I haven’t the faintest idea!

Today was fun.  Quite fun, actually.  For my brother’s (much belated) birthday party (celebrating his 14th birthday, which was last May; this was a seriously, seriously belated party), my family went to space camp.  It’s pretty fantastic.  Especially for Star Trek geeks.  It’s pretty much being on a Federation Starship and doing all sorts of Star Trekky things.  Like going into nebulas and negotiating with the baddies and granting people political asylum.  Oh, and of course, blowing stuff up.

I had a pretty boring job on the ship; mine was "Operations".  It was my job to control communications inside and outside of the ship.  Basically I got to answer the phone.  Which didn’t happen a lot.  I did get to run "Diagnostics," though, which was pretty cool.  Whenever the ship goes into UBER EMERGENCY OMGWTFBBQ mode, I get to plug a bunch of wires into a panel, flip some switches, and basically fix certain critical systems in the ship.

This is actually a pretty stressful job.  So, my family is in this pretty small room with a lot of cool computer gadgetry going on, which is fairly stuffy.  The baddies are attacking, there are red lights flashing everywhere, and I get handed this manual and a bunch of wires that I’m supposed to plug in.  It was pretty dark in the room (because our lighting consisted of red lights flashing) so I couldn’t really read the manual all that well, and I really really couldn’t tell the difference between the red and green wires (because our lighting consisted of red lights flashing).  I really really couldn’t read the manual.

My mom (the first officer; Patrick was the captain), was trying to help me decipher the strange markings (which I later found to be English), when I turned to her and said "I’m going to faint."  The next thing I remember was being on the floor with lots of hurt (mostly my elbows, and my right ankle, but a little bit my head) and my mom standing over me yelling "Stop!  Stop!  Alex, Stop!"  (I vaguely recalled that the person running our mission was named Alex– I’m really glad that my mom remembered his name, because everyone thought that she was just acting along in the mission before she shouted his name.)

I managed to get out of the spaceship (read: was half-dragged, but my feet moved, so it counts as walking, right?) and sat in a chair for a bit.  Eric brought me some water, and everyone was really really nice.  I honestly felt fine after getting out of the ship, and said that I really thought that it needed some better ventilation.  I also commented on the fact that it was REALLY hard to read the manual.  They opened up the vents a lot more and kept the lighting a bit brighter in the crisis modes, and I was really fine after that.  I also realized, thinking back on it, that the main reason I couldn’t read the manual was because my vision was swimming and I wasn’t really connecting the dots there.

So, I’ve officially fainted for the first time!  I didn’t hurt anything (which is good, because I fell off of some aluminum stairs into a door) except that I scraped some skin off of my ankle.  My mom was really worried that I’d hit my head, but I think that I had enough warning that I was able to position my arms to keep my head safe.

On a completely unrelated note, I keep meaning to mention in here, but also keep forgetting, that Hana is doing really really well.  The surgery went a lot better than expected, and she should be able to regain her performing capabilities within the year.  Which is fantastic, because it means that she will be able to get her Master’s!  We didn’t think that she’d be able to get it after the surgery, but things went really really well.  I just wanted to tell everyone on here, because I made the situation sound pretty shitty before (which it was), but now that it’s no longer nearly as shitty, I thought I’d let everybody know.  Yay for knowing things!

One more note before I head off to bed:  The person in charge of the whole Space Camp shenanigans has a blog, which is linked from Space Camp’s main page.  Alex suspected that I will be mentioned in the blog, so I’ve been checking it ever since I got back today.  It hasn’t updated yet, but you can check too, to see if I’m famous!  http://voyagerslog.blogspot.com/  Apparantly I’m the first person to have fainted in the seventeen-odd years that they’ve been running this, and it’s been one of the bigger crises so far.  It really wasn’t that big of a crisis– it took about ten minutes out of our mission, so I’m actually pretty impressed that they run such a smooth operation!

I’ll probably show up in the blog as "some girl that fainted today" or something similar.  I’ll be famous*!

*Sarcasm included.  Sarcasm may cause stomach cramps, anal bleeding, nausea, fatigue or other, much more serious symptoms.  Call your doctor if you experience any significant change in mood, appetite, or sexual performance.  Pregnant women, women suspected of being pregnant, or nursing women should not take Sarcasm.  Use only as directed.
Ask your doctor if Sarcasm is right for you.