The Stupid, It Burns

Don’t even gripe about how I vaguely promised a post after my weekend and it’s now Thursday.  I am day-challenged and deserve a 3 day margin of error at all times. In truth though, it was one of those weeks where when I wasn’t busy, I was laaaaaazy, so I just felt like writing anything longer than a paragraph was much too much work. That said, I have some recollection of leaving you with hope for a fun-weekend update when I returned from my trek to the Portland area.

Portland, as some of you may know, is Oregon’s major Metropolis. We don’t have much in Oregon, but Portland we do have. It’s like any other city except cleaner, really intent on recycling and a hippie haven.  I like Portland a lot, I just don’t think I’d want to live there. Though this will win me very few friends, I have an aversion to public transportation, love driving my car, and am mildly convinced that the chance of you getting murdered and/or mugged greatly increases just by being within the general proximity of a Big City.  I’m a small town girl at heart. I like my limited choice of take-out and knowing the cashiers at the grocery store. Not that I go against the grain of whatever city I’m in. I used public transportation for months and months when I was studying abroad, I just got home and gave my car a huge hug and told her I would never leave her again.

All of that aside, my friend Heather and I drove up to Portland and stayed with a friend of mine from high school (Jaz). Friday night we planned a kind of reunion party with all our Portland friends. I have the unique experience of having a large group of friends who are all friends with each other wherever I go. I’m not entirely sure why I gather groups instead of just individuals, but that’s how it is. So all my high school friends now living in Portland got together Friday night and we went to McMenamins (which I had no idea how to spell- had to look it up) which is a West Coast restaurant if I remember correctly.  Well, some are restaurants with bars, some are bars, some are restaurants/bars/hotels… basically each one is entirely unique. My dad and step-mom stayed in one that was an old school house remodeled. In any case, the one we went to in Portland (they’re like Starbucks, they’re everywhere but way cooler than Starbucks, because while Starbucks has good frappucinos, they’re also taking over our souls with every sip, I’d like to think that McMenamins is not, or at least is doing it in a less obvious way) was kind of petite, but had a sort of underwater theme or something. I wasn’t paying that much attention.  In the bathroom though (please be advised: 12 year old humor coming) there was a baby changing table that was suppose to read “Sturdy Station” like that was the brand. And somebody had scraped away the ‘S’ at the beginning so it read “Turdy Station” — I admit it, I totally laughed and told people when I returned to my table.

Check it out!

http://www.mcmenamins.com/

My group of friends from high school is reknown for not eating out. We eat together, but it’s always at each other’s houses. So pizza and junk food basically. This was the fourth time we had eaten out in 8 years. My senior prom, Taco Bell before bowling, Chinese food before a storm and last Friday. Beat that. After food (I had tatertots) we returned to my friend’s apartment and ran through our usual list of shenanigans before everybody headed home and the people staying behind went to bed.

Oh! I know what I forgot. On our way to the restaurant we were about halfway through this crosswalk when this policeman ran a RED LIGHT and literally came within a FOOT of hitting us. Not even joking. He slammed on his brakes and just looked at us like “oh, you can go, that’s fine.” And all of us looked at him like “ARE YOU NUTS?!!?!?!?!?!” Seriously, and he didn’t put on his lights or anything, he genuinely ran a red light and almost hit a group of people in the middle of an intersection. How insane is that? It was so scary. I respect and support the police, but sometimes I swear to God they are the worst drivers out there.

Moving on, Saturday Heather went to visit her other friend who was also in Portland and while she was out with him, Jaz and I went shopping at the Pioneer Square mall, ate lunch, wandered through one of the mini Powells bookstores that are lying around. Powells for those of you who don’t know is… um… amazing. The main bookstore occupies an ENTIRE city block. It’s like Book Heaven.

http://www.powells.com/info/places/burnsideinfo.html

After all the fun shopping we ended up getting back together again with our friends. We hung out and watched Steel Magnolias and Stargate. Great movies to be sure. We also played Life, where I came in second because while I finished in debt I apparently had done a lot of living and when it came time to reveal our Life cards I had secretly managed to win the Nobel Prize, win some kind of sports award, publish a Best-Selling Novel, discover a new flavor of icecream… etc. etc. I was basically hard-core awesome.

Sunday we ate bagels, watched Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Grease, and then I headed to Eugene where I went to college and had dinner with my group of college friends at Olive Garden. Because when you’re there… you’re family.

I got back into my small hamlet around 1 in the morning, give or take, after battling some serious fog on the drive home. Fog that always appeared right when I was passing a semi. Ah well, c’est la vie.  So, as you can see, life was pretty good to me this weekend so I hope you can forgive me for not enjoying some of the lovely weather to fly. Hopefully it clears up soon and I can take my Mom up and also get some pictures for y’all.

On a more blog-related note.  Care, who has a great blog that you should check out (which can be found here: http://bkclubcare.wordpress.com/) commented recently about a woman in New Hampshire that crashed an ultra-light.  (definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight) Ultralights are basically (kind of) small, tiny, petite, weightless airplanes that don’t require a license. Yes, they’re cool, but you can’t go as far or as high and you get more respect, as good ol’ Rodney Dangerfield would say, if you get your actual license for real, adult planes. Nothing against ultralights, I’ve heard they’re crazy fun. I just like to tease. In any case I did a little research because I hadn’t heard anything about this, and this woman apparently had little to no experience and decided to take it for a spin. I don’t know how I feel about that because I’m not sure, maybe she got some instruction, but obviously not enough.  As in, oh my god, she was dumb. Now, I don’t want to sound rude towards her,  I’m a nice person generally and I’d like to give her the benefit of the doubt, she is probably a great person, fun to be around, obviously likes a challenge. I bet she’s a great mother and just wanted to try something new. So putting that aside and examining just the situation, not her personally… seriously?

This woman, by one account, took off WITH the wind, like not into the wind like normal people, but with it… with it. You just don’t do that. If that’s true, and she did, oh.my.god. It’s basic flying 101, you just don’t land or take off with the wind.  That’s how you overshoot your landing, or flip the plane or um… crash into somebody’s house. Even when doing an emergency landing you’re suppose to keep in mind which direction the wind is blowing so you can land into it if possible. ANYWAY, the stupidity makes me hurt inside, so she finally takes off and then proceeds to stall various times, flip the ultralight around in circles and then spirals into a house. Let me repeat that, into a house. The woman inside thought her house was blowing up. She was fine by the way, the woman flying the ultralight. But my brain, it can’t handle the stupid. Now, I’m not advocating having to get a license or certificate for flying an ultralight (though many countries do) but I am saying to use some common sense. Get some dual-training, talk to people, don’t just randomly go out and do solo work. You’re IN THE AIR, people. If you get lost you can’t stop and ask for directions, you can’t pull over on the side of the road and calm down while you figure out what that weird noise is. COMMON SENSE… get some.

I’m done now. But for your enjoyment I have a list of websites below that cover the crash. My personal favorite is the first one, it has a video of witnesses, and though the camera man and interviewer (possibly the same person) are a little, shall we say… novice? in their experience, we still enjoy the commentary:

http://www.eagletribune.com/punewsnh/local_story_049022925.html

http://www.lowellsun.com/todaysheadlines/ci_11789756

http://www.derrynews.com/chester/local_story_049160800.html

http://wbztv.com/local/newhampshire/nh.plane.crash.2.943885.html

Thanks Care for the story!

My Shiny, New, Real License

Hello! Couple of things I realized yesterday. One, I have a few pictures I never posted from back in the day. We’re talking checkride pictures. I don’t remember what day the checkride was (though I remember it vividly of course) but I do know that it was several months ago.  The thing is, these pictures came in my email and were taken by the airport manager’s wife. Hence why they didn’t get posted with the rest, I didn’t have them at the time. But the neat part is, for me anyway, is that they were taken as soon as Randy finished his checkride and also passed. So we were both enormously happy. Randy, you might remember, was the man that I had been studying/flying with for the last several weeks prior to my test. He had also been putting it off for years, so it was a big deal to both of us. The pictures show us in all our happy glory, and there’s a picture of the yummy cake we got to eat. There are also photos of Whitney Balentine, the instructor who came down from up North and passed us.

Me making a squinchy face and Whitney Balentine, RIGHT after the test. I literally had just found out I had passed for absolute positive, and I don’t even think Dick (who had taken this picture) knew whether or not I had passed yet. Imagine the embarassment of him taking a picture of me NOT passing. How would you like that forever immortalized?

Me being… well, me.

Me with my grandparents, also insanely happy. Though not nearly as happy as me, obviously.

Me, Randy, and Whitney. All posing for somebody else’s camera.

The crew. L to R: Courtney (looking way too excited), Randy, Me, Whitney

Our cake! that we were afraid was going to slide off the platter by holding it like that. I also loved that sweater and was sad to return it to my grandma after wearing it all winter

My second thing (I now realize there are more than a “couple”) is that I completely forgot to tell you all that my pilot’s license came in the mail. Like the real card that you carry around with you instead of my fakey fake paper that looks like you wrote it in Word and printed it off.  I was pretty excited because I had convinced myself that the FAA had screwed it all up and I would never receive it. I took a picture of myself being dorky with my card because obviously who doesn’t want to see my shining face next to a small piece of plastic.

yes, that is orville and wilbur.

oh nooos

My third piece of news is that since I received my license I had to fulfill my promise of calling Courtney to let him know that I had got it in the mail. Apparently he was feeling a little put-out because I hadn’t contacted him in two months. But seriously, I had no reason to since all I had said was that I was going to call when I got it. So I did. This is actually quite the feat because it’s three hours later there and he’s only home pre-7am, so you do the math. I ended up watching a BBC mini series until 5:30 the morning I called him, and the phone call only interrupted my viewing pleasure for about 7 minutes because Courtney’s idea of a phone conversation is 30 seconds or less, so that he even got past the 5 minute mark is more impressive than any of you realize.

We chatted about the usual state of affairs (“Danell, you need to get your ground school license. It’s not easy, don’t think it’s easy. But you can do it–.”  I had missed being called Danell, because clearly that is my name) and he was glad to hear I’d taken up at least one person and wanted to hear all about my instructor here and the airport and my thoughts on the 172. It was fun, I miss the Michigan airport crew, they were like a little family. It’s not really like that here quite as much– you know the people at the airport, but you don’t go drink at bars together afterwards and hang out at each other’s houses. Anyway, it was nice to hear what he’d been up to (i.e. he was in the local paper for finally reaching 10,000 hours- yes, 10,000- compared to my paltry 100+, not to give me a complex or anything) and very little flying since the weather had been Michigan weather ever since I left, I brought on the awesome apparently. He has great hopes that I’ll return for a while come summer and hopefully I have enough  money to do just that, I should perhaps start saving N.O.W.

So that is my all-flying-all-the-time, news.  I’m off to the big city of Portland with my Valentine Heather tomorrow, so no idea if there will be any posting this weekend. We are planning on driving so there should be no major flight tidbits. However, plenty of weekend excursion updates when I return.  Most of my friends from highschool live up there, so visiting gets 80% of my social circle in one go. We also are stopping in Eugene on the way back since we drive right through it and will visit my college friends. Have to love Oregon and its crazy one interstate, everything is on your way to somewhere. Hope your weekend is just as fun as mine should be!

Cheesecake Vs. The Hardy Boys

Blog of Interest:

That last post got um… a lot of attention. There must be something about purple that gets to people. I’m sure it helped that there were dozens of pictures too. In any case, I came across this really neat blog recently that I thought I would share. I’m afraid that it’s far more interesting than mine just by sheer virtue of this woman having a cooler life but she is worth the competition.  The woman is a bush pilot in South Africa, and she writes about not only her daily doings but also, obviously, about flying. She’s also pretty funny and a great writer. I didn’t ask for her permission to post the link, which I should perhaps do, but since she was recently in a LiveJournal spotlight, I’m sure she’s used to the extra attention. If she randomly ends up on this blog and notices that I linked her and would prefer me not to, I’ll take it off. But it would be a shame because the topic is super interesting. She has amazing pictures and where she lives sounds incredible.  I’m not jealous or anything, I swear.

So below is the link, check it out if you’re interested and you might end up with something new to bookmark.

http://vilasy.livejournal.com/

Valentine’s Day:

Aside from that, a Happy Belated Valentine’s Day to all. It’s also commonly referred to as Singles Awareness Day, Hallmark Day, Candy Day, Totally Manufactured by Card Companies Day, Massacre Day, and my personal favorite EVOL. I did not bemoan my singleness because what ever is the point in that, and instead celebrated it with a good friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in a while. I sent her a Singing Valentine which my mom’s quartet does every year, and she brought me chocolate covered strawberries (oh my god, yum) and a pretty glass swan with a rose in it.

I also got various presents from parents, friends, and family. A lot of candy, a book detailing the history of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys (Frank and Joe were my first loves) and a beautiful wooden rose. So all in all, I feel pretty popular. Heather (my friend) and I made sushi in my apartment which is a long standing tradition for us, we don’t usually even make it out of the kitchen because we eat it as we go along, and had some seriously delicious cheesecake for dessert.  I love cheesecake.  Which is a lesson to all of you who sit alone and gripe on VDay because you think you’re not loved.  Not only do your friends and family love you, but cheesecake does too.

link to book:

http://www.amazon.com/Mysterious-Case-Nancy-Drew-Hardy/dp/1416549455/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234831092&sr=8-1

Questions to Consider:

I wonder actually what would happen if you had a battle royale between cheesecake and the Hardy Boys. Is it even fair to have both Hardy Boys fighting against one cheesecake? Which one would you choose to go into battle against something so tasty?  I always did like the impetuous Joe Hardy, especially in my younger and more naive years, but it’s kind of a tossup in the end between him and Frank. Frank is branier, geekier and would fit into my friend group, but is a little condescending and needs a good beating by somebody who knows how to argue.  But Joe is madcap, passionate, and a little angsty. He acts purely on emotion and though no slouch in the brain department, uses his brawn in most cases.  However, he does have a motorcycle.

Do you think cheesecake would be an intellectual fighter or a Karate expert? Frank and Joe are both experts in Karate but as stated, Joe is the more physical of the two. He’s also the only one who ever becomes single at any point during their 80 years of adventures. Sure it’s for a brief period of time, but he has hope. Not that I couldn’t take Callie (Frank’s girlfriend) in a fight, because let’s face it– I totally could. Um… anyway, I have to say in the end I’d go with the Hardy Boys vs. The Cheesecake. I love cheesecake but Frank and Joe are just part of me, I think either could take down a piece of turtle cheesecake, resplendent in its chocolate crust, creamy goodness, crumbly nut exterior and sticky caramel. Any takers?

Hardy Boys Through the Ages:

The original 1927 Hardy Boys. They were classy, they wore sweater vests. They solved cases called "The Missing Chums." They were everything you wanted in a young Depression-era boy and more.

oh lord, my personal favorite Hardy Boys. Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy. Parker playing the much-loved Frank Hardy, he has brains, he has wit, he has the classic Travolta look. And Shaun, 70s pop star or secretly a mystery solving boy detective with future washboard abs?

oh.my.god. i need these.

only 13 episodes of watching Paul Popowich (Joe) and Colin Gray (Frank) parade around in the leather jackets, sweater vests and giant cellphones while attending college. 1995 was a great year.

Who knows what the future holds…

Purply goodness

Prepare yourself… for a picture post! Rejoice, rejoice.

Still no flying pictures but this is because Oregon suddenly decided to take on some winter-like qualities (it was 60 last week) and become cloudy, gray and altogether bleak. We even got a good snow dusting of all things. That said, the pictures are of course of my new apartment. I promised you visuals of my purply goodness and boy have I delivered. You wouldn’t think a place so petite would supply so many photos, but it managed. It is small but mighty.

I think how I’m going to do this is like a before and after image gallery. There are a lot of pictures so I will just post them as one giant group, but you can click on them to make them bigger. The before is of all my plastic tubs lying around and the after is how great it looks now. I have visited every major store in the entire valley in the last week and have spent great quantities of money but luckily, as anyone who had lived on their own knows, most things you only need to buy once or twice in a lifetime, like pots and pans and knife sets. So that’s a plus. I haven’t finished decorating yet so excuse the fairly barren walls, but the rest is more or less done. There are of course the obligatory cardboard boxes lying around in some shots, but they will be removed by the end of the week.

The last week+ has been entirely spent creating a home. I’m not one to leave unopened boxes lying around so after several painful and long days, I managed to get everything at least mostly unpacked. It was all then transferred to available spaces or put into piles for further relaying. As you can see by one of my pictures my closet is FULL. It’s a fairly big closet and as you can see I have more clothes than Christ has followers. I even gave three bags away to Goodwill. Clothes that I actually still wore but that really didn’t need to be in my wardrobe. The problem with my clothes is that I wear every single piece, I really don’t have many pieces at all that I don’t wear more than 5 times a year,  it’s bad. Most people when they have that many clothes never wear half the things.  I did pare it down to the things I’d miss if they were gone though, which is a step. Someday I’m going to have a gigantic walk-in closet where I can hang every single thing up and maybe it will rotate like in Clueless so that I can see everything. *sigh*

Take special notice of the bathroom, it has this great tiled wall and even though the place is small, I do have tons of storage areas. There is a built-in bookshelf next to the entertainment center, shelving under the tv, I built a bookshelf for the living room, I have tons of drawers and cupboards in the kitchen, that closet in my bedroom, etc. The only place missing storage is the bathroom which I mostly remedied by a little shelving unit in the corner. You would not believe how many bathroom type items I have, it’s insane.

Aside from apartment decorating, I also managed to get internet, as you can see. The awesome part is that my neighbor can also receive it and so we’re splitting the cost. She’s the one who lives behind me, you can see the side of her apartment when you look at the pictures of the courtyard/gazebo, it’s on the left. We share a wall, and while sometimes she’s doing God knows what in the mornings, like building furniture or something, she’s mostly awesome, quiet and super friendly. So far I like the area a lot, and it seems to be working out well. I even bought myself a turkey yesterday and baked it starting at 10 at night (yes, it wasn’t ready until 1:30) and now have two huge plates full of yummy meat in my fridge and am making homemade turkey noodle soup out of the carcass. It smells delicious. The turkey was on sale for $9.99/10 lbs. It was a great deal. Anyway, so I’m going to be eating turkey from now until Thanksgiving.

But, without further ado, here are the pictures:

the main house, my apt. is to the left, this is where the woman who rents to me lives

my apartment from the front, the main house is on the right

shared courtyard

gazebo + kara’s apartment on the left, she’s the one sharing internet with me

my bedroom on moving day, i had the hardest time finding the screws to put my bed together. they ended up at my mom’s house in a drawer for some reason

My living room now. I personally think it looks better

My messy bed, usually it’s neater, I just was too lazy to go over and fix it. I also, as you can see, haven’t figured out a wall decoration yet

My bookshelf on left and closet on right. FULL OF STUFF

bookshelf and end of bed and window in bedroom

my bathroom sans junk or shower curtain

My bathroom now with junk in it and a shower curtain

my living room on moving day

My living room now

my dad looking busyandimportant

A fuzzy picture of my kitchen

stained glass window next to my front door

tile in my bathroom, pretty no?

My new table, cause Jaz asked me nicely to post a picture of it

Me being dorky at my front door. I’m usually cuter than this

So there you are. Enjoy! My dad is here so I have to go but I of course left you with all this fun.

Footie Pajamas

See, that was good. Thank you everybody who commented or who might comment in the future. I really like hearing who is out there.

So, there is some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I went flying today for little under an hour. The bad news is:  I was totally lame and forgot to take pictures. I know I said last entry that I hadn’t forgotten. And obviously, I haven’t forgot since I’m talking about it right now, but I go so carried away with checking weather and getting the plane ready and whatnot that I completely forgot to grab my camera out of my car and there’s just not a lot you can do about it when you’re 5500 feet in the air and you remember. I swear up and down that I will get pictures the next time I go out though.

The flight today, fortunately for me, and unfortunately for blog writing, was pretty uneventful. I took the plane up, circled the training grounds and came back. I was hoping my Mom could go with me today but she was detained by some work issues and couldn’t make it. I will just have to wait until another great day comes along and take her up. Today wasn’t actually great- it was good though.  Close to 60 degrees (got to love February), and even though we’ve had an air stagnation advisory since forever, the valley was pretty clear of haze and fog. There was even a slight crosswind, so on landing I started drifting a little towards the left of the runway and had to correct, but I came down okay in the end.  My principal issue in the 172 is the landing which I’m always deathly afraid will be horrifyingly wrong; that either I will come in too high or low or float forever down the runway.

Of course, I don’t come in with this negative attitude, I always do my pattern and say: “This landing will be great. Not only great, it will be awesome! Beyond awesome, more like completely and utterly fabulous. People watching will stop in awe and clap. There will be banners and brass bands and ponies awaiting me.” Because if you talk yourself into a bad landing before you’re even landing you might as well just circle the airport, run of fuel and crash to your fiery death.  Confidence is key.  That way even if you miss, the miss won’t be huge, it will be marginal and you can try again. If you go in defeated chances are you will ironically run into the graveyard oddly positioned at the end of our local runway. All that said, if the runway were about 1,000 feet longer I wouldn’t worry about about it, but then I wouldn’t be at a small town airport anymore either. I do miss the Cherokee when it comes to landing. I never once did a go-around in the Cherokee and with the Cessna, it’s always a real threat.  Not that go-arounds are actual threats, but they’re a hassle and always mildly embarrassing. Kind of like finally getting up the nerve to ask that person out you’ve always liked and knowing that the chances of them turning you down are pretty high.

In other news, I get to move into my apartment tomorrow. I really will have pictures of that shortly  now that I’ll be living there. It’s a lot easier to go get my camera from my car parked out in front of my house than to ponder whether it’s possible to fly over your car, throw a fishing line down, somehow maneuver it so it manages to enter a not-open window and then magically hook onto your camera case in the back seat and pull it up 5000 feet.  I know, I know- if you don’t try you’ll never know. Anyway, absolutely nothing is packed which is pretty  much how I roll. The good news is, 90% of my things are in storage so technically, kind of packed. All that’s left is a third world country’s life supply of clothes, books, and Christmas gifts. I stand a fair chance of actually getting most of my things into the apartment tomorrow. I don’t know if I will actually sleep there tomorrow night, but I will at least have multiple boxes consuming the floor.

My mom, bless her little 5 foot 3 inch soul, took me shopping and got me an amazing amount of apartment type things. I’m now the proud owner of trash cans, cleaning supplies, pots and pans, silverware, cups, clocks, and the list continues. It was brilliant, and if I didn’t already love my mother in the way obligatory to most children, I would at least worship the ground she walks on. She’s like the cat’s pajamas. But not your ordinary pair, like a footie-clean sheep soft-hot pink pair that you know is meant just for you.