Darling, it's incredible that someone so unacceptable, thinks that I am unacceptable too.

We have new members. We are growing as wildly as Jimmy's hair.

And there's even more today!

Why would we mess with an unbeatable formula? Well. Let me back up. 

The last time I wrote, Jimmy and I had just returned from New Mexico. Soon after that, we had a presentation to give in Greensboro about our experiences with ballooning.

That talk went so well that we decided to add Dan to it and give another talk at the State of North Carolina Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium. 

But in between all of this talking, we've also been writing, writing, writing. We applied for $5,000 from NC Space Grant.

Why did we do that? Well, let me back up.

The entire time we were in New Mexico I kept saying to Jimmy, "I feel like we'll be back here." I don't remember him contradicting me and that could either be because he didn't disagree with me, or he did and I was too tired to listen, or because I didn't want to hear it and chose not to. Regardless, I had a spooky feeling the entire time we were at CSBF that we'd be back!

The week I got back from New Mexico was hectic and I had a lot to do to get back up to speed. One day Jimmy and I had a serious conversation where we agreed not to take on any new projects until the projects we were currently working on were completed. We shook hands. It was at that moment that an email landed in my inbox with an opportunity to launch our own PIPER scale balloon from CSBF in New Mexico. I almost didn't tell anyone about it, and by that, I mean I had told Jimmy about it within the hour. 

We told the team and they were on board, too. We agreed to shelve tUR-3 until the Spring and focus all of our balloon energy on this application. 

This challenge is going to be huge! This payload will be more advanced than tUR-1 or tUR-2. In order to complete the application we'll need to plan the entire project from wiring to diagrams. The proposal will be about as long as our PLAR. We'll need to call on help from all of our contacts and reach out to new people. Luckily, we've been meeting some talented individuals from all of our schools and other projects and some of them are crazy enough to want to join us.

We've already spent hours and hours of work just getting ready to apply and it is a national competition with only 12 spots, so we know that our odds of acceptance are slim. 

Last night we had our second all hands meeting and managed to get most of the team in the same room.

 We were focused.

We were a little worried.

We were at times overwhelmed by the challenge we've chosen.

But we're also eager to get to work!