Flight Home

Last night I flew home from Ottawa. Once again I had to stay lower than I liked because of the engine break-in, but this time it was nearly perfect weather. Clear skies, not too bumpy, and a little haze south of the lake. The hardest part was that for the first time ever, I had to refuse a clearance and try to negotiate something different.
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A great flight

I’ve been feeling antsy about the fact that I haven’t flown in clouds since the flight back from Oshkosh last year. So I’ve been thinking about waiting for a day with low ceilings, but not too low, and getting an instructor and going to fly some approaches in real conditions. But we’ve had so many thunderstorms this summer, and I’ve been working so hard that the confluence of the conditions I wanted and the spare time haven’t happened.

So something good happened – I got a chance to get a plane for the weekend, and it was nicely cloudy. The thunderstorms passed through the area a few hours before, and it looked like the nice sorts of clouds.
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Good weekend

Well, that was fun. Harry and Vicki and Emily have already written about it, and I attempted to write something as a comment in Harry’s blog, but the registration system on his blog stymied me.

Anyway, I enjoyed the weekend immensely. I have to confess, however, that the abundance of kids overwhelmed me and I had to go off by myself to recharge a lot. Fortunately my work project is horribly behind schedule so I had a ready excuse to sneak off into a quiet corner to ponder the wonders of the Observer/Observable classes and the “fireContentChanged” methods in AbstractTableModel classes.

The highlight of the weekend for me was the Saturday evening discussion, mostly because it’s good to find people who are far more politically aware, astute and active than I who are not totally paranoid about the election. My personal feeling is that dirty tricks are going to give us at least 4 more years of this crap (and a good possibility of the complete destruction of democracy in the process), and it’s good to know that Angus and Harry and Misha aren’t totally convinced that this is a done deal. (But I’m not giving up my Canadian passport, either.)