J.P.

DL 3374.

I’m on Delta flight 3374 flying from Detroit to Greenville, S.C. This is the final leg of today’s flight. The flight attendant on this Embraer 145 is Cynthia. She is very nice and has made me feel most welcome. I find that many flight attendants in the Delta fleet do their job well. That’s why I tend to stay loyal to the airline.

I’m excited to be back in Greenville to work with the rest of the team this week. There will be a lot of collaboration and productivity this week. I’m ready to immerse myself in work and get stuff done. It’s been a challenge learning what I need to know for my new job, but I believe it is going well and I’m happy with my personal progress.

If the weather cooperates, I’m going to fly with an instructor out of Greenville Downtown airport on Wednesday evening. I’m looking to log some time in a Cessna 172 and this is the perfect opportunity to give it a try. I’m still trying to decide as to what kind of airplane I think Earl and I should buy, hopefully next spring, and flying the C172 will help me narrow down my choices.

Earl has been traveling since Wednesday and he’ll be back home this evening. I just started my travels today and I won’t be home until late Friday night. We don’t do the “power couple” a thing a lot when it comes to travel, but sometimes it’s necessary and we just do it because it needs to be done. Thank the stars for today’s technology with Skype and FaceTime and the like, it makes being apart that much easier for us. It’s not like being home together, of course, but at least it’s the next best thing to being there.

10 August 2015 by Geek 0

Accomplishment.

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do as a private pilot is land the Cherokee on a grass strip, just like my grandfather and father did all the time. My path to becoming a pilot was different than the rest of my family members’ in that I learned to fly at a towered airfield with a really long hunk of concrete that we called the runway. My dad and grandfather learned on grass strips that were basically mowed sections of grass alongside a farmer’s field and as best as I can remember, they never talked on the radio. I know neither even had radios in their homebuilt airplanes.

This weekend, the Recreational Aviation Foundation worked in conjunction with their owners of the Boonville Airport, located in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, to host the annual pig roast at this small airport. Located about 30 miles from home, this is the airport’s way of reaching out to the community to let folks know what goes on at and around these two strips of mowed grass in the woods. I like community involvement like this.

Lsat year Earl and I drove up and had a lot of fun with our fellow pilots and friends. This year I decided it was time to fly the Cherokee up there and land there myself. Since I had only simulated soft-field take-offs and landings on a hard surface, I asked our friend Russ, who is a flight instructor, to go up with me and shoot some landings and take-offs from the grass strip so I could ramp up my comfort level and get in and out of there safely. Mother Nature decided that she had better plans, and Russ and I scratched three planned flights last week due to weather. On Friday I decided that I was going to break out of my comfort zone and figure it out on my own, sort of the next step in confidence building and playing around with the airplane.

Getting in and out of Boonville Airport on Saturday morning turned out to be an very enjoyable adventure. I brought the airplane down onto the grass strip with ease. Russ encouraged me on the radio a little bit and my fellow pilots from the flight club were alongside the runway watching my first landing on grass. All turned out very well and I felt great. When it was time to go, my short-field take off went equally as well and I decided to go play around with the airplane in the local practice area before heading back to home base, where I had another beautiful landing on the familiar hunk of concrete. It was like a butterfly setting down ever so gently on a hot tin roof.

Every time I fly I discover something new about myself, something new about flying the airplane and something new about flight in general. I never tire of it and I often find myself daydreaming about the next time I can go flying.

I’ve started working on the next step of my piloting career and have started studying for my instrument rating. I hope to be flying in the clouds before the end of 2016.

Life is full of adventure and I intend on not missing a minute of it.

10 August 2015 by Pilot. 0

Mall.

  
I am sitting at the mall wondering why I’m here. As you can see by the photograph shown above, there’s not much going on at the local mall. Sears has left the building. Buses keep stopping at the entrance. The only person on said bus is the driver. No one gets on, no one gets off.

Earl is out of town until Sunday. I go out of town on Sunday. We are experiencing what we call “power couple time”, two career minded people passing like airplanes in the night, blinking our lights at one another, making radio calls and blowing kisses in the wind. Things will be back on track next Friday.

I just worked at 12 hour day and because I work at home, I was going stir crazy so I had to get out of the house. I had planned on flying after work today but it was too windy for me to derive any enjoyment from flying and once the wind settled down it was too late because the airport closes at 9:00 p.m. for construction. The construction was slated to be completed in July but now they’re saying September. So they’re closing the airport every night to work on fixing whatever they ripped up earlier in the year. 

Our tax dollars at work.

Next week, during my travels for work, I plan on flying with an instructor in a Cessna 172. Aside from that one time in Kansas City, Mo., I’ve always flown low-wing airplanes, so going up in the high-wing 172 will be a newish experience for me. This is another step in determining the type of airplane I want to purchase for us next spring. I spoke with the instructor today and she seems nice. Since airplanes handle differently, it’s always good to go up with a qualified pilot when flying a new model of airplane for the first time. Most insurance companies require a couple of hours of proficiency flight and when I’m trying something new I always want another pilot with me.  I’m really looking forward to the experience.

It still amazes me that our local Sears store closed and yet our downtrodden, dilapidated Kmart remains open (they’re both opened by the same company). Our Sears was a decent store. I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse. Personally I think Sears could use a sprucing up by adding a little bit of class to their stores, something like this model of store, using the old logo from the 1960s. 

  
  I think it looks kind of sharp.

5 August 2015 by Fun and Games Dept 0

All Shiny And New.

It’s been a month since my latest surgery. I remarked to Earl the other night that I feel absolutely amazing. Having this procedure again has brought me a great amount of relief, not just because I’m now able to pee when I need to pee, but also because I don’t have to watch my liquid intake, I don’t have to keep track of every bathroom location and I don’t have to worry about getting caught trying to urinate indiscreetly next to the Jeep in a downtown parking garage. Everything is working brilliantly and I’m very happy about it. Things are working much better than they did after the same procedure in 2005.

The main reason for me writing this blog entry is so that if difficulties start to arise again, I am able to go back and read how happy I am with that area of my life at this moment. Procrastination is never a good thing and I procrastinated too long in getting this taken care of. If difficulties happen again, I need to get them fixed quickly.

At age 47 I feel like a brand new man. It’s been better than a hit of Viagra.

4 August 2015 by Quirky. 0

Light.

I’ve been slowing upgrading all of the light bulbs in our home to LED lighting. I’m doing this during light bulb replacements; I’m not running around ripping out perfectly functioning light bulbs just to put an LED in its place. That would be kind of crazy. Kind of.

I try to be mindful of the energy we use around here. Not only does using too much energy impact the household budget in a negative way (and we don’t want that when there’s pretty things to buy), but I think it’s important to balance our use of natural resources, etc. during our time on this planet. It’s not really a balancing act, but using more efficient lighting and heating/cooling methods helps me feel less guilty about driving around in a Jeep Wrangler or flying an airplane.

I tried to embrace the CFI (compact fluorescent) light bulbs a while back but honestly I hated them. They were slow to warm up, they gave off a weird colored light and, I don’t know, they didn’t feel right. Plus, it seemed like they burned out faster than incandescent bulbs. Luckily, the CFIs have been burning out quicker and I’m rapidly getting rid of them.

During this switch to LEDs, I’m also ramping back one notch on the perceived wattage of the bulb. For example, I replace a 75W incandescent bulb with an LED that appears to give off 60W. This helps keep the costs down and even better, makes Earl think he’s getting older because everything is dim. Don’t tell him.

The only LED lights that I don’t really like are LED Christmas Tree lights. The coloring looks funky to me. As technology moves forward perhaps they’ll get the coloring closer to the classic bulbs in a year or two.

3 August 2015 by Geek 1

Ads.

As I get older and probably more crotchety, I’m finding that I have a very low tolerance for advertising in general on the Internet. In a way, isn’t it ironic, don’t you think, because I used to make my living by writing ad copy for an advertising agency and a group of radio stations. There’s where my uproariously fantastic knack for humor comes from, from writing ads that were suppose to make people giggle as they listened to the morning show on the local radio station and were allegedly titillated by people that were paid to make people laugh and feel slightly sexy by off-color jokes.

What the hell am I talking about?

Oh, the Internet ads. Now, I don’t believe that I need a tin foil hat because after all, tin foil hasn’t been around in a few decades or six, but I’m really not enjoying the tracking that is done on the Internet for the purposes of targeted advertising. I don’t mind tolerating commercials on the radio and I have been known to sit down once or twice a year for live television and I have tolerated those commercials because after all, that’s what we grew up with. Some shill gets paid to tell us why we should ask our doctor for a pill that gives us oily, gassy excitement in our nether regions (among other things that are probably more productive), but I really don’t like having some shill tell me, specifically me, what I should by based on what I mentioned in an email. For example, I off-handedly mentioned in an email that I was going to hang out with friends and there’d be beer and cigars at the event and now I’m being bombarded with ads for cigar companies. I have mentioned a cigar once via my keyboard but all of a sudden I’m getting all these ads. That’s definitely the product of someone tracking me somehow and I’m not liking it. Now that I think about it, it was an email composed on my Google Chromebook and I wasn’t even using an Google services when I composed that email, it was one of my private email accounts, which can only mean someone is monitoring my keystrokes or watching specific words typed into a form using Google Chrome. I have since wiped Google Chrome off my Mac and I’ve shutdown the Chromebook (it’s for sale if anyone with a higher tolerance for banality than I have is interested).

So I’ve decided to start weaning myself off of ad supported services. I’m already six steps ahead in that game because I use primarily Apple products, which cost a lot more but don’t bombard you with advertising. I’ve had the same Google account for many years (Gmail, Google+, Google Maps, etc) but I deleted that earlier this week and that felt amazingly cathartic. Since Gmail was forwarded to my primary email account, the amount of spam/non-desired mail coming in has decreased to about a 1/3 of what it was in less than three days.

The other thing that is really irking me about ads on the Internet is the click-bait articles, especially those aggregated by the news aggregator apps like Flipboard and Zite. A well known tech blog site had an article entitled, “Why Windows 10 leaps ahead of Mac OS X” and because I’m a die-hard Apple boy, I clicked the link. After getting through an ad that blanked out the entire screen until I found the minuscule ‘X’ in the corner and then the auto-start of a video that blared some really cheesy music that I hastily turned off, the article turned out to be no more than five sentences talking about some inane feature in Windows 10 about network password sharing or something. It was a complete waste of my time and it irked me, so I completely deleted Zite, wiped out Flipboard and pledged to start reading the newspapers that I subscribe to instead of scraping the bottom of the Internet for something to entertain me.

While I’m on a bit of rant, I’m also going to mention that an new app on my iPhone or iPad gets ONE opportunity to ask for a rating in the App Store. If they persist in asking for ratings, I will give them a bad rating and delete the app, finding an alternative that is a little less needy. Asking for a rating is a glorified ad to contribute to a glorified ad for their product and I don’t want to be part of the snowball that this whole thing is starting to resemble.

Another service that I deleted today is Pinterest. Honestly, I’ve never quite figured out what Pinterest is for; I stumbled upon it in an Internet search for clocks to add to my collection and all it was was a bunch of pictures taken from other sites and tagged as interesting. Since Pinterest has since bombarded me with emails that have escaped my spam filters, even after I have filled out forms asking for no more emails, I decided that I can just find the damn photos myself and I yelled “Good Riddance!” to Pinterest.

I understand that most of these services make their living off of advertising revenue, just as I did when I worked for the ad agency and radio stations, but as an old-school consumer of sorts, there are some lines that I have drawn in the sand and I’m not going to tolerate companies crossing those lines.

I’d rather pay for my supper than have someone tell me what to eat.

1 August 2015 by Ponderings and Musings Why. 3

Fly Guy.

So tomorrow is the big trip that I’ve been planning for a year. Earl is already in Indiana by now. Chuck, his wife Elise and I leave in the Cherokee 180 around 10 a.m. tomorrow morning.

We are flying to Oshkosh, Wisconsin for EAA AirVenture, the big aviation celebration and convention that Earl and I have been going to for the last couple of years.

My first visit to Oshkosh was in 1984 with my dad and grandfather. No one from my family has ever flown an airplane to the event.

That will change tomorrow.

21 July 2015 by Fun and Games Dept 0

Monday.

Earl and I are in the midst of packing for our trip to Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Earl has been kind enough to drive out alone; he will be leaving tomorrow afternoon. I will be flying the Cherokee 180 out along with our friends Chuck and Elise. I’m wicked excited about this trip. It’s going to be an awesome adventure.

Tonight we setup the tent to make sure we knew how to do it. It’s a big tent, and we are using it for only one night as we have a hotel room in nearby Appleton, Wis. I’ve always wanted to camp with the airplane at Oshkosh, so we are bringing the tent along.

It’s a big tent.

IMG_1880

20 July 2015 by Fun and Games Dept 0

Visitors.

This summer our back lawn has been a social gathering place for various visitors, much more so than in previous years. I don’t know if it’s because we don’t have a resident guard by way of the feline persuasion living with us or what, but every evening we can look outside and see deer, rabbits, turkeys and more. The deer usually come around meal time, whether it be I’m eating lunch during my workday or Earl and I are eating supper. I don’t know if they just have a terrific sense of timing or whether they can smell us grilling and/or cooking, but they like to stop by and see what’s going on.

IMG_1813

During one of the last visits from the deer, Mama had two of her kids come along with her. One of them jumped over the creek and into the woods as soon as I stepped foot on the patio, but the other kid and the Mama stayed their ground until I was fairly close to them. Mama then made a noise at me, the kid jumped along the same route as his sibling and then Mama jumped behind the both of them. A quick glance into the woods confirmed that they were just across the creek and looking back through the brush at me.

I enjoy the visits from our neighbors.

19 July 2015 by Ponderings and Musings 0

About J.P.

Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.

Weird? Eccentric!

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