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October 31st, 2005 11:27
27 days…
Well, it snowed a couple inches the other day. Yesterday was, however, beautiful, and the snow melted, and I went on my second X-country with my instructor and then we finally got to take mrtee and hyperfl0w out flying. We had planned for a longer trip, but one way or another, things kept going wrong — first I came in from my X-country late because Hanscom was busier than I’d ever seen it before and we were left to do 360s over the airport for an interminable amount of time and then routed out to the north indefinitely before there was a long enough moment for them to allow us to land, then the plane that we took had weird radio issues and we had to check them out for a while, but finally we were off.
There was a completely ridiculous headwind as we made our way up north that cut our speed worse than in half. Eventually we gave up with the northward trekking and turned west and headed out to Keene, NH. We flew over the mountains as the sun was setting — it was a stunningly beautiful haze of red and blue and purple fading together in the haze over the dark mountains. There are very few lights out there to disturb the scenery. The wind – crosswind this time – was still very strong and hampering our progress, but we touched down in the silent, empty Keene airport about 20 minutes after sunset and then stood around watching the red fade to dark blue as the stars came slowly out.
Then we hopped back into the plane and drive back to Hanscom. By this time it was full night (and Zaubi was being rather illegal as he isn’t supposed to carry passengers at night as he hasn’t done 3 full stop night landings solo in the past 90 days).
Today I have my first solo flight since the week I did my official first solo — I made reservations several times since then., but have always had to cancel due to weather! Today is beautiful, though, and doesn’t look windy, so everything should be just fine. Perhaps I shall fly to Lawrence and do some pattern work there.
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Went to T.’s Halloween party Saturday night. I was a bug in a rug (yes, 5 minutes costume with printed out bug mask and a rug of my mother’s wrapped around me and pipe cleaner antennas pinned to my sweatshirt hood) and Zaubi was an Indian chief in a Native American patterned Pendelton blanket and a totally gnarly (heh) headdress made by mrtee for the Murder Mystery party of last August. Fun party, ridiculous number of people, way to many stupid ’sexy’ costumes. HALLOWEEN is NOT about SEXY, people…
October 30th, 2005 22:28
hyphen
You scored 38% Sociability and 52% Sophistication! |
You are comfortable around others. While you don’t have to go out every
night, yet you take pride in being easy to get along with. This should
not, however, be misconstrued as believing (as many do) that you are
without subtlety. In fact, you have the power to inform the anal
retentive that, indeed, they are discussing an anal-retentive issue.
Who else can do that? Quotation marks intimidate you a little bit. |
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My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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You scored higher than 26% on Sociability |
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You scored higher than 34% on Sophistication |
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October 29th, 2005 13:23
Flight cancelled again. SNOW.
It’s not even Halloween and yet it was practically blizzarding this morning. Bah!
I’ve been playing around with this interesting internet communications software (don’t know what else to call it, that’s what they call it), Qnext. It’s pretty neat, that is if I could make it work properly. It is simultaneously supports all-in-one messanging, voice over IP, video conferencing, (secure) P2P file sharing/transfer, audio streaming, group chat, photo sharing, and remote PC access from any web browser (among other things). And it’s completely free!
They have pretty terrible support pages and no good skins yet but I suppose that all comes in time. It seems to be very new. Still, it has the potential to be very cool, I think. I’ve been trying to find good free voice over IP and/or video chat and this doesn’t look half bad. Zaubi and I have been playing around with the video chat all morning with my little ancient Philips ToUcam that I bought years ago – the thing works ok on his machine, but for some reason my laptop seems to feel very strongly anti-video for some reason. This is a realm of troubleshooting that is completely unfamliar to me and so I’m stumbling around a bit…
October 28th, 2005 20:39
The forecast tomorrow calls for *rain and snow*…?!?!?!?!?!!?
It’s October! It never snows here before Thanksgiving! Blah!
We had our flight, that we couldn’t do last weekend, rescheduled for tomorrow. Looks like it’ll be off again. $%#@&!!!
Next weekend we will be in NYC, and then there are only two more weekends after that…
I don’t know what the weather thinks it’s doing, but it isn’t funny.
October 26th, 2005 9:42
Teehee… http://brisbane.craigslist.org/wan/101771143.html
I SEE BLUE SKY!!!!
October 26th, 2005 8:04
Being at work when the sun hasn’t fully risen is just… inappropriate.
The weeks have been flying by of late; still, I wish this one were over already. I am so tired.
We made hotel arrangements for while we are in Sydney from the 3rd Dec to the 8th at Morgans Boutique Hotel in Darlinghurst (what is with all this Australian darling business?). The hotel is only about $80/night while still being an a happenin’ area (so it claims). When we get to Brisbane, we are going to be staying, or rather, housesitting, for Zaubi’s boss to be who will be away for 6 weeks. It should be a decent arrangement on both sides: we won’t have to deal with the whole hotel/car stress and he gets someone to look after his cat and swimming pool. Apparently you have to be very rigorous about feeding Australian swimming pools the proper chemicals. Maybe that is just swimming pools in general.
Finally got our act together enough and have hired a shipping company to ship all our stuff for us. They will pick it up at our door (hurray!) and even pack up the furniture and repack china etc. so that the damage insurance will cover it (I found that if you pack stuff yourself, even if you buy damage insurance, the things won’t be covered). Best of all, they will store it for us for a month before shipping for FREE (we can’t have them ship it right away as then it would arrive in Brisbane before we have our permanent visa and the port would not allow us to pick it up).
Everything is coming together, and thank goodness. There isn’t a lot of time left. Now as long as the pets pass all the requisite blood tests (they should!) everything should be smooth sailing.
October 25th, 2005 21:26
Today we dragged ourselves out of bed at 5AM in order to leave for the airport at 6AM so Zaubi could make his 7:55AM flight. I spent half an hour quickly trying to fix my mother’s computer to little avail (long annoying story) and then we left, into the gale and frigid rain and horrible traffic.
We had gotten a good ways to the airport when I decided to call to check on the flight (we had checked on it earlier and they said it was still on but we were suspicious). Indeed, they had cancelled it, so we turned around in the dreadful traffic, went home, and back to bed.
Thank goodness Tuesday is my work at home day, is all I can say!
After we woke up again, Zaubi called to arrange another flight to make up for the cancelled one, and was informed that *his* flight hadn’t been cancelled, his flight was actually *tomorrow* morning, hadn’t he read the itinerary?
Bah. Getting up at 5AM in a late October wind and rain storm and driving to and from the airport through abysmal traffic twice in a row isn’t my idea of fun… If it were due to an honest cancellation, then, well, there’s no way around it, but when it’s due to someone not bothering to read his itinerary…
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Anyway, we went to the beach today at high tide and it was amazing. I have never seen such large waves at this particular beach: there were 10 footers swirling and crashing at our feet as we and the dogs frantically scootled by, and when we hopped up on the stone wall, we could see the waves striking another part of said stone wall a ways farther down and exploding some 30 feet into the air. It was beautiful.
October 24th, 2005 15:24
Today I am dressed like the girl in the song — in leather and lace.
Tomorrow, my husband is going to ABANDON ME for three days while he goes down to VA on a business trip. I must leave him at the airport at 6AM tomorrow morning, which means that (barring Wilma exploding on us) I will arrive at work at 6:30 AM. Bah! I don’t even know if I can get inside that early.
Oh well, at least in that case I will be able to leave in mid afternoon, before the traffic gets bad. Or, alternately, go and get a haircut, which I need so badly it isn’t even funny.
We have been having a lot of trouble finding my replacement at work. Very few resumes have come in and most were not suitable; the only truly suitable looking person decided to cancel her interview, and the one person we have interviewed thus far was anything but suitable. I have proposed to my boss that I can do contract work from Australia for however long they need me to do so during the transition and she says that seems fine to her. All I’ll need is a good internet connection!
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Last night at midnight, Viacimo decided to get stuck in a tree. My mother heard all these wails and meows and called us outside, where we all stumbled around in the darkness trying to identify where the meows were coming from until we finally saw him, clinging on a branch, 25 or 30 feet off the ground. Of course, at my mom’s house, there is *no light* whatsoever as it is in the middle of the woods, it was a clouded damp night, and she has no outdoor lights or indeed anything better than a flashlight that was going dead. We couldn’t think of how to get him down from there, as the tallest ladder my mom had was some 15 feet short of where Viacimo was, the tree had *no branches* until you got as high as Viacimo was (and even then they had a diameter of only about 2 inches), the tree was one of those variety that has very mossy, slippery bark, and it happened to be located next to a painful looking foot high stone wall that separates the yard from something of a cliff. And we couldn’t see anything. Viacimo is black as black, to make matters even worse!
I got out my climbing rope and we tried unsuccessfully to throw the rope over the branch that Viacimo was on — it was pitch black, Viacimo kept walking back and forth and wailing and we didn’t want to hit him, we all have horrible aim, and there were too many little leafy things interfering with the whole business. The tree was way too slippery, in any case, to even scrabble your feet on without them skidding right off even if we had tossed the rope successfully, and there was nothing that could be used as a potential anchor near it even if we did manage to throw the rope over and hook somebody into belay.
Then I had the brilliant idea of using loops of climbing webbing. I had several long pieces of webbing tied into loops, and I figured that if you put the doubled over webbing around the tree entirely and pull one doubled over end through the other doubled over end and pull tight, it will hold onto the tree and you can stick your foot through the end that you pulled through and use it like a step. I had 3 of these looped pieces of webbing. So I climbed up the ladder and put the first piece of webbing around the tree, stepped off the ladder and into the loop, attached the second piece of webbing to the tree, and then realized that I had absolutely no potential hand-hold to use while putting my second foot in the second piece of webbing. I could have balanced precariously and tried to attach my final piece of webbing to make a third step and use that as a handhold while sticking my feet into the other two pieces, but it was a difficult job to do with only one hand while trying to maintain enough pressure on webbing #2 so that it didn’t relax and slide off.
And in truth, I wasn’t feeling very good about standing 15 feet above the ground (over a stone wall and a cliff) on one foot on a piece of webbing in the pitch dark trying to climb a vertical object that was as slippery as black seaweed at low tide.
So I came down, and Zaubi climbed up instead. He was lucky enough to be tall enough to be able to reach a useful handhold while standing on webbing #1, and so he skittered up to Viacimo successfully via the three webbing pieces (albeit with many worried noises from the two people below). I passed him up the climbing rope on a tall metal thingie my mother has for opening the skylight, and he looped it over the strongest looking branch and tossed down the end. Then he managed to coax Viacimo over, grabbed onto him and stuck his clawed feet firmly onto the tree, looped one line (the wrong one, I may add) of the rope a few times around his arm, clung onto the rope while I clung madly onto the two ends down below, and walked down the tree via the webbing loops, using the rope as a handhold. Every few feet he detached Viacimo from the tree and re-attached him a bit farther down. I kept tight tension on the rope with both hands, letting it out slowly as he needed until both my hands were stretched way out above my head (he had wrapped the wrong line around himself!). Luckily, at that point he was close to the ladder.
The whole procedure must have taken about an hour, the three of us shivering in the damp pitch blackness. Viacimo disappeared as soon as he touched the ground and only reappeared a while later, looking very subdued.
October 24th, 2005 10:42
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence and the title of the book in the comments or your blog (along with these instructions, if the latter).
5. Don’t search around for the coolest book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
My result?
“In Theravada Buddhism the prime attribute of enlightenment is wisdom (bodhi), meaning profound insight into the nature of reality, the causes of anxiety and suffering, and the absence of a separate core of selfhood.”
– The World’s Religions, Huston Smith.
Wow, that sounds super boring, doesn’t it? But it *is* an interesting book.
October 23rd, 2005 9:30
5 weeks… 35 days.
I dreamed of my father last night. I haven’t seen him in a year and a half.
Which reminds me: shall I ever see any of the Three Unsuitable Men again? I shall not mention their names.
Today is vile and pissing rain. Thus, no lovely cross country out west to see the leaves. Perhaps next weekend. There has to be at least one good weekend in these final 4 weekends, although all too soon all the colored leaves will be gone.
I need about 17 more hours of flight to finish my license. About half of that is solo time, and half is cross country. If only the weather would hold a bit, I’d have some hope of finishing, but then, maybe it is better not to finish here, since I will have to have a bunch of hours of instruction once we get to Aussie in order to fulfill their much stricter navigation requirements, learn to fly a completely different plane, learn all the airspace etc. rules for Australia, and take their tests.
We brought the dogs in last night so they wouldn’t have to sit out in this miserable chill and damp. After a bit of growling around, they settled down quite companionably. I think living together outside has improved their relationship.
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