Did you ever have one of those moments where you just find yourself thinking "Wow, my life is so cool?" I just had one of those.

Bit of background: There's an astronomer/shuttle astronaut, John Grunsfeld, who once did some observing out at the VLA, and apparently carries some very fond memories of the place. Now, the astronauts get an allowance of a certain number of items that they're allowed to carry on each flight on behalf of some group or organization. And this guy decided it would be cool to take up something on behalf of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (so he'd have an excuse to come back here, or so he says!). He ended up taking a big flag with the NRAO logo, which all the NRAO employees (including yours truly) got to sign.

The shuttle mission was last month, and today he came here to present the flag, and gave a really great little talk about what it was like to work on the Hubble Space Telescope, complete with video footage. And at some point I'm sitting there in a smallish room with a few dozen other people, looking at this astronaut who's holding a piece of cloth with my name on it that's been up on the space shuttle as he's happily describing to us what it's like to work in space, and it hits me. This is exactly the kind of thing the space-struck little kid that I once was would be so jealous of! I had something of the same feeling the first time I got to walk around on top of a radiotelescope dish. And when I realized that I was actually working in a room labelled -- quite sincerely -- "control room."

Sometimes my job is really annoying. Other times, you know... it has its compensations.