Flying News and Easter

13 04 2009

Good news, I got an email from my old flight instructor who said she would be working on keeping her IFR training updated soon and would need a safety pilot. That would be me, which would be awesome, cause then I’d get some hours in and also have some better blog stories. IFR flying, as most of you know, is flying around when the weather is below minimum. Like maybe there are a lot of clouds, for example. It would obviously take forever to get your IFR training done if you were always waiting on some bad weather to drift your way, so you can practice wearing foggles (giant glasses that have the top half all fogged up so you can’t see outside the plane), etc. to simulate an inability to see much outside of your plane. From what I gather, a safety pilot sits in the co-pilot seat and makes sure the pilot doesn’t do anything too stupid while practicing. They don’t wear the foggles, they get to hang on for the ride and let the pilot know they’re tilted at a funny angle. I don’t anticipate any problems with my past instructor, she’s a great pilot, so it should be educational and fun. So yay flying news! The weather is verrrrry slowly trying to get better which is a plus too, there might just be some flying in my future!

Aside from that, I’m keeping busy. Easter was a festive occasion. Friday night I dyed Easter Eggs and had an Easter dinner at my Mom’s house. We watched a CSI marathon along with that, very Eastery I know. Saturday I went to this local dance show that is run by a very chipper woman. She teaches dance to people between the ages of 3 and *insert age here* — her oldest this year was 88. The first half is all the little 3-12 year olds running around in tutus. It’s insanely cute. You have to love the 3 year olds who can’t quite remember what they’re suppose to be doing so they’re rolling around on the floor. The second half are the older generations, the 17+ — the music is very eclectic, from classical to modern, from all over the world. It was extremely entertaining. Sunday of course was Easter, for anybody who celebrates it, and I spent the morning with my great grandmother and my Mom and then the rest of the day with my Dad and co. at his house having Easter dinner. Always fun to have lots of people around during holidays. We played lots of games and there was so much food- luckily we had a garbage disposal in the form of a Great Dane, so it didn’t go to waste.

That about sums up my weekend. I am just this side of done with The Historian. It doesn’t usually take me a zillion years to read a book, I just have been super busy and I have this tendency to pick up other books at the same time. Right now I’m also reading Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris, the woman who wrote the Sookie Stackhouse vampire mysteries I mentioned a few times in earlier posts. It’s about a woman who can sense dead bodies. She can find the dead body and then see the last few seconds of their death. So she goes from town to town assisting the police in finding “missing” persons. Of course, she gets dragged into a mystery because of it. It’s one of those books where I can’t decide if I like it or not, and the ending may determine it for me. The tone is really weird, almost uncomfortable for some reason, even though the plot doesn’t make me so. I’m intrigued enough to read the few others in the series though because I’m curious if they’re just as odd. Do you ever associate colors with books or situations? I do that a lot, and Grave Sight for me is a gray book. Like a stone gray, nice and gray and sort of washed out. We shall see how it goes I guess.





I’m Alive, I Swear…

6 04 2009

I realize it’s been eons since my last post but this week has been crazy-hectic and I wasn’t even around internet the last 2 days so you guys can’t blame me… much.  As soon as I can figure out how to get the pictures from my phone to my computer, I will show y’all where I was. But basically, to describe, it’s this lake about 45 minutes up the hill from me that is completely frozen over and there is about 1-3 feet of snow on the ground depending on where you are. Drifts up to about 6 feet.  My step brother’s grandparents… or something, own this cabin up there, so my family was celebrating my Dad’s birthday in style.

I took a few pictures of us standing on the lake (where we took several walks) and also putting this Puzzle From The Underworld together. It was this little bridge and about 6 billion trees during fall. Can you imagine trying to put 1,000 pieces together of just tree leaves? Yeah, it was a blast. We also played games – Monopoly, dice, etc. and watched some movies. We ate steak, crab, garlic bread, baked potatos and salad for dinner last night (amazing I know) and cinnamon buns for breakfast, yum. But now I’m back, and in the valley it’s 75 degrees outside. Wait, let me repeat that SEVENTY FIVE degrees. I was driving out of town and there were 3 foot snowbanks alongside my car as I drove and I heard the radio announcer say “and it looks like it’s going to even out at about 75 degrees today… and tomorrow, and actually… pretty much all week. Enjoy it!” and here I am driving to a cabin that hsa 6 foot long icicles on it. I don’t even know.

So that’s what I was up to. Everybody will be happy to know that I didn’t give up on The Historian. I realize it’s past the end of the month but I’m going to finish it if it’s the last thing I do (which hopefully it isn’t). I’m actually almost done with it, I just didn’t have time this weekend to read it, so I’ll work on this. I finished a few of my ongoing projects up this week so I should be able to squeeze in an hour or two to finish up and post on it, since I know you all were waiting breathlessly for my commentary.

Aside from all that, I’ve been keeping busy. Anything fun happen to you guys this week?