Minotaur Launch successful

Here's our Minotaur I rocket that launched from Wallops, VA yesterday. It's the largest rocket ever to launch from Virginia's space port, but will soon lose that title when our Taurus II launches later this year. We saw this launch from our home, and the Taurus II should be even more visible as it's considerably larger. Although it was smaller than I had remembered from seeing previous launches, we were able to clearly see stage 1 and 2 burnout and the next two stage ignitions. Getting real time updates over the internet at the same time added to the fun, although our slow internet connection didn't let us watch the video or hear the countdown.

Any opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of Orbital.
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Ice cream is in order while Jordan and I stay up late for another launch delay...

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Berry hunting on the back 40

Jordan, Jessie and I are hunting berries by our woods, while Claudia is out riding. All we hear from Jessie is the sound of munching interspersed with "more, more!"
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Guitar lessons for the littlest

Jessie took this guitar lesson by our friend Paul very seriously -- strumming slowly and consistently while staring awestruck at her instructor. Soon she'll be leading the worship music at our Friday evening homegroup.
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Happy Father's Day!

Here's a great YouTube video they showed in church this morning, for all Dads out there.

More flying

Yesterday we "traded in" the plane Mom and Dad got Jordan for his birthday for a different one that was supposed to be easier to learn with, because we weren't making much progress on the other one.  A much improved experience!  Both Jordan and I could fly this one straight out of the box, including doing nose dives, loop-the-loops, and real landings.  Along the way we discovered many great places to crash land a plane too, like on the roof and in the tops of trees.  If it ever gets stuck at the top of our willow there'll be no way to get it down other than to wait for a windy day!  This morning when I took it out I even had two small birds flying along with me for several minutes, not sure about this intruder in their domain.  We flew around in circles over the back field, and they followed close behind or flying next to me, like fighter jets scrambled to bring in a wayward plane over DC.

The new plane is a HobbyZone Champ, and it's the high wing that gives it inherent aerodynamic stability, so that it automatically recovers if you "stall" it in flight.

Flying lessons

We pulled out a present Jordan got last year from Oma and Opa, and relived the fun of flying last night.  This plane is a lot of fun, and amazing how far it will go.

Thunderstorm

Jessie and I were playing outside as this storm approached. It sounded like a waterfall approaching for about a minute before the trees suddenly went wild when it hit -- from no breeze to what you see in the picture in a matter of seconds! Ten minutes later it was all over and the sun was back out.

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Weeding in the garden

Claudia and I went out to weed the garden after a fresh rain, but I got distracted by this wine and cheese along the way. She's making great progress on the weeding.

She says I can make it up with a bouquet of roses soon. :-)
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Sandbox time on Saturday morning

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Banneker Elementary family picnic

Got back just in time to catch Jordan's school's family picnic.

In the picture where Jessie's pointing through the fence, she's pointing at Jordan, with a red shirt at the edge of the picture.

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Back from a week in Phoenix

I just got back from a week in the beautiful city of Phoenix.  I enjoy that city more and more each time I visit it -- hot, dry, sand-colored, but clean and orderly, modern, vibrant, and no traffic (at least when compared to DC, the 2nd worst city in the US for traffic)!  We have three impressive campuses there (two pictured below) and an expert engineering and integration team.  I manage a Test Engineering group there that in many ways is a model of efficiency (thanks to previous processes developed before we acquired this division), and one purpose of my trip was to find opportunities to integrate processes from there with our own here in Virginia.  Simply acquiring another company doesn't provide much competitive advantage in business if you just use it to add business -- instead, we can gain much more by finding efficiencies using both divisions that have more of a multiplication effect than an additive one.  A week isn't enough to accomplish all that but relationships were made and processes analyzed and actions assigned that I think will start yielding results very quickly.

All opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of Orbital.

Barn painting

Our barn's getting painted! We have some lovely new neighbors who love to paint, and graciously asked if they could paint it for us! Does that say more about their generosity or about how forlorn the barn was looking before...?
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Beautiful morning to wake up to!

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Recycling our old picnic table top into a vegetable garden planter

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Thanks for the new outfit, Oma and Opa!

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