Loosing It

Okay, this has to be said once more for the record. When you can no longer find something, you did not loose it. Arbitrary though it may be, the present tense of the verb in English is lose. That’s with one “o”. That’s the rule. Sorry to be a stickler, but man that really hangs in my craw.

Now back to life as we know it.

Back in the Saddle

My wife and I just got back from a lovely 5-day trip to the other coast. She was attending the first annual encaustic painting conference, but I tagged along to just wander around and do nothing. We stayed in Salem, Massachusetts, just up the road from Boston. It’s a fantastic city, steeped in a rich history (although a little too hung up on the whole witch thing for my taste). The conference ended on Sunday, so we went to Boston together on Monday for a little sightseeing. The Salem ferry, a high-speed catamaran, swept us from the Salem wharf to Boston’s waterfront in 45 minutes. In the last stage of the trip, the ferry route crosses under the approach path to Boston Logan airport, and we got to see a couple of landings from underneath. This was our first trip to Boston, but definitely not the last! Below are a few shots from the ferry ride.

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be packrats.

There’s nothing like a good spring cleaning session to get the blood moving. Or boiling, in this case. The big project this season is prepping our garage for its transformation into my wife’s art studio. That means massive cleanouts of both of the garage (to be her studio), and the basement (so it can hold the crap we moved out of the garage). Ugh.

I was hacking away at the mess in the basement when I stubbed my toe on yet another box of old railroad magazines that my dear departed father had dumped on… er, bequeathed to me. It brought back nightmares of cleaning out his house a few years back, hauling away staggering piles of pure rubbish. Twenty thousand or so paperback mysteries? I might be exaggerating, but not by much. Why does one person need to hold on to every paperback they’ve ever read? I found magazine collections reaching back into the 1940’s, and quite a few single issues dating back much farther than that. You’d think that having a full, bound collection of Model Railroader magazine spanning multiple decades would be interesting enough to draw a few interested in purchase. And you would be wrong, at least as far as I can tell.

So today, I loaded my pickup with yet another bedload of old mags, swearing that this was the last of them (yeah, right), and got them ready for the big newsrack in the sky. As I was grunting and cursing my way through the job, Linda lightened my load by regaling me with a story she heard recently of an older couple who were literally buried in an avalanche of trash in their own home. The husband died as a result, his wife was miraculously found alive after a week. I think she was trying to cheer me up.

So once again, it’s springtime. And again, I rededicate myself to cleaning the junk out of my life. All those issues of Computer Pilot magazine? I’m recycling them now, while I can still heft them myself. Say what you will for a life well lived, I think one of the kindest things you can do for your family is leave them as small a pile as possible to clean up.

Naught to say today…

So I’ll let Emily Dickinson do it for me.

FAITH is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency!

We don’t get nearly enough poetry in our lives these days. Drink up some more Dickinson, and a lot of other wonderful works, on Bartleby.com.

Blown Away Again Today!

Okay, this is getting ridiculous. It’s day three of our Hawaiian oddysey, and if anything the winds today were the strongest yet. It’s been a sort of hurricane in a teacup all day long, with winds raging down the windward slopes of the Koolau mountains and tearing into Kailua, where we’re staying. It was so crazy, I had to brave the tempest today and take a video. Here’s hoping tomorrow is somewhat calmer!

Paradise?

Remember that breathless post I made a few weeks ago, all about how I was pining for Hawaii? I couldn’t wait to get out of Portland and into some warm weather and bury my feet in the sand. Here’s an update: we’ve been in the islands for three days now. Three days of uninterrupted nasty weather, mainly in the form of wind (lots of it) and rain. Sure, it’s interesting to see what winter can be like here from a weather geek point of view. But so far, the sum total of our beach time is about an hour at Sunset beach, on O’ahu’s North Shore, and that was a trip made mainly to see the 20′ surf. Impressive? You bet. But damn, I’d like to be able to go outside again. I’ll close now before the weather brings down the ‘net connection, power, or both.

Aloha!

Choo-Choo!

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of trains. Not the lumbering giants belching steam and rumbling across the landscape, but tiny trains, locomotives that fit in the palm of my hand. My father was a model railroading fanatic. Even now, years after his death, I have a basement still full of his books, magazines, railroad hardware, and the like. And upstairs, in a tiny box full of cotton padding, an engine. It’s exquisite, a small flatbed locomotive with a young hayseed leaning against a crate on its deck. He’s got a pike in his hand for rolling logs, and though you need a magnifying glass to see it, the crate is stenciled with a miniscule address, and even the chalk marks of someone who had to do some quick math calculations. And all of it made by hand by my old man, from brass stock, plastic, and balsa with the precision of a master jeweler. Trains run in my blood.

I bought the original Microsoft Train Simulator not long after it was released, mainly for the “Microsoft” and “Simulator” parts. Although I love model trains, I know next to nothing about real-world rail operations. It seemed like it might be fun to venture over into Dad’s world a little and dabble with consists and grades and the like, so I tried it. I quickly discovered that riding the rails requires a whole lot more patience than plying the skies, and ended up not using the sim very much, but I could see the potential. I promised myself that at some point I’d return to Train Sim and see if there wasn’t something more of interest there.

And now Microsoft have announced that they’re once again stoking the boiler for another run at it! The new Microsoft Train Simulator was just recently announced, and this time it’s said to be built atop the FSX platform, a move I think is exactly the right way to go. So I say, bring it on! Especially if the same capacity for third-party addons and modifications exists in TS that we all love so much about the FS franchise. I’m keeping my ear to the track, just waiting for the hum to get louder, so I can take another stab at railroading.

Sunny Skies and 80

I’m counting down the days… only three weeks until my wife and I take off to pay a family visit to her hometown, which just happens to be Kailua, Hawaii. Oh man, I can already feel the silky sands of Lanikai beach between my toes. For the unfortunates stuck in the colder climes, here’s a fun pick-me-up: I use Firefox as my primary browser, and have installed the ForecastFox extension for it, which gives a graphical display of the week’s weather in the status bar at the bottom of the browser. In anticipation of our trip, I’ve set the zip code for it to check to “96734″, the address of our Hawaiian relatives.

Ahh, that’s better. I can just close the blinds, turn up the heat, and I’m there.

A Pause for Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving here in the U.S., one day out of each year when we collectively stop obsessing over what we don’t have, or where we want to go, and ponder the bounty that has already been heaped upon us. As I had my coffee this morning, I thought about the good fortune I’ve found as a direct result of being involved in the hobby of simulating flight. I had no idea of what I was getting myself into back in 1999 when I took my son to the computer store in search of the game of the week that he had to have. Although I had worked in the high-tech arena for years, I had never gotten into the gaming aspect of computing before that point. Then came Combat Flight Simulator 1, followed quickly by FS2000, a host of new controllers, FS2002… I think you know how it goes from there.

At the time, I figured I had found a little diversion. What I couldn’t have known was what else would jump out of the box along with the CD; a community of like-minded enthusiasts, web sites galore, forums, addons, and more. Since becoming involved in ’simming, I’ve met a slew of wonderful people from countries spanning the globe. I’ve traveled to distant cities to take part in FS gatherings, made part of my living from extending the hobby for others, and even learned to fly a real airplane. And all this from a chance encounter and a shrug at the software seller.

So, this Thanksgiving, let me take this opportunity to say a big thank you to everyone who has made this such an exciting and rewarding hobby so far. We come from all walks of life, diverse cultures, and sometimes radically different viewpoints. We’re bound together by a shared love of everything related to flying, and amazingly that’s enough. Thanks Microsoft Aces for creating the turkey around which we all gather this season (it’s an analogy guys, go with it), thanks to the addon developers who provide the delicious mashed potatoes and stuffing that makes flying so much more filling, and thanks to the community forums for the conversation around the dinner table. It’s a feast for sure, and it just gets better every year. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for some more pie.

Speed-writing challenge

Last year about this time, I was gearing up for my first-ever crack at one of the craziest ideas I’ve heard in a while. National Novel Writing Month happens every year, from November 1 – 30. The idea is to sit down and, grammar and spelling be damned, write a 50,000-word novel in a month. This isn’t a contest of creativity, but more of a raw endurance and speed challenge. Last year, tens of thousands of people from all around the world took part in this mass hysteria.

Often, the results are, um, “less than brilliant”, but you never know what might happen. I was so enthralled with the ideas I came up with last year that I’ve devoted a large block of my time since then to revising the original rough and hasty prose into something marketable. I’ve even gone so far as to talk with a few agents about the book, a teaser for which can be seen on a site I set up just for the novel.

If you’ve ever wanted to write, this might be the cherry bomb you need to get you off your keister and into action. Give it a go!