Category: Revelation

Not much going on

I haven’t been doing much updating of this blog, mostly because I’ve been busy fixing up Maddy’s blog. Good thing she never got around to changing her password after I set it up for her. I had been putting updates on her blog because she’s been incommunicado – as people reach her on the phone or go visit her, they email me some status information and I put it on the blog for the benefit of all her friends. But because she’s been in the hospital and extremely fatigued, my posts were basically overwhelming what is, after all, her story. So thanks to the wonderful extensibility of MT, I’ve made a separate category for my posts, made the main page only show her category, and put a side bar entry showing my most recent posts.

It was remarkably easy. The only hard part was that because my blog and her blog are on the same site, if I wanted to look at my “Main Index” template while editing hers, I had to use two browsers, because two windows on the same browser couldn’t be logged in as different users. Fortunately I was working on my Mac, so I had both Mozilla and Safari, two excellent and standards compliant browsers at my disposal.

Woo hoo!

I’m currently without an aviation medical. If you want all the gory details as to why, you can read
this entry in my old journal, and you can read why it’s taking so long at this other entry.

In order to not just sit around on my ass having all my skills atrophy, I decided to check out in our club’s Lance. The club requires a 10 hour checkout, today I did 1.5 hours.

It was a lot of fun. The plane is big and heavy and a bit of a wallowy pig if you let it get slow, but at 90 knots on a standard landing pattern or 120 knots on an ILS, and it is steady as a rock and lands smoothly. It’s touchy on the throttle and propellor controls. But it’s fast and carries a ton literally – it’s got a max gross takeoff weight of 3600lbs and an empty weight of 1241. I’m looking forward to taking some long trips in it.

One bright spot

One thing I am looking forward to this weekend: Last time, Alyssa and I had an hour to fill in between the checkout time of the hotel and the start of the movie we went to see, and so I stopped for a walk along the Ottawa River. I’ve always loved the Ottawa River – when I lived in Ottawa I’d frequently go out of my way to drive or bike the River Parkway on the way somewhere.

On this short walk, we discovered some amazing sculptures done in the river. I remember this artist from 10 or so years ago – he wanted a place to set up his easel to do some painting, and arranged the flat stones that he found in the river into an Inuktuk. He liked it so much that instead of doing his painting, he made dozens of Inuktuks, mostly in the shallow parts of the river. Well, evidently he’s still doing it, but he’s progressed beyond Inuktuks – some of the things he’s doing now are amazing. I hope they haven’t been swept away, as I’d like to document them.