Ponderings and Musings

I just read the Old Farmer’s Almanac to see what they’re saying about the weather for this year. They’re right on target for this week, back to cold and snow but things look better starting next week. The summer will be hotter than normal and dry. Let’s hope they know what they’re talking about.

One thing that was not in the Almanac was a prediction for the bout of sniffles that I currently have. I met with an FAA Medical Examiner (doctor) last week for my required exam. He was sniffly but said he wasn’t contagious. But now I have the sniffles. There must have been Kryptonite in his equipment.

For a Monday with loads of meetings and a bout of the sniffles, today is still a pretty good day. I don’t know if it was yesterday’s backseat flying, mulling over Trade-A-Plane to see what airplane I would like to buy or the fact that I went to a luau over the weekend that has me in good spirits. But I’m not going to complain.

I even feel inspired to start writing in my blog again. Let’s see if I can get back into the groove.

So yesterday was Monday and it was a crappy mood. After writing yesterday’s blog entry I decided I needed to do something about my crappy mood and I went upstairs and got cleaned up for the day. When I woke up yesterday morning I waited until the last minute to get out of bed, showered quick and then threw some “whatever” clothes on so I could work from home. I think feeling scruffy contributed to my mood yesterday, so at lunch time I cleaned myself up a little more and tried to feel more presentable. This helped my mood a little bit.

What really helped my mood was a message from my flight instructor indicating that a slot was open late yesterday afternoon and that we could so some flight training.

Now that’s more like it!

So what started out as a “meh” day segued into an awesome afternoon, where I enjoyed flying in the calm, clear skies, practiced emergency maneuvers and I did my first practice emergency landing on the runway. It was awesome. The procedures I have been learning are starting to come naturally to me and I’m “feeling” the airplane more as I fly. It is a wonderful feeling.

Today my good mood continues. I’m all cleaned up and though a little sleepy, I’m feeling good. Work is hectic but I’m trying to remain laid back about the whole thing. There’s no sense in getting all worked up about work, especially when it’s a means for funding my passion of aviation.

I am trying really, really, really hard to not let the winter weather get me down. Today is a beautifully sunny day but it’s still cold out. We have a lot of snow. I want to feel warm. I want to enjoy the outdoors. I’m tired of shivering.

It feels like it has been a long winter, though the calendar says we are still a month away from the “official” start of spring. It can’t get here soon enough.

Some have noticed that I haven’t written in the blog for nearly two weeks. There are a couple of reasons for this and to those of you that reached out to make sure that I was OK, have no fear, my life is better than ever.

A while back I commented that I had hoped to do more with my blog, after all, it’s been around for over 12 years and I’ve met some really nifty people as a result of having this blog. But the times have changed and since blogging was around long before the big social networks, I’ve started to wonder how “out loud” I want to live my life. I’ve been pretty open and honest in my musings on this blog thing and lately I haven’t felt the need to be that way. I think I’ve become more accustomed to the controlled atmosphere of the social networks, where I have control of who is seeing what content. With my blog in its current format, I don’t really have that luxury.

I still love to write but I’m feeling the need to write about specific topics these days. This blog has been a catch-all for everything that has gone on in my life since August 2001, and that’s all well and good, I suppose, but again, there’s that privacy issue that I’m started to be conscious of.

Another thing that kind of irked me about my blog is that I received an email from a person who wanted to start contributing to my blog because I haven’t written enough about a certain subject. Years ago I wrote a blog entry about a long-gone discount department store chain and it still ranks quite high when you search for that chain on Google. The comments to that one entry have connected many former employees together and I think that’s wonderful. That being said, I don’t want to devote a blog to discount department store chains, I just don’t have that interest and quite frankly this is my sandbox and the only other person that would ever be allowed to write in this blog is Earl and he’s going to that he would say, “not in your dreams.”

I am thinking about writing about my flight training and my journey to becoming a private pilot. My lessons are going well, yesterday I started the “next chapter”, as it is, with slow flight and turns at a point. I still can’t describe how much I love flying but when I’m in the airplane, all cares, concerns and worries melt away as soon as we lift off the runway. Learning to become a pilot requires focus, discipline and a whole bunch of work, but those elements are effortless for me because, well, I get to fly! I don’t think I want to write about my student pilot journey on this blog, so I haven’t quite figured out how I want to parse that information out yet. There are a lot of pilots that film their flights, edit them to a beautiful presentation and then share them on YouTube and/or their personal webspaces. I’m not ready for the filming part yet, I’d be too distracted, but the writing part, that’s something I think I’ll do.

I mentioned to Earl that I was really considering just shutting down this blog but he urged me to think about it for a while before doing so. So I’m going to leave it here for now and see if the mood strikes me again when the days get longer or something.

In the meanwhile, I’m here, all is well and I’m lucky because I’m a guy that’s learning how to fly.

Photo courtesy of another student that rode along and snapped a photo during my lesson yesterday.

So I haven’t blogged much lately. I haven’t even really read the small number of blogs that I still read, though there are a few I’ll get back to when I’m back on my routine. I have been enjoying vacation immensely and the experience has definitely recharged my batteries. I had to get through some “stuff” in my head. Perhaps it’s a midlife crisis of some sort. I wonder how many of those I will have before I’m an old man. Nevertheless, this vacation had given me a lot of time to think about all sorts of things and the end result is all good. Disney has that effect on me. Being in “the magic” brings a smile to my face.

It all started with a “delete” icon. Killing my original Facebook account was more cathartic than I ever imagined it would be. The “sigh of relief” I have felt from dumping that account was much bigger than I ever anticipated it would be. There is some saying that says something about wheat and chaff but I don’t remember the exact syntax at the moment. I’m focusing on the good stuff and steering away from the extraneous fluff. It’s like beer – why drink the cheap swill when you can invest a bit and savor an amazing taste of experience?

I have also been making significant adjustments to my Google+ circles and the folks I follow on Twitter. These accomplishments have furthered the feelings of renewal in many ways. Google+ has always been my “techy” social media presence, but now I’m steering it toward aviation and other interests. Many of the tech journalists I have followed over the years have turned their social networking presences to little more than a promotional / information regurgitation outlet. Twitter had been a catch all for me. I’m bringing that into focus as well. I want to read opinions. I like the intelligent debates. I like genuine points of view. That is what I seek today.

The vacation isn’t over yet. I don’t go back to work until Tuesday. So I’m going to go back to sitting back, relaxing and enjoying this flight I’m on. The view is awesome, the sky is bright and the horizon is easily seen. I’m not piloting this plane, but I will be behind the yoke soon enough.

Life is good.

Look how pretty the back yard is today.

It’s a sunny day with partly cloudy skies. But let me tell you something, it’s cold. It’s very cold. In fact, it is currently +5ºF/-15ºC. The wind chill is at -17ºF/-27ºC.

The local school district is one of two districts in Central New York that opened today. Most won’t agree with me on this, but being open makes sense: the students are bused to school, the buses are heated and the school can be heated just as easily as a home can be. I wouldn’t really make my kid wait out by the road for the bus but a good sprint down the driveway as the bus approaches can do wonders for the circulation. I was there many times as a kid and as I grow older I lose touch with the latest trends in nanny states and all that.

That all being said, I’ll admit that I didn’t go to the gym this morning but instead opted to work out in the basement. That’s the hypocrite in me, I guess. However, if I was scheduled to go into the office today I would have still gone into the office, just like the thousands of other folks in the area did today. On the other hand, I will be going out after work to head to the chiropractor. I hope nothing on my body is frozen up to the point where there won’t be any snap, crackle or pop.

The worse thing about this weather is that I am unable to fly today. It’s not good for a student pilot to fly a four-seat airplane in 25 MPH winds and single digit temperatures. I’m looking forward to the day that I’m skilled enough to fly a hearty airplane in this kind of weather, though.

Just as long as it has heat.

I admit it, when I left for work this morning I was in a crappy mood. I had looked at my schedule for the day and I had six hours of meetings on the calendar. I had to work at the office today, ending a two week run of home-office productivity. I’ve never been one to fit into the “one size fits all” mould.

Driving into work I couldn’t bear the noise that was coming from the radio. Local stations, Sirius/XM, talk, music, nothing fit my mood. Honestly, there were only two things that could have put me in a better mood in that moment: 1. snuggled under the blankets for a few extra moments before working from home or 2. flying an airplane somewhere. Neither was bound to happen anytime soon.

I settled on driving to work in silence. I didn’t even talk to myself. There was no singing to the radio, no screeching at the political commentary I might have landed on, no, instead I just listened to my thoughts and the pounding of the Jeep tires on the wet pavement.

I exited the Thruway at the least used interchange on the roadway, went through the tolls and prepared to descend the hill and make the left-turn required to follow the back roads for the remaining portion of my commute. While the Thruway was wet, after all it was 51ºF at the time, the local roads were still covered with slush. I slid right through the intersection and was unable to bring the Jeep to a stop when I wanted to. The pilot training must be taking hold, because I just calmly herded the Jeep over the shoulder of the road and purposely ran through the rumble strip that is designed to keep motorists awake. The extra friction brought the Jeep to a stop.

I never panicked. I didn’t yell. There was no cursing. A couple of years ago, while driving the old Jeep to work I found myself sliding sideways headed toward a sign that proclaimed “EXIT 28”. In the middle of the skid I found time to yell “Shut Up!” at the radio and turned it off before finally getting the Jeep out of its skid. I didn’t have to yell this morning. There was no noise to distract me.

There’s a lot of chatter in our world today. Facebook notifications, Twitter updates, instant messages interrupting our training of thought, bing, bong, boo. I must be getting old because I want the noise to mean something. I don’t want frivolous things flung in my direction, if there’s going to be noise, it better have a purpose.

After bagging the idea of taking the back roads to work (after the skidding incident), I jumped back on the Thruway and stayed on the wet pavement that wasn’t slippery. It was a few extra miles out of my way but I still made it to work in plenty of time. The radio remained off. My mood softened.

Aside from the rhythmic pounding of the Jeep tires, the silence was golden.

So it has been 2014 for over 36 hours in these parts and there is much rejoicing in the land. We’ve been watching snow lightly fall since the New Year arrived. We have about a foot of snow on the back patio at the moment. We should have another foot of snow by this time tomorrow.

Suffice it to say, I’m not going to be able to fly for my next lesson this afternoon.

I don’t mind the snow but I do mind all the hysteria that surrounds it. I complain about this often and sometimes loudly, but I don’t remember the general population being so terrified of snowstorms back in the day. It was rare for school to be closed, we usually ended up with an early dismissal, and it was unheard of for a school to close the night before, but that’s common place now.

This morning I listened to the local radio station on my drive to the gym and the newscaster was telling everyone to stay off the roads today due to the snowstorm. She then said four inches of snow were expected. She encouraged listeners to call 911 if they felt they were in danger.

Now, I’m all for calling 911 if you’re in danger, but unless you’re a complete tool, I don’t see how one can get stranded in four inches of snow. Four feet of snow, I can see, but four inches of snow? Drive through it. If one uses common sense and prepares by having a hat and gloves and boots and a blanket and a bottle or two of water in their vehicle, and they don’t drive into what is obviously a dangerous area, chances are pretty good that you’re going to be able to make your commute just fine.

In fifth grade I remember being stuck at school until nearly 5:00 p.m. due to a snowstorm blowing through. (I remember being excited about the fact that I was see the classroom clocks at “5:00” since I had never seen that before and I have always been a huge geek). One by one the buses would come back from the preceding high school run, the principal would announce the bus number over the intercom and a few more students would be able to leave. Since we lived away from town and our bus went to the outer reaches of the district, bus 53 was one of the last buses to get called. We survived the ordeal just fine and we got home just as Dad was getting back from his day at the store. There were no hysterics. Mom was a little worried but she wasn’t a sobbing mess or anything. Common sense. That’s all that’s needed in these situations.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of that anymore.