Happy Valentine's Day!

This morning the sun was fully out and it was chilly,  but taking Heidi for her morning walk was very energizing. It was wonderful to see the sun again.

After a little striving to work on school and to keep everyone quiet while Brock had several phone meetings, we decided to drop everything and take advantage of an amazing opportunity that we had. We were already planning to visit the John C. Stennis Space Center while we were here, but we saw on their website that today Astronaut Fred Haise who was the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 13 would be speaking on site!! We'd already missed the first session and the next one started in 40 minutes and according to Google maps it would take 34 minutes to drive there! Would you believe we made it?!

We bought our admission and proceeded straight to the area where the talk was to be given. "Mr. Fred" as the ticket lady called him, was still signing autographs from the first session and employees were adding chairs because what they'd set up were all full for the second session. Mr. Fred went straight from signing his last autograph to beginning his talk for us. He took a sip from his bottle of Barq's Root Beer and gave a history of his getting into NASA and about the Apollo 13 mission. He talked about how they trained for lots of different disaster scenarios, but the outcomes for the training on the scenario of what happened on their mission were always that everyone died so they didn't have a backup plan. Pretty amazing teamwork by both the crew and mission control to see the positive outcome that actually played out. We were able to stand in line after the talk, visiting with some interesting people in front and behind us, and have a turn to get autographs for each McFarlane kid and one for the two biggest kids. Mr. Fred seemed a very nice man and he let us do a family picture with him and interacted with the kids, shaking each of their hands. So cool!!

Mr. Fred seems to now kind of be the face of the space center which is where rocket engines are tested. He is on the center's board and in his words does a lot of fundraising.

The big boys paid to ride the shuttle simulator. I guess it was
some kind of Star Wars-type simulation called Star Warriors.

What we actually visited was called the Infinity Science Center because the actual NASA site is not open to the public, but we did get to take a bus tour of the engine test site and past buildings of organizations located on the property like NOAA with their weather buoys and EPA, and university science campuses.

Rocket engine test platforms at John C. Stennis Space Center

Along the tour, we saw the coolest squirrel. I'd seen one like it earlier in the week in the grass alongside the roadway while we were driving. Today Brock looked it up and we think it was a fox faced squirrel. They are big and look somewhat ferretlike, but have a big full tail. They are supposedly pretty rare, so it is pretty cool that we've seen two! I forgot to mention that yesterday, in the rain, when we were almost to our campground, we saw a black figure in the ditch area next to the road and I thought it was a small black bear. As we got a little closer, I saw that it was a wild boar! Whoa. I do not hope to ever see one of those when I'm out walking Heidi.

A picture of a fox squirrel from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Website.