Honeymoon Recap, part 4

After Israel, there was another sea day.

Learning Italian!

Happy Hour!

Then we went to the Greek island of Crete. In Iraklion, we visited a Minoan palace that is estimated to be 3,000 years old. (Hands down the oldest thing we saw... even older than Jerusalem!)

The palace was discovered and restored in the early 1900s, and sections were reconstructed in concrete. Our guide told us that people refer to this as the archaeological Disney-land for the inauthentic concrete reconstructions. I feel badly that they say this about the guy who dedicated his whole life to reconstructing the palace so people can see what it actually looked like.

 

This was another half-day tour, so afterwards we stopped for lunch and to wander around the city center. 

Nearby is a Venetian sea-fort from the 1500s so we took a walk down to the waters edge.

Iraklion has city-wide wi-fi, so we took the opportunity to send emails to our parents and snap a pic for facebook. It was windy and pretty chilly though so we grabbed a snack, and headed back to the ship.

Next stop was Naples. We took another cruise tour called "Pompeii and Flavors of Sorrento." First up, a guided tour of Pompeii...

See Vesuvius in the middle? It used to be twice as tall before it erupted and buried the city!

 

Then we stopped in the town of Sorrento. In the summer it's a popular vacation city for European tourists, but we were there before tourist season so it was pretty sleepy. We wandered around some, and stopped for pizza (what else? All Dan wanted to eat in Italy was pizza.)

Then we headed to a farm for a tour and lunch. Sorrento is full of cliffs, which means not much usable farm land. To be profitable, the farmers use all the land 3 times over: Vegetables on the bottom, citrus trees in the middle, and grape vines across the top.

 

We saw how they make mozzarella and ricotta cheese (ricotta is a byproduct of the mozzarella process, which was interesting!). Then we ate: meats, homemade mozzarella, and a fresh olive. I HATE olives that come in jars, but the fresh olive was delicious! Then pasta with some of that fresh ricotta in the sauce. There was also homemade wine, and limoncello tasting for dessert!

After that we headed back to the boat for our last night on the ship- the usual farewell show, late night chocolate buffet, and packing.

Snapped a pic of our multinational water bottle collection before we left the ship: Israel, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy.

We took the option to carry our own bags off, which meant we could leave anytime before 9:30. We took the opportunity to have a leisurely room service breakfast before heading out. This was the part I was most concerned about. We didn't have a very good plan, but we had read that the port authority runs a bus service from the pier to the front of the port. Then its only a "short" walk to the train station, where you can hop a train into Rome.
Turned out it was SO easy. The bus ride was long, probably 10 minutes or so, to the front of the port, but we didn't have a map, so we just took off away from the port on the road they dropped us off on, hoping it was the right direction. Sure enough only about 5 minutes later we passed a sign with the train station symbol saying it was ahead in the direction we were walking.
After only about a 10 minute walk, there it was! We bought tickets and the next train was leaving in about 20 mins. Perfect timing!

The train was a commuter train type that didn't have a lot of room for our big bags, but we made it work.

We arrived at the main train terminal in Rome. From there it was another 15 min walk to our hotel (mostly downhill thank goodness!). My sweet husband let me wheel the lighter bag as we dragged them through the city streets.

To be continued in Rome...

Our Interfaith Wedding Ceremony

Trying to write an Interfaith wedding ceremony? I've been there! When Dan and I started thinking about our ceremony, we knew that we wanted to represent both faiths as equally as possible. One of our main motivations was making our families feel represented and comfortable. We used the book Celebrating Interfaith Weddings as a guide. It has a number of suggested passages and even suggested ceremonies for interfaith marriages between a Jew and varying branches of Christianity. I highly recommend it if you're in a Jewish/Christian relationship.
Of course there are a million ways to do a wedding ceremony, there is no right way or wrong way. But this was our way, and if you find yourself in the same position, maybe it'll inspire you:

Welcome
Some opening words by our Rabbi, welcoming our guests. It included a common Jewish welcome blessing in both Hebrew and English: Blessed are you who come in the name of the Lord.
(Everything said in Hebrew was repeated in English, so everyone could understand.)

Acknowledging Different Traditions
(There were options in the book for these passages, but I didn't like any of them that much, so I wrote my own. It was read by the deacon who co-officiated. And even though I wrote it, it almost made me cry.)

"On their Ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract which will be signed later in the ceremony, Stephanie and Dan begin with a quote from the Book of Ruth: "And Ruth said, ‘Do not entreat me to leave you, to return from following you, for wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God.’"

Stephanie and Dan chose this verse to emphasize that, though they have some differences of faith and tradition, they ultimately believe in the same God. Today we will honor both the Catholic and Jewish faiths in the rites and rituals of the marriage ceremony. Today they join their lives together. His people will be her people. Her people will be his people. Whatever they do, wherever they go, they go together."

Readings

The Catholic wedding ceremony contains three readings- Old Testament, New Testament, and Gospel. The Jewish wedding ceremony doesn't usually contain a reading. We decided to do 2 readings, 1 Torah/Old Testament and 1 New Testament.
We picked Genesis 2:18-24, where God creates Eve from Adam's side (the Christian translation uses "rib," but Jewish mysticism suggests that the original Adam may have been either a hermaphrodite or had both male and female parts, which were separated here into two beings) as his helper. Then we chose Mark 10:6-9, where Jesus quotes our Genesis reading and says "What God has joined together, no human being must separate."
The Torah reading was done by my cousin and the Gospel reading by Dan's sister-in-law (who is my sister-in-law now, too!).

 
Personal Remarks
Both the Rabbi and Deacon prepared personal remarks about us to include in this part of the ceremony. You can read the Rabbi's remarks here.

Vows
We chose the Catholic vows because the vows are an important part of the Catholic tradition. Since we were not married in the church, however, the Deacon could not receive the vows. Our Rabbi read the vows and we repeated:
I, (name), take you, (name), to be my (wife/husband). I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.

Rings
In the Catholic tradition, the rings come right after the vows. In the Jewish tradition there aren't really vows, and only the groom gives the bride a ring (in many modern Orthodox couples, the bride will give the groom a ring later, not as part of the ceremony; in many modern, non-Orthodox couples they go ahead with the 2 rings during the ceremony.)
The intro went like this:
These rings represent the enduring trust and affection that you bring to one another, and are the outward and visible symbols of an inner spiritual bond.
In both ceremonies, you say something while putting the ring on their finger, but neither of the sayings fit us, so we chose a more generic:
I give you this ring as a symbol of my commitment to you and to our partnership in life.

Ketubah
The rabbi briefly explained the ketubah tradition. Then my aunt read it aloud, and Dan and I, along with our two witnesses, signed it.
One of my bridesmaids and one of Dan's groomsmen signed for us. Though not a binding ketubah and not kosher witnesses, we did stick with the tradition that your witnesses not be related to either the bride or the groom.

Nuptial Blessing
This is performed during the Catholic wedding ceremony. The Deacon very kindly tweaked the wording to make it interfaith. We went back and forth on this a lot, because we still wanted to represent the Catholic faith appropriately but didn't want to alienate the Jews in our midst. It eventually came down to feeling that neither of us should have to have anything in our wedding ceremony contrary to our beliefs, and calling him "Christ our Lord" definitely fell into that category.

Holy Father, creator of the universe,
maker of man and woman in your own likeness,
source of blessing for the married life,
we humbly pray to you for this bride
who today is united with her husband in the bond of marriage.

May your fullest blessing come upon her and her husband
so that they may rejoice together in your gift of married love.
May they be noted for their good lives 
and be parents full of virtue.

Lord may they both praise you when they are happy,
and turn to you in their sorrows.
May they be glad that you help them in their work,
and know that you are with them in their need.
May they reach old age in the company of their friends,
and come at last to the kingdom of Heaven.

We ask this in the name of our Lord.
(We put in our programs that people could respond Amen here if they desired, giving people the option but not an order, and also not leaving those not familiar with the tradition hanging when everyone but them knew what to do.)

Priestly Blessing
Funny story, the Priestly Blessing hangs in the foyer in my in-laws house. I saw it there when I first visited them with Dan almost 3 years ago for Thanksgiving. At the time, it intrigued me, because I knew it from grade school, learned a very different aspect of it at the orthodox synagogue I now attend... but didn't know that Catholics used it so frequently in their own prayer services. I jumped at the chance to put it in our wedding ceremony, as it truly represented a commonality between our religions. The rabbi said the Hebrew, then the deacon repeated in English:
May the Lord bless and keep you.
May the Lord shine his countenance upon you and be gracious to you.
May the Lord look upon you with favor and grant you peace.

Pronouncement
We were pronounced husband and wife, (according to the "Great State of Texas" because it's what you do here). I argued for an egalitarian kiss-type wording, but Dan wanted them to say "You may now kiss the bride." I let him have that one.

Having Faith Returns to APW

Almost a year ago, I wrote a post for my favorite wedding blog, A Practical Wedding, about our officiant struggles.

I cried a lot. And I tried to give up.

But it all worked out in the end. We found a deacon and a rabbi willing to work with us, and had a wonderful Jewish/Catholic interfaith ceremony under a chuppah.

Read my Wedding Grad post at APW.
_ _ _ _

If you got here from APW and want to read more about our wedding, check out Nerds In Love (my wedding page) for links to wedding planning posts, wedding recaps, and more.

"...But its going to be okay"

The title is a quote from our favorite article about the ISS ammonia leak that popped up on us Thursday: "The space station is leaking vital fluid, but its going to be okay"

That headline became our motto in the 2 day sprint to Saturday morning's EVA.

The leak was in Photovoltaic Thermal Control System 2B, one of 8 such systems on station, which cools one of our 8 power channels. It would be simplistic to say that this is 1/8 of our power generation, which is pretty much true, because 2B is a special channel. It powers more important stuff (aka critical loads) than any other.

Source

As NASA's own briefing site explains, rather than lose those loads, we performed what's called a seamless power channel handover. This configures the dying channel's loads to be hosted by another channel. (As the word seamless implies, we can do this without powering down the loads.) We are still down 1/8 of the power generation capability, but retain power to critical loads. After that, we powered the leaking loop down and configured channel 2B for dormancy.

Then we got to work planning the EVA that might save the system. For me the days looked like this:

• Thursday, noon
  The email came out to the group that PVTCS 2B quantities had taken a sharp downturn... aka were leaking at a much faster rate than we had been tracking since before I even started at JSC.
• Thursday afternoon
  A coordination meeting was held between program people, engineering people, and flight control people to discuss the problem and how we fix it. It was decided then that we should plan an EVA. Because half the crew is coming home on Monday (regularly scheduled, not failure related) the EVA window would end on Sunday. It was this weekend or next month...
• Thursday evening
  I left work Thursday afternoon around 5, and headed to happy hour with some friends prior to a softball double header with our co-ed recreational team. Just as we were leaving the restaurant to go to softball, I got a call from my boss. The EVA lead team for our group was staying late working on the EVA plan; they had to sleep sometime and there was another meeting scheduled at 3am that they needed me to cover.  
• U-turn!
  Dan and I had carpooled, so he drove me home, missing the first game but heading back for the second. I obviously missed both games, took some Nyquil and went to bed getting about 4.5 hours of sleep before my 1:30am wakeup call.
• Thursday night to Friday morning
  While I was sleeping, and into when I arrived, the on console team (including someone spun up Thursday afternoon to head straight to bed to support the night shift) performed the seamless power channel handover and channel dormancy procedure.
• Friday 3am
  I attended the EVA coordination meeting, and then I hit the ground running on various EVA prep tasks. Among them I worked on much of the timeline for our supporting activities, wrote/updated 3 procedures for various EVA related operations, and even spent an hour sending some commands to ISS. After a long 12 hours, I realized I had to pee. True story, I spent 9 hours in a chair, tied to a console, and never got up to pee. And I ate a giant bag of pretzel M&Ms and a doughnut for lunch. Oops.
• Friday night
  We headed to bed early- Dan because he had to get up at 5 to drive to a karate event in Dallas, and me because I had been up since 1:30 and had to get back around 5 the next day.
• Saturday morning
  3:30 am wakeup call (whoo, sleeping in!) and I headed to work. I spent most of the day squinting at numbers, preparing our console tools for the new pump which was to be installed. I didn't send any commands, but I did take a real, live derivative of a function. (My calculus is a little rusty, but it still works!)
• Saturday noon
  Crew successfully installed the new pump assembly and was headed back to the airlock. We realized that it was just 48 hours since we started the whole thing. I spent more than half of them at work and am amazed how much we accomplished in such a short time. Now we are just waiting to see if that stopped (or at least slowed) the leak so we can keep the loop.
  

Source

 One of my coworkers joked that this scene described the Spartan group on Friday:

Yup, pretty much EVERYONE in my group had a hand in the planning and execution of this amazing feat- planning and executing an EVA in 24 hours. I was on the front lines, but no less than 8 people IMed or emailed to offer whatever help they could provide. And they took the assignments I fired off at them and did them perfectly.  I'm proud to work with so many people dedicated to the manned spaceflight cause.

One other observation: This was made possible not just due to extreme dedication and sleep deprivation by many many Spartans, but due to the amazing powers of the internet. I can't imagine doing everything we did in 48 hours without being able to so easily share all the information we needed. When I went to bed on Thursday night, I woke up 4 hours later to a complete handover from the guys who had just gone to bed a few hours before in my cell phone inbox, information necessary for me to get anything done before they all came back the next morning. Email has truly revolutionized flight control (and our lives in general) and I'm just amazed at what it has enabled us to do.

More info on the spacewalk and state of the ISS can be found:
Spaceflight Now

Previous EVA posts:
A Night in MCC
Another EVA
Pumplemas