I have to admit: Washington State is beautiful. And what’s the best way to get acquainted with the Evergreen State? Explore the outdoors of course!
The beauty of Washington state
That’s something you don’t get to do much in Florida. The typical summer months here are a completely different idea than my summers in the Sunshine State. I can actually spend a lot of time outside without worrying about heat exhaustion or a sun burn!
So that’s exactly the first thing we did when my roommate came. That weekend, a few other friends and I went hiking to a place called Poo Poo Point (yes that is actually the name…) After a short 45 min. drive, we started our hike at about 10 am. See, not being a very outdoorsy girl, and upon encountering dreaded a 20-degree-steep climb all the way to the top…I gave up. Yep, I’m ashamed to say it but hey I lasted a good hour and a half! Anyways, my roommate and friends kept going, and I made my way back down to the mountain to do some shopping in the little town right by it. After about 5 hours, they were still not back, and I began to worry. Two hours passed…still nothing. I decided to call them. It turns out they got lost in the mountains!! They ended up at a private residence about 20 mns away by car, so I went to pick them up one by one. It was definitely a lucky break that I had decided to come back to the car! We would have had to walk all that way back to where the cars were parked! It was definitely my first great adventure here…
The following week after that was pretty uneventful at work. My job deals with pretty much every component around the engine, as well as the thrust reversers and the APU section in the tail. Say a material needs to be changed, or there is some sort of non-conformance from the original part drawing, then it is up to my team to figure out if it’s OK structurally to fly. I mean, these parts can be $1 million plus! So we can’t just be throwing everything away for the slightest error! We do a lot of finite element modeling, which is pretty much cutting a part into a bunch of little pieces and figuring out the stresses at every point on the part. It’s definitely not an easy job, but yet again, we are dealing with very high temperatures sometimes (1000F+) and constant vibration loads all around!
Example of FEM model – no pictures allowed at Boeing!
The weekend after that, we went to yet another baseball game (it seems to be a big thing around here, and Boeing employees get a pretty hefty discount on tickets).
At the game
SUPER Mariners fan
This time, it was Mariners-v- Yankees…guess who won? Yep, not Seattle…But what we did after that was quite more exciting! A few hours after the game ended, we went to watch a Roller Derby match. Yep, those girls in roller skates pouncing at each other and doing laps around a track. It was definitely very interesting…not quite as violent as I would have thought, though.
Roller Derby!
Right after the game, which luckily for us was near the Space Needle, we walked around the famous landmark. I love this city!
Space Needle
