I haven't been blogging much lately. Mostly, I have been too busy. A lot has been going on. I really feel this is going to be a good year. I have chnaged some fundemental approaches to some of life's problems. Stress can be successfully reframed.
I am in Wichita Kansas. I call the ICT airport the biggest little airport in the country. Today's example was that I tried to check in with an hour before launch and the kiosk and customer service people indicated that is not enough. I have to take the later flight. I can make it through a huge airport like ATL with less than an hour even at peak times. No so at ICT. It is not a negative comment about the airport. It is just a comment.
I am getting a lot more serious about buying a house in the Northern Atlanta area. The deals are as good as they are going to get. I surprise people when I tell them how good the deals are. you cannot build a house for a new house is going for.
The three remaining llamas have a new home. Professor, Aries, and Artemis have moved to a new home about 10 miles from my farm. It is a really nice home. They will be happy and well cared-for. I certainly can't take care of them. I can't even take care of a plant with my transient lifestyle. They say the happiest days in a boat owners life are the day they buy the boat and the day they sell it. Loosing the llamas is far from a happy time. You have to do what you have to do.
it is cold here in NY. I measured -12 degrees F out this morning.
There has a been a lot going on. Over the Holidays I was in GA, NY, MI, MA, RI, FL.
DJ has moved off the farm and has moved back to her Farm.
I did some night flight last night. There is a requirement to do 10 takeoffs and landings at night for the private pilot licence. Landing at night is different. It is like... well... dark. I took a bunch of photos, but the most interesting is the one where the flash was on by accident. I like that you can through the prop and that the windscreen didn't seem that dirty.
Look at this ticket I booked for February:
Airfare quoted amount: $365.00 USD
Taxes and fees: $617.50 USD
Total Estimated Cost: $982.50 USD
Success! I did my "long cross country" today. 3.1 hours (includes all the taxi and run-up time) and 215 nautical miles. I had a cold when I started. Now I have a bit of cough from the stress and dry thin air. I wasn't in the best shape to do the flight, but it was manageable. Now that I am looking back, it was worth pushing through. It was a very memorable view and experience descending over Lake Hartwell South Carolina. I forgot to take a picture.(This pic is from the web but represents my memory well only at a bit lower altitude.)
From Bloomberg 12-3-11. Try and tell me this isn't scary. We would all be in "occupy wherever" if we could allow ourselves to understand this situation.
The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
Eric took a few pics of some property he is looking at today. We had the window open. The open window caused more drag that I thought it would.
I have been busy at work. It is getting to the end of the year. There are a lot of things to finish up. I am working a lot this weekend.
This weekend is the first weekend of the month. My favorite weekend when I am in Atlanta. I have all the regular aviation activities that happen on the first Saturday. I am flying after the EAA 690 pancake breakfast tomorrow. Always a good time. I am going to miss a presentation from a new turbine engine manufacturer and the class down at American Eagles flight school.
My leadership class is going well on Thursday nights. I certainly have got to know a bunch of people in the area a lot better and the spiritual context gives me a lot to think about. We had some conversation about Sir Edmund Hillary this week. Our paths crossed in Antarctica, spiritually a couple other times.
It looks like I am not traveling that much for a while. I am headed up to Boston after Christmas and I have some trips somewhat emerging for Europe, North America and South America. Nothing is booked at this point, I don't think.
Getting the sawmill working up in NY was fun. I did quite a bit of firewood cutting as well. My Stihl 290 chainsaw worked great.
Lately, I have had to scrape my car windows in the morning. It gets over 50F when I leave work though.
One of the pics below show the "first flitch" of some nice Ash.
I am in NY. Richard and I got to do some flying, fantastic weather. We went from Greene, Norwich, Hamiliton, Sidney, back to Greene. Lots of fun. I got to meet up with my old flight instructor. That was great seeing him. He just sold the plane I originally learned how to fly.
The sawmill is currently setup and running. My neighbor is bringing over some logs to slice up this afternoon.
I climbed Blood Mountain yesterday in Northern Georgia. It felt like a mountain in that the climb through the woods turned into more and more granite faced ascents. The wind picked up and the temperature went down. Again, the decent was a mirror of the ascent. Eventually, back to the car it was the comfort of a dense calm forest valley. It might be worthwhile to do that one again.
I had to use my backup camera. Not as crisp.
I completed a very nice cross country today, LZU to IIY via AHN and direct back to LZU. After that I went back home and piloted my vacuum cleaner around the apartment. Our theme (this week) in my leadership class is humility. Interestingly, when I opened the cypher lock for the pilots lounge at IIY (lights out and vacant) there was a bible (between the weather computers) that when I picked the book up it opened to Matthew Chap 18:18-19.
The airborne pic shows the Athens, GA airport in the right and the city of Athens, GA on the left at 4500 ft.
I feel I would really be missing something if I didn't post SOMETHING on 11-11-11.
I am in Duluth, I am planning a solo cross country from Gwinnett County to Washington Wilkes county airport tomorrow in a Cessna 172 R model with GPS. I think Sunday is a hike day. The leaves are all turned here in Duluth. Up in the mountains they are largely falling off. I will be on the Appalachian trail. I certainly need some exercise.
My work week went pretty well, mostly successes. It is about moving multiple projects down the road. Multitasking is crazy these days. The bottom line is that my heart beats 168 hours a week. I have two hands, feet, ears and eyes. And I have one brain and one soul. There is only so much you can do.
I have been daydreaming a bit about my recent trip to Brazil. I admit it. The gas price of 2.84 Brazilian reals per liter works out to be $6.13 Gallon at today's prices. This was in the capital district of Brasilia, the equivalent of Washington DC in the US. Most places I travel outside the US gas I see gas as twice as expensive as the US.
