spend this much time with the materials and the people who can help me learn how best to make use of them is something I couldn't have even dreamed up if I'd tried.  Once again, someone has agreed to pay me for something I would gladly do for free if time permitted.

A note to future Nora:  I sometimes worry about what you will think when you discover that the universe planted you in this house with these two nerdiest of parents.  This basically ensures that the things you will be wildly passionate about in your life will be perceived as super lame by a large portion of the population.  But I will promise you this: Here, in this house, you will be encouraged to follow whatever paths those wild passions lead you down.  For however long you want.  With the force of our combined nerdiness and passion behind you.  When you look back up, you will be surrounded by people who understand why those wild passions are super interesting and valuable.  And that, little one, is exactly where you deserve to be.

A view of the Katherine Anne Porter Room inside Hornbake Library; or, Where My Nerdy Passions and My Parents' and Husband's Encouragement of Them Has Led Me.

Family Field Trip

On Wednesday, we finally ventured out of the house as a family and were joined by Mom and Vickie to visit the full size model of the James Webb Space Telescope, which was on display in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.  Those who've been following our blog for a while will remember that Billy has been working on developing the telescope's computer ground support system for the past three and a half years.  After seeing plenty of computerized mock-ups of how the telescope will look, we couldn't pass up the chance to see what it will look like when it unfolds in space.

The outing also felt like a good first trip for our family, since the family-friendly policies at the Space Telescope Science Institute allow Billy to spend Nora's first seven weeks at home helping to care for her.  It's hard to believe that she'll be at least seven years old when the telescope launches, but it was fun to imagine how much she will know about space and the telescope itself by that time.  We hope that someday the JWST will radically change the way we understand our universe, as Hubble has done before it, and we look forward to showing Nora these photos once JWST is a household name, too.

A Good Man is Hard to Find

Flannery O'Connor is right.  A good man is hard to find. Personally, I found it to be impossible.  I had to wait until a good man found me, but I sure am glad I did.

Today, on the heels of his excellent performance appraisal, Billy found out he has been promoted at work!  He has been taking on more managerial responsibilities each year since he started working at the STScI, and now that he has been named a Systems Integration and Test Engineer, his ascension up the ranks is official!  He even let Patti and Chuck meet us for dinner to mark the occasion, so I will not test his patience by going on and on about how proud of him I am.  But I am.  He deserves it.

While Billy is hard at work each day, Oscar and I are working on holding down the fort at home.  My gym routine was starting to leave me pretty exhausted, so I have scaled back to walking around the neighborhood, and nobody is happier about this development than Oscar.  Evidently it wears him out because he has been spending even more time than usual cuddled up in our bed.  I never cease to be entertained by how he tucks himself into the covers, props his head on pillows as if he were a human, and persists at nudging your legs into just the right position so he can maximize his comfort.

So it goes around our house.  We're ready for you whenever you're ready, Baby D!

How to be Good

Time keeps moving right along in our house.  Last weekend, we got to celebrate Billy's cousin Gina's wedding.  Gina already posted her photographer's photos from the day on facebook, so I borrowed a few of them to share here.  Congratulations, Gina and Rich!

Tony, Aunt Nancy, Gina, her new husband Rich, and Chuckie after the ceremony

MomMom, Aunt Mary, Patti, and me at the reception

Brian, Billy, Chuck, and Tony

Nana and Mr. Dick were big hits on the dance floor, as usual!

This week, we had dinner with Vickie and heard about her fun trip to the northwest, and though I couldn't make it, Billy went out to dinner with his family to celebrate Chuck's birthday. The other exciting thing about this week is that we got plenty of good news!

Our weekly OB appointments began with another good checkup.  We learned that we have to get flu shots this year, and the doctor confirmed that the baby is ready to go in head down position.  My weight gain and belly measurement are still right on track, and so is the baby's heart rate.

Billy also had a meeting with his James Webb Space Telescope supervisors to go over his yearly performance appraisal.  He was given universally high remarks in every category, and his bosses have been very pleased with the work he has done this past year as well as the leadership responsibilities he has taken on.  He let me read the write-up they gave him, which goes into quite a bit of detail about all of the ways he has met and exceeded their expectations.  As his wife, I really appreciated the effort his supervisors put into writing up his review and enjoyed getting a chance to see how much they appreciate the hard work he does.  Anyone who knows Billy knows he believes that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing well, but being this hard of a worker sometimes leads to frustration in a work environment if others are not willing to work as hard.  In his first few jobs out of college, I often felt like his employers took advantage of and didn't show much appreciation for his work ethic.  So even though he doesn't like everyone calling attention to his successes at this job, I do!  : )

I missed Chuck's birthday dinner because I was scheduled to give my presentation on my Katherine Anne Porter paper to the theory colloquium, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.  The presentation format was a little unsettling because after giving my opening remarks, I had to sit quietly and listen to my colleagues discuss the work for 15 or 20 minutes before I was allowed to say anything.  Listening to their feedback was really interesting, and some of their comments were very useful, but when I was finally allowed to talk, I wasn't sure how to address all that conversation at once.  Then there was about 30 minute of a more traditional question and answer format about my paper before we switched gears to discuss two unrelated articles for the second hour.  I had read and taken notes on those articles, but I wasn't able to focus enough to join that discussion because I sat there thinking about things people had said about my paper and scribbling notes to myself.  I came out of the session feeling good about the feedback I'd gotten but unsure about how well I had done in addressing the issues that were raised.  When I talked to my friends who've attended the colloquium for several semesters, though, I felt reassured.   They thought I did a good job of taking peoples' suggestions into consideration and defending my project when necessary without seeming defensive or unprepared.  A few of my classmates also mentioned that they'd like to talk to me about the project more when I have a chance, and that always seems like a mark of success.  Overall, I'm mostly just glad the presentation is behind me-- I've not only finished my requirements for the Critical Theory Certificate, but I also have some good ideas about how to move forward with the Katherine Anne Porter project.

Plus, we're one week closer to baby!

(How to Be Good is a novel by one of my favorite contemporary authors, Nick Hornby.  I don't actually recommend it, though.  My favorites among his books are High Fidelity and Fever Pitch.)

More Space Telescope News!

The local news did a feature on the construction of the JWST, the space telescope Billy is working on, which is being built right here at Goddard.  You can watch it below, or if that doesn't work, follow this link to watch it on their website.

Magnificent Desolation

You might remember that last year, I blogged a photo of the final repairs being made to the Hubble Space telescope.  About a month ago, we went to see the Hubble 3D film about that repair mission.  I meant to write a blog post about how fantastic the film was, how much it helped put the size of our universe in perspective, and how heavily it features the work done by Billy's coworkers at the Space Telescope Science Institute... but then I got super busy with my end-of-semester projects, and I forgot.  But I cannot encourage you strongly enough to check out this film if it's still available in your neck of the woods.  If you go to the film's website you can locate a theater near you.

Seriously.  Take yourself.  Take the young people you know, especially, because we need kids to stay interested in science.  Billy and his coworkers grew up in an era during which every trip into space was a leading national news story... and look at what they're up to these days!  For this year's World Science Festival in NYC, they built a full-size model of Billy's telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope.

This video shows a time lapse of the construction.  The full thing is visible starting around 2:55.



(Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Back From the Moon is Buzz Aldrin's most recent memoir. I'd love to read it, actually, because every time I see astronauts in space I wonder what it is like to come back.  The summary of the book suggests that my suspicion might be right: it is not so easy to return.  When JWST goes up, it is going to show us more of the magnificent desolation of outer space than we can even imagine.  It will be able to see back in time almost all the way to the Big Bang!)

Bits and Pieces

A few things here and there...

I can never make up my mind about Roger Federer. When he's on top, I'm desperate for anyone to beat him. When he looked fallible, I was cheering for him to make it back to the top. But it annoyed me when, after beating Andy at Wimbledon, he pulled a jacket out of his bag that had "15" emblazoned across the back. Today, I'm happy imagining that there is an article of clothing inside Roger Federer's racquet bag, designed to celebrate 6 US Open victories in a row, which never got to see the light of day. Congratulations are in order for Juan Martin del Potro, who becomes the first person to defeat both Federer and Nadal in a Grand Slam tournament. Neither played their best against him, but he rose to the challenge.

Patrick Swayze has lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. As a member of the generation of girls who grew up loving Johnny Castle, I feel sad. I have always felt, though, that his real life love story with his wife, Lisa Niemi, was more inspiring than any of his movies. My thoughts are with her as she tries to imagine life in a world that no longer includes the man she's been with since she was, I believe, only 15.

They have begun building the James Webb Space Telescope that Billy is working on. You can read about it here.

Congratulations, Kanye West. You've succeeded in doing something so absurd and ridiculous that not one single person is willing to come to your defense-- I didn't know this was actually possible! Also, you should be required to attend just one session of my current seminar on aesthetic inquiry before you are allowed to use the word "greatest" or spout off about "real art" even one more time.

President Obama is coming to my campus on Thursday to speak about health care reform. I think I'll ask for the morning off. I find it hard to maintain my sanity in the traffic that hits College Park on a rainy day, so I don't think I will make it through the mayhem surrounding a presidential visit.

I came across this quote from Elliott Gould in Esquire, which I thought was especially profound. "It is essential that I listen, so I can try to minimize problems that I create for myself." If only I could remember this at all times.

All right, enough, I must get back to my reading for my Early Modern readings class. So far, I hate it. I've got a Willa Cather book in my bag that's burning a hole in my curiosity, but instead I'm trying to decode "The articles whereforth John Frith died." An article I read yesterday from the New York Times quoted some scholar who thinks a "conservative" estimate of what percentage of academic searches begin with Google is about 95%. In order to figure out what the heck John Frith is saying, to Google I go... where, evidently, I'm in good company.

Summertime

We've had a fairly relaxing week here in the DePriest household. The weather has been beautiful, Billy's dad continues to heal well from his surgery, and I am preparing for an 8k race I have coming up on August 2.

On Tuesday Billy got to attend a presentation from the astronauts who fixed Hubble when they spoke at his work. I was hoping to go along, too, but had to go to work for a training session instead. It was a fairly slow week at work for me as my co-worker tries to get as much of her work done as she can before she moves to her new position and leaves her responsibilities to me.

I finished reading Cather's One of Ours and am relieved to find that nothing in the novel conflicts with the thesis for the paper I am working on. I will need to spend some time researching and reading secondary articles about the text before reading OoO again prior to writing the paper. I am hoping to get a solid draft done before classes start at the end of August so that I don't have too much to do during my fall semester. If all goes well, my argument will come together well and the paper will serve as my PhD application writing sample.

Friday night Billy and I went into Baltimore to watch "On the Waterfront" at an outdoor screening in Little Italy. It was a fun (and free!) evening, and right as Marlon Brando gathered his courage to return to work, it started to rain, so the timing worked out perfectly. The traffic was another story-- it took us an hour to get out of the city because we were fighting the crowd from the soccer game between Chelsea and AC Milan. Saturday we relaxed at home, enjoyed our free trial of HBO, and spent some time reading outside before going out to dinner at a local mexican restaurant. This afternoon we took Oscar to the park and he got as muddy in the lake as we would let him. He even behaved himself pretty well when we tied him up in the shade and played catch. He still hates riding in the car, though.

This week we don't have much planned until the Legg Mason Tennis Classic starts on Sunday. We got the weeklong pass, and I am looking forward to spending the week prior to my birthday celebrating with some world class tennis. According to Andy Roddick's twitter account, he is recovering from his hip injury and ready to play, so he will lead a very good field of players including Tommy Haas, Juan Martin del Potro, Lleyton Hewitt, JW Tsonga, Robin Soderling, and all the other top American players. I can't wait!

Blog Makeover

Hello again! Now that I'm on summer hiatus from my graduate classes, I am going to try to post a weekly update to my blog for those of you who followed my progress so closely as I was training for my race. Here's a brief recap of what I've been up to for the past few weeks!

I turned in my final seminar paper on Tuesday, May 19. The weeks leading up to it are a blur in my memory. As best I can remember, I spent nearly every waking moment working on three papers: one about the theoretical constructions of narration and description, one about Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings and her similarities to the British Women of WW1, and one about Willa Cather's composition of The Professor's House and the construction of its second section. I was very pleased with how all three of them turned out, and this semester really helped me to isolate my research interest: Women's writing about and after WW1. I find this subject area more and more interesting with every new text I read, which is nice affirmation that I'm on the right "life path." I'd be lying, though, if I didn't admit that I was also pleased to be finished with my semester of three seminars, one theory colloquium, and very little free time!

In the midst of my paper writing, I did manage to compete in a team marathon in Frederick, Maryland, with Billy's cousin Heather and two of her friends. (Those of you who attended the Oregon reception remember meeting Heather, who made the trip west.) I recorded a significant personal best for my 5 mile leg (46:26), and although the weather was bad, it was a great chance to stop thinking about J.R.R. Tolkien for a few hours. Here's a picture of me running toward the finish (even though it's just a proof).

I also got to take a break from writing for a day to attend the Bridal Shower and Bachelorette Party for my good friend, Erin. I am in her wedding on July 4, and she is moving back to New York after school gets out in June, so it was a great chance to spend some time with her before she leaves and to meet the rest of her friends and family. For the bachelorette party, we went to an outdoor wine festival, which was a lot of fun (and GREAT people watching!).

After I had a few days to decompress from my busy semester, Mom came to visit for Memorial Day weekend! This was her first trip back to Maryland since the wedding, so it was exciting to show her what we've done with the house. While she was here, we attended a Orioles/Nats game at the new Nationals Park, walked around campus in College Park, tried out Duckpin bowling, attended a Memorial Day BBQ with Billy's family, exercised on the trail where I do much of my distance training, and visited the Holocaust Museum in DC. It was great to have her here, and her visit really helped me transition from full-time brain activity to a more relaxed state of mind for the summer. While Billy and I both enjoyed her visit, I think it is fair to say that Oscar was especially upset to see her leave. In fact, he peed on the floor right next to her suitcase to show her his displeasure. (This is a dog that never has "accidents"; he only has what I call "intentionals." If he is unhappy, he will let you know-- not unlike his mother.)

Billy has been enjoying his summer break from classes since about two weeks before I finished up. He concluded another successful semester and only has one more class to take this fall before he earns his MS in Information Technology. May was an exciting month for him and the other workers at the Space Telescope Science Institute because the astronauts went into space to complete the final repairs on Hubble. He hasn't done any work on Hubble, but seeing them improve Hubble made me realize how exciting it will be when the telescope he is working on launches in 2014. Below is a picture from the live internet feed that NASA ran during the repair mission; at this moment, the astronauts were bringing Hubble into the cargo bay for the repair work. You can also learn more about Billy's telescope, JWST, by reading this article.

Our summer travel plans include attending the weddings of several friends and spending a week in upstate New York with Dad. (My dad is doing great and enjoying his treatment-free summer!) I'll continue working about 20 hours a week at my job on campus, and it's an exciting time for us there as we prepare to move into our new home in a much nicer building. The work I'm doing feels a bit menial, but I really like the people in our office, and I'm happy to do whatever they ask of me to long as they're paying my tuition. I'll also be working on preparing for my PhD application, which I'll submit to Maryland in the fall. I have some research to do before I can develop one of my seminar papers into a writing sample, and I may audit a German course during the second summer session to prepare myself for the foreign language requirement. I've done a pretty good job of keeping up with my running, and I have several races planned for the summer months. The next one is a Father's Day 10k that I'm running with my friend Danielle.

We're also hoping for an exciting summer of Orioles baseball (while the A's continue to disappoint). The future of the organization is arriving in Baltimore one player at a time, and while they still have a losing record, the young players seem to be establishing themselves well. Last night we made our first trip of the season to Camden Yards to see the MLB debut of Matt Wieters, our new catcher, who is one of the top minor league prospects. He went 0-4, but played well in the field and called a good game behind the plate. Tonight, he got his first two hits with a triple and a ground rule double. Along with Roberts, Markakis, Jones, Scott, and some other pitchers (who are so new I don't even know their names- Billy will scold me for this), the team is looking like they might have a winning season, if not this year, then next. It was fun to be part of a big crowd last night who were excited about the direction the team is heading... and it was fun to see a decisive victory!

This morning, I slept in until 11am, and awoke to find that Andy Roddick has made it to the second week in Roland Garros for the first time. Monday he will play Monfils, who I love to watch, so I will spend the day trying to avoid hearing the results in order to watch it on my DVR. Summer has officially begun!