Pug’s Place

It’s amazing how much goes on and how little there is to say about it.

The cake is a lie.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. I just haven’t had much about which I want to post.

Today two things happened: I landed at Casa Grande airport for the first time and I had to turn on my car’s air conditioner for the first time in 2008.

Casa Grande is a city of about 35,000 located roughly halfway between Phoenix and Tuscon. It has a busy municipal airport, owing to its proximity to a radionavigation beacon and that it has instrument approaches, allowing pilots holding or seeking an instrument rating to perform practice “precision” landings. It’s also just a short 12 nautical miles away from Phoenix Regional Airport, the airport at which I made my first solo flight and a large portion of my landings. The proximity of Casa Grande Airport to my ’stomping grounds’ south of Phoenix should have made it one of my most common destinations while airborne, but for various reasons until today I had never touched my wheels to the asphalt there. It wasn’t for lack of trying, rather it seemed for a while that higher forces were at work to keep me away: a sudden dust storm, a skydiver mis-jumping and the frantic call to clear the airspace around the airport, etc. However, I tried again today, and despite the heavy instrument student traffic I did do several landings and a leisurely taxi-back across the airport, allowing me time to enjoy the view.

Since February I’ve been regularly driving with all of my windows down and my sunroof open. It’s just that pretty. Today, however, it was a little too warm for that to be comfortable, at least while wearing long pants. So I flipped on my A/C in the Pugmobile. That’s all there is to that story.

So after repeated snubs by the media, I’m happy to see Ron Paul beating McCain for 2nd place in the Nevada GOP caucus today. As of now he’s holding 2nd by a few hundred votes, but not all precincts are reporting yet, so this may change. At any rate, he’s a long way from 4th or 5th place. (Update, midnight: Paul did place 2nd)

So, I’m somewhat annoyed to see to what lengths Fox News goes to avoid showing Ron Paul. Check this out, snapped this evening:

Notice in the bottom right corner that at the time this was shown Paul was in 3rd place. Now look at the three photographs.

These people disgust me. Incidentally, this sort of thing is why I never watch Fox News.

…But it’s all in the best interests of the American people because Glenn Beck on Fox News says Ron Paul supporters are a “domestic threat.”

Update, 11:30 pm: I just noticed that the New York Times doesn’t even show Dr. Paul as a candidate. Even in their online coverage. How can people roll their eyes when I say the media’s snubbing him?

xkcd is regularly brilliant, but as a fervent Browncoat (Firefly), I absolutely had to post today’s comic.

I didn’t blog again in July; I was pretty busy. I’m now in the very last phase of my pilot training. Saturday morning, after answering lots of questions on the ground I’m going flying with a pilot examiner to show that I’m a safe and knowledgeable pilot.

It feels like I flew more in July than I had in any other month, but I checked the numbers and that isn’t true. I suppose what is true is that I’ve done more aviation-related stuff in July than I have before. Halfway through the month I took the private pilot written exam (which was a cinch), after which I read the newly released Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows novel. Dotted around the rest of the month have been flying lesson after flying lesson with my instructor polishing up my maneuvers.

Of particular difficulty to me has been my short-field landing technique: the ability to put the airplane on the ground within a 200 foot block of runway consistently. I’ve spent hours in the air working on this required maneuver until I’m starting to have a real sense of what a given engine sound versus a given headwind and altitude will yield in terms of a touchdown point. Without getting into details that the vast majority of my readership doesn’t care about, it appears I’ve found the problem I had with my short-field landing technique (power management) and I’ve figured out how to fix it in almost all cases.

Otherwise, training has been going great. My soft-field landing technique is being lauded, as are my ground reference maneuvers, steep turns and slow flight. I’ve conquered my fear of stalls: I’ve learned to do stall recoveries from turns without even having a wing twitch, so I have almost no chance of aggravating an unintentional stall into a spin. I’m sensing the first flickers of what it feels like to be a pilot, though I know I won’t be calling myself a real pilot for quite some time.

Current numbers: 153 landings, 56.2 total hours of flying, 13.5 hours solo, 5.3 hours nighttime.

My brother and his gal are in Grand Cayman this week, leaving me with the cats whose behavior hasn’t changed appreciably since I last wrote about them. I’m keeping them all fed, of course, but I can’t keep them from fighting. The hinged gate which has been carefully located in the stairwell to separate cats when I’m not home has proven ineffective; the cats can push their way underneath it, despite there being only about an inch of clearance. I haven’t seen it happen, but that’s the only explanation due to the gate’s design.

Anyway, cats aside, by the time they return on Saturday I should be holding my private pilot’s license. Which means when I come home in another week, if I wanted to I could rent a plane and go flying out of Destin. I probably won’t since I’ll be home such a short time, but that may be fun over Christmas.

The only thing geeky I’ve done recently (other than read the new Harry Potter book in an afternoon) was to convert my free software repository page to use Trac and switch my copies of Eclipse to use Mylyn. Unfortunately as of press time it looks like the repository page is broken, but I’ll try to fix that. Ah, the fun of switching to something new…

This morning I took to the sky and headed west to a state I had formerly not visited. I flew a bit over 350 miles from Phoenix to Blythe, California as my “long” cross country flight: One of the requirements for my pilot’s certificate is to take a solo flight and make three landings to a full stop at three different airports, two of which must be at least 50 miles apart with a total distance of at least 150 miles. Since I hadn’t been to California, I decided (with my flight instructor’s approval) to fly there for this long trip. I took off from Stellar, circumnavigated the Sierra Estrella mountains westbound to Buckeye Airport and then flew west over 70 miles of semi-empty desert to California. The flight out was totally uneventful - exactly as I like it. The air was smooth and the air temperature - at 6,500 feet - was a cool 73 degrees. At the end of my flight the desert turned verdant green and I knew I found the Colorado River.

I began descending into Blythe when I flew over the I-10 bridge across the Colorado River. I then skirted the south side of the city of Blythe and landed at its airport. Blythe Airport has freshly-painted runway markings but the lone hanger has seen better days. I did a lousy job of parking the plane (though the parking area was almost empty), shut it off and walked into the little building. The Fixed Base Operator (FBO) was quite polite and didn’t look at me odd when I walked in wearing my Gators hat and said, “So, this is California.” He just looked tired and said, “Yeah” and looked back to his TV. I bought a bottle of fruit juice and walked out to call home. I talked to Mom and Dad to say I was in California for the first time, they were surprised, suddenly worried and not a little upset. Standing in the shade of the plane’s wing with the air temperature a moderate 109 degrees I tried to reassure them that the flight was fine, I wasn’t tired, the plane was fine, I had my plan to get back and the weather was beautiful (if hot). After I got off the phone with Mom and Dad I called Chris to assure him as well that I was fine. After I took a couple pictures posing with the plane I taxied back to the wind-favored runway and took to the air again, this time climbing to 7,500 feet and heading back to Phoenix via Gila Bend.

I backtracked into Arizona until I had passed around the restricted / military airspace in the western part of the state and then headed southeast to Gila Bend. Remember, to count as my “long” cross country flight I had to land (and stop) at three airports. After suffering through some increasing turbulence (due to increasing air temperature), I overflew the town of Gila Bend and landed at its deserted airport. The landing was sweet, I taxied clear and returned to the departure area to take off again one last time for the day, this time headed for my home airport of Stellar. (I had to come to a full stop for this to count, so this is what’s called a “full stop with a taxi-back”).

The flight back to Stellar was just full of turbulence; it was noon in the desert with an air temperature of 97 degrees at 3,500 feet: nasty. This is why I started the flight early in the morning, and why I keep waking up early on the weekends to fly! Anyway, I had no trouble keeping the plane under control, on course and at my desired altitude, it was just uncomfortable. The turbulence made my landing at Stellar none too pretty, but it was both safe and acceptable.

So, anyway, now I’ve visited California and I can report that it appears to exist. You can see more pictures here at Flickr.

In other news: In honor of the Fourth, one of Chris’ friends is having a Transformers-and-pool-party; we’re seeing Transformers in the morning and then going to hang out by his pool. Otherwise, no other plans. Work continues to keep me challenged and busy and I’ve booked a flight to come home for a couple days in August (unfortunately work deadlines kept me from making it more than a few days long).

Finally, the few pictures Stephen and I took on our trip to Vegas (mostly of his old house) are online, too.

Stephen and I have returned from Vegas; we got back late yesterday afternoon. Between the last post and now we wandered more of the strip, went through the recreation of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Luxor, enjoyed a photography gallery in the Forum Shops which reminded me very much of Rebekka’s work on Flickr, saw Spamalot and hung out in a posh lounge in the Wynn. Finally, before leaving Vegas yesterday, we visited Stephen’s old house.

During our morning wandering Friday we just had to head down the strip to see the Luxor, the giant pyramid-shaped casino/hotel, and since we were there we decided to take the 10-minute tour through the recreated burial chamber. Dad and I went through that tour some years back when we stayed in the Luxor but it was a nice distraction from gambling. The voice actor they had play Cartier went over the top on the narration, but what else do you expect from Vegas?

After mediocre pizza in New York, New York, we slowly made our way back up the strip (via things like the Forum Shops at Caeser’s Palace) to a pre-show nap. Following said nap we proceeded to the Wynn and Spamalot. Spamalot was the best live comedy I’ve ever seen, or as Stephen put it: “Freegan ‘wassome.” The musical loosely follows the plot of “Quest for the Holy Grail.” Highlights were:

• The Black Knight scene, complete with all of his limbs being chopped off on stage
• The Lady of the Lake’s first musical number (“In every show there is a song which goes like this!”)
• The Knights Who Say “Ni” demanding that Arthur and his band become famous on Broadway (“You won’t succeed on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews”)
• Arthur showing his amazing tap-dancing skills (courtesy of Patsy on the coconuts) while in Camelot
• The Lady of the Lake’s cheerleaders while in Camelot
• Concord being struck by the arrow - and being knocked several feet backward by the impact

With our Spamalot tickets the Wynn gave us entrance passes to one of their lounges, The Lure. We loitered until a bit after 9 pm to allow it time to open before proceeding inside; while loitering we spent some time watching wall panels being lifted into place and welded onto the superstructure of the new tower at The Venetian. Anyway, the Lure was not just any lounge, it was an ultra lounge complete with a quartz fire pit and a view of … the construction at The Venetian! We ordered ridiculously expensive drinks ($5 glass of coke, anyone?) and talked about jobs, Phoenix, the future, school, airplanes and any number of other topics. When the conversation started dimming Stephen interrupted two middle-aged gentlemen lounging on a low sofa to introduce us. That conversation turned to a discussion of physics and mathematics between Stephen and one of the guys which eventually became a description in recent papers about metaphysical math and Bayesian Surprise Theory; I listened, nodded, recognized metaphysical mathematics and smiled appropriately. Some time later while Stephen and I continued discussing whatever was the topic of the hour, two sisters wandered up to us to ask after who we were, “since [we] didn’t look like typical Las Vegas guys.” We looked like we “had jobs” and didn’t “spend all day in the tanning booth.” We chatted for a few minutes and then they excused themselves to go back and take care of their drunk friend (drinks without food while spending all day by the pool makes for a poor evening, apparently). Conversations continued between Stephen and those girls a few times more during the night, but my ears aren’t attuned to the noise so rather than actually taking part in the conversations I was spending my effort at those times trying to teach myself to read lips. About this time the music had turned from Genesis and Sting to Beastie Boys, Fergie and other, louder music. At midnight I excused myself to walk back to the hotel and stop cramping Stephen’s style; nothing interesting happened on my way back aside from passing two grandmotherly-old ladies on the sidewalk who were carrying yards of Maragaritas. Stephen stayed for about an hour after I left, chatted up the girls a bit more, spoke to some other folks and passed a Vegas wedding couple on his way back.

We left the next morning, swinging by Stephen’s old house on our way out of town. He’ll probably write about his impressions thereof, and I’ll put up the pictures we took there shortly and add a link to this post. Our drive back was uneventful (no 1lb hamburgers), we played some Wii Sports after getting back, hit Los Dos Molinos for dinner and crashed. Sunday we talked Chris into playing D&D for the first time in 20 years. I together a short story by cannibalizing parts of The Speaker In Dreams and customizing it for their low character levels (they started at level 1 and by 11 pm were level 5). I kept throwing them into very hard encounters (EL 4s when the two of them were level 1, for example) but they were so destructive and generally tactical that they kept pulling through. I’ll write more about the D&D game later.

Stephen came into town Wednesday night and we decided Thursday morning to head to Las Vegas. After a stop for lunch at a local restaurant in Wickenburg, AZ in which Stephen received a hamburger which rivaled the size of his head, we pushed on and arrived without incident at about 5pm local time. We got a room in the Imperial Palace, tickets to see Spamalot Friday night at the Wynn and over the course of the rest of last night I introduced Stephen to the present generation of slot machines, he played Blackjack at a table and we wandered a bit. I came back to the room at about 11, but I think Stephen went out to a nightclub at the Wynn before coming back; he’s asleep so I won’t ask him at present.

Internet access here in the hotel costs far too much money so I’m utilizing my cell phone as a modem. Unfortunately, though I know I prepared my cell phone charger to come along with me, I seem to have left it out of my bag, so I have to minimize my cell usage so the battery lasts until we get back to Phoenix tomorrow.

We’re having a good time so far. I’m trying to not cramp his style with my unwillingness to spend much money (a requirement to play at tables) while he tries to be ‘good’. It’s works. I’ll probably have to rave about seeing some live Monty Python soon, so perhaps another update will occur tomorrow.

Cheers from Las Vegas!

The good news: I’m 31.1 hours into my private pilot certificate and now I’m ready to start my solo “cross-country” flights. One of my homework assignments this week is to chart out a flight to some airport at least 50 nm away (that’s “cross-country”); I’ll probably fly there next Saturday morning and that will take care of my first of three solo cross-country flights. Last Thursday morning I took a plane up all by myself and did some maneuver practice right north of the town of Maricopa. I did about 10 minutes of slow flight, including turning 360 degrees in each direction, did two power-on and three power-off stalls (the power-on stalls needed work), some S-turns and turns around a point and then flew back and drove off to work. It was a nice way to start a day!

The bad news: I’m opening myself to advice about living with felines versus living with roommates versus living alone. I’ve been living with a cat, Zach, since January. At the end of April two more cats moved in, Simon and Addicus. Individually, none of these cats are bad (though the majority of my readers know my stance on all things feline). However, Simon and Zach do not get along and their strife causes disruptions which range from leaving tufts of hair from the fights to computer equipment being knocked over and stuff getting unplugged (including the phone system). I learned to get along with Zach and deal with the normal things that come along with cats, like their tendency to vomit on important things semi-randomly. The tripling of the cats, however, has left me much less happy. In fact, at times I find myself not wanting to come home to deal with one cat whining about not being able to go outside and the other cat being chased by and hissing at the third. I like things fairly orderly and quiet and I’m having difficulty imposing sufficient order and simply can’t manage the quiet at the times I most want it. Sometimes I pick up my laptop and flee to my room, carefully pirouetting around the briefly-opened door to keep cats from rushing in to hide. It’s been a bit more than six weeks since the cat numbers here tripled and apparently things have gotten remarkably better: Less cat yowling and fewer scratchings and bitings, or something like that. I have difficulty seeing the improvement.

I’m not a cat person. In fact, at this point I would just claim to not be a pet person.

I’ve started looking at places to move; I’ve found several apartments I like and have made a list of favorites. However, I’m not sure I want to live alone; I’m worried that I’ll end up with all of my social interaction occurring at work and just being lonely for a year. I’m now looking for roommate situations to move into, however Chris has pointed out that roommates could well be worse than the cats (which is true). Roommates, however, tend to be trainable. Or I could stay here and try to be less verbally hostile about the cats and deal with the daily annoyances. And no, the cats aren’t budging, so any flexibility must come from me.

I’m not sure what to do. I’m idly checking into roommate opportunities but I don’t want to leave my brother. I could get a nice, big, quiet apartment three miles from work and move in next week, but I don’t want to live alone nor leave my brother. Everything I’m looking at is up in the northern part of the valley, up near work. Chris lives in the south part of the valley, and additionally, my flight training airport is on this side of the valley. I have comfort reasons to stay here another 10 months, but if I do I’m going to have to become numb to the cats somehow.

Other than this, life is good. However, regarding my living situation, this is my solicitation for advice. Please comment below.

Three awesome things just happened. I’ll enumerate first, in chronological order:

First, I soloed Saturday morning! Some pictures my flight instructor took from the ground are up here. Yes, the corner picture has me as the sole occupant of that Cessna 172SP. WOO!

Second, entirely by chance Chris found a Wii Sunday afternoon while shopping at Target and purchased it. Our house now has a Wii, three Wii-motes and some competition brewing over Wii-Tennis and Wii-Bowling!

Thirdly, I just got a birthday present from LIZ! It’s some awesome artwork from Ursula Vernon of a very happy Old One, the one, the only, the Dread: Cthulhu! Oh my gosh, so awesomelycutetotallyneato! Going into frame immédiatement!

So! Soloing!

Saturday morning, wearing a white t-shirt, I went to Stellar Airpark and met my instructor for some touch-and-go practice. It was understood that if I was on the ball that morning and I wanted to, that I would also solo. We took off and Jason (my flight instructor), as is normal these days, leaned back with his hands cushioning his head and said, “Take us to Phoenix Regional, James, then let’s see four touch-and-goes. That number four may be a full stop, we’ll play things by ear.” So I flew us down to Phoenix Regional Airport, flew over midfield and turned into the traffic pattern, ending up a little high on the final approach but did a perfectly fine landing. Jason just reminded me that my downwind leg wasn’t quite parallel to the runway and said, “two more, and then a full stop.” I did two more touch and goes followed by a real to-a-stop landing - my first full stop at an airport other than Stellar, actually (not that slowing down to a stop is very hard).

I pulled off the active runway and taxied back to the “hold short” line, pulled the throttle back to idle and waited. While I had a Zen moment Jason endorsed my logbook and medical for my first solo flight. He gave me some final advice about what to do if I started freaking out while alone in the plane (just in case, I suppose), tuned his hand-held radio, took my camera, shook my hand and shut the door. A minute later I pushed the throttle to the firewall, verified the engine was performing nominally and headed skyward alone! When it was just me in the plane it took off quicker and climbed noticeably faster. I flew the pattern and made two touch-and-goes followed by another full stop landing. They went off splendidly: The first landing saw the winds cooperating. I flared where I should and bumped the plane lightly to the ground on its main gear. My second landing had a crosswind - in the time it took to circle the airport again the wind had shifted 90 degrees and picked up, so landing number two had me tipping my right wing toward the ground to account for the wind. My instructor noted this, of course, and took a picture of my plane in the crosswind attitude, the windsock and his triumphant … grin-thing! Also fun, I did a three-point landing on this touch-and-go. My last solo landing was another full-stop, this time to pick up my instructor who was so kindly taking these photographs from the ground. I dealt with the crosswind again and even better judged my landing point: I put the main gear down either on or really really close to the runway numbers, an age-old landing precision metric.

I picked up Jason, and after he buckled himself back in we taxied back to the runway’s end and headed home. My nerves weren’t shot yet (apparently they should have been, hrmmm) so Jason gave me more work to do on the way back: while I was flying us back the GPS “failed” (Jason turned it off), the radio navigation “failed” (Jason scrambled the controls) and - to make matters worse - my maps and charts “blew out the window” (Jason tossed them in the back seat), so with just my eyes, my compass and my knowledge of the area I had to once again navigate home. He enjoys giving me these exercises, sometimes while also pulling the throttle to idle and telling me the engine failed… I’m sure they’re good for me. Oh yes, the white shirt… There is a tradition among pilots that after your first solo your flight instructor cuts off your shirttails. This dates back to open-air cockpits and the oldest method instructors used to communicate with their students in the pilot’s seat: yanking on their shirttails! Well, I was no different: after we got back to the office and my log book was signed off that I soloed my instructor took a pair of scissors and trimmed my shirt. I get the decorated cloth back after I am awarded my pilot’s certificate.
And now, the Nintendo Wii! So we only have two games, WiiSports that came with the system and RedSteel, a game I bought. Let me put it this way: It came with one controller. Sunday night I bought a second controller so that Chris and I could play at the same time. Monday afternoon I bought a third so Amy could join us. It’s great fun to play Wii-Tennis or Wii-Bowling with these motion-sensing remotes. I just hope the novelty proves to have some staying power, but by all indications it should. Side note: Chris and I are hosting a LAN party here on Saturday and despite 10 people coming over with high-powered computers, we’re wondering whether people are going to end up more interested in the Wii…

Finally, I gots ART! I received this package today from Ursula Vernon and murmured, “Who is this person and why is she mailing me something stiff? And the address is handwritten to me - no mistake about that…” I came in and opened it immediately, wondering what was in my hands. Out slid two pieces of cardboard, between them a sheet of computer paper with my name and address upon it and beneath that… CUTE CTHULHU! I immediately decided it must have been from Liz. I showed it off to Chris and Amy and looked up the artist and was duly impressed - as if the lovely print wasn’t impressive enough! This is being framed lickety-split!

So that’s what I’ve been up to since I got back from Boston last week. Oh yeah, I was in Boston, did I mention it? Oops… Anyway.

Other interesting things: I’m figuring out a time to head back to Florida for a long weekend visit in early August and Stephen is plotting to come out here in two weeks to enjoy the chilly humid air– Wait, Phoenix, not Boston — hot dry air.

Will I blog more? No one can predict…