The helicopter training flights have left the floor. I’m practicing steady hovering, within the confines of the front room, with slight movements and corrections, and no panicking. Many flights last for a minute or more now. Some flights end with a graceful intentional landing. Most finish with a decision to return abruptly to the floor just before a more serious crash. There is a tricky lag to helicopter controls. It’s easy to overcorrect. I’m supposed to relax and let the helicopter fly itself. That task is complicated by the tendency of the craft to rotate around an axis when held at a steady hover however. It’s like the little flying machine is hanging by a string fixed to the ceiling and someone gave it a bump; or a tetherball that has a life of its own. It picks up momentum, the plane of rotation expands and wants to take up the whole living room. My challenge is to neutralize the rotational motion, without over-correcting. It can be done… I just don’t get it done every time. It will be nice to fly this outdoors on a calm day. But this is South Texas. We haven’t seen a calm day lately. I think, with a little more practice in the house, I’ll be ready to fly outside even if it’s a little breezy out there. I won’t be able to completely control which direction the craft goes, but I should be able to follow after it and keep it in sight. I’ll be sure to have my running shoes on just in case though.
We got hosed!
I took a handful of CDs out to the Minivan to load into the CD changer. It only took one and it was full! One CD? Where is the multi-disk player? I took the remaining CDs to the Mazda. Same result. One CD loaded. That’s it. No more room. Two cars, both relatively new, neither cheap, and no CD changers? We got hosed! I thought to look in the owner’s manuals. Lots of data on USB ports, MP3 players, and cloud accounts. Oh. Both cars are equipped to listen to all the music we want, the way we listen to music now. We just need to move beyond something so primitive as CDs…
Other times
…we’ve stayed groomed.
This winter we’ve been wearing the shaggy look:
This winter we’ve been wearing the shaggy look: Arctic blast
Yesterday’s high was 90. We got up this morning to 36 degrees. The weather front found us.
Last weekend
Last weekendWe went to Port Mansfield. It’s a sixty mile drive. The visual picture is: Padre Island is a barrier island running north south for a hundred miles along this section of the Texas Coast. the Gulf of Mexico to the east, Padre Island in the middle, the Laguna Madre on the west side of Padre Island, then the mainland to the west of that. Port Mansfield is on the mainland. There is a low spot in Padre Island where waves would wash over in a storm. They dredged that out as a boat channel through the island into the Laguna Madre right opposite Port Mansfield. Port Mansfield has fishing access to the Laguna Madre for shallow water fish, and access by way of Mansfield Pass (channels though islands are called passes here) to deep water fish. Port Mansfield has a few houses. A little beach park on the water. A fishing pier. A marina. That’s about it. No downtown. No stores. No shops. Absolutely nothing to do. We spent the whole day.