A promising start to the day

The weather yesterday was beautiful, albeit chilly enough to make a statement: summer's done, and you better enjoy the fall, because the dreaded winter months are right around the corner. No flying yesterday, though, between going to the Arts Festival to see if any of my pictures won anything (they didn't) and to watch the Bucks play my favorite PAC-10 team (I LOVE Huskies! Although... they're pretty high maintenance dogs, in my experience, and are better suited for admiration from afar rather than living with one.).

We watched the parade at the Festival, and as usual my favorite parts were the high school marching bands and the Jazzercise float or as I call it, "Dancing Spandex on Parade."

As for the football, The Bucks won, but it was the second half before I could stop concatenating "You're our only hope!" to every utterance of "Come on defense!" I must have used 20 various inflections on that statement in the first quarter, too.

Flying today, though. It's always scary to miss a good flying day because you never know if the next day will be an adequate replacement. The "weather out the window" report looks promising, though:



I finally broke down and read up on a few things in the instruction manual for my camera, chief amongst them being how to keep the flash from popping up of its own accord so I could take pictures like that. I mean really, the thing was acting like a teenage boy at a cheerleader competition. No control whatsoever. I found the appropriate menu setting somewhere slightly south of page 200 of the manual. The instructions for Apollo 11 were thinner than the book for this camera.

I'm heading down to Vinton Co. today for the annual BBQ Chicken/Fly-in/Air Show, although I intend to get out of there before they close the runway for the "Air Show." I didn't get out in time last year and had a few hours to regret it. My passenger for today is a local guy that left a comment on one of my YouTube videos. As I understand it, he's had a few rides over the years and is now in the position I was a few decades ago (minus the rides, of course - I never had any): he wants to get his license.

My advice to him will likely be the same as I give everyone else I meet in his situation: it at all possible, find someone willing to sell a share of an older Skyhawk or Cherokee, rather than pay $80/hr Hobbs on a rental. This obviously requires much more commitment than renting, but I've met too many people that scrimped and saved to get their license, only to find that they couldn't afford to do anything with it once they were done. Believe me, there were many, many years when I knew exactly what that felt like. There were a whole lot of days when a view similar to the picture above did not invoke eager anticipation in me; rather, an early morning horizon like that would cause a deep, visceral frustration at my ground-bound status.

I haven't forgotten.