Category Archives: Summer Jobs

Sometimes I actually get on someone’s payroll.

I’m Being Paid to Worry about the Weather

Posted on by
2

A funny true story.

The backstory: I’m in Washington State on cherry drying contracts. In short, I’m being paid to be on call to use my helicopter to dry cherry trees in case it rains. You can learn the details about this in “The Life of a Cherry Drying Pilot.”

Last night, my grower called around 9 PM. He was almost certain that it would rain at 4 AM this morning. He lives in Wenatchee and his orchard block is near Quincy, a 30-minute drive south. He wanted to give me a heads up. He said that he knew I wouldn’t fly in the dark, but if it rained, he expected me to be drying at dawn. I assured him that would be no problem and encouraged him to call me if he needed me, no matter what time it was. That, after all, is what he’s paying me for.

I was dead asleep this morning when my phone rang. My Blackberry’s ring tone is a digitized version of the classic analog telephone bell. Despite the fact that I’d heard that sound every day for the first 20 years of my life, when it rang this morning, I had no idea what it was. After all, I was asleep. When I realized it was my phone ringing just inches from my head, I grabbed it, pushed the answer button, and said “Hello.”

It was my grower. “I’m leaving Wenatchee now,” he told me. “The sky is clear.”

I wasn’t too sleepy to wonder why he was calling me to tell me the weather was good.

“I’m going to see what it’s like down at the orchard,” he went on.

I got the feeling he wanted a local weather report. After all, I was only 6 miles (as the crow flies) from his cherry trees. Fortunately, the zip-up window beside my head faced out that way. I unzipped it and looked out. I could see stars. It wasn’t raining. I couldn’t see any rain clouds by the light of the waning moon. I reported my findings.

“Well, I’m going down there anyway,” he said. “I’ll call you if it rains.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. We said goodbye and I found the button that disconnected us. The phone reverted to clock mode. It was 3:50 AM.

I managed to get back to sleep for another hour before the birds woke me up for the day.

It’s nearly 12 hours later and it still hasn’t rained.

When I told this story to my husband, he told me I needed to have a talk with the grower. I told him I’d do no such thing. I explained that I was on standby and that the grower had paid me good money to worry along with him about his crop of cherries. If it made him feel better to wake me up to discuss the weather once in a while, that was fine with me.

As long as he didn’t do it every morning.

Helicopterless

Posted on by
Comment

For the next two weeks, anyway.

My helicopter is sitting in a hangar at Boeing Field in Seattle, WA, being tended to by a team of experienced Robinson helicopter mechanics. There’s nothing wrong with it — well, other than a few minor squawks. It’s in for its annual inspection.

I, on the other hand, am in Wickenburg, AZ, finishing up some work before I head northwest for the summer.

So, for a while, I’m helicopterless.

Of course, now my phone is ringing with calls from folks who want to fly. Tours of Phoenix, day trips to the Grand Canyon, photo flights west of Sedona, and even a tour around Wickenburg (if you can believe that). Sorry folks. No can do. Helicopter is out-of-town and I’ll be joining it shortly.

We flew it up last week. I took Alaska Air back to Phoenix. Next weekend, I’ll hook up my travel trailer to my husband’s pickup truck and drive up to Quincy, WA. Although I might spend a few days in the campground on Crescent Bar, it’s more likely that I’ll simply return to the Quincy Golf Course and set up camp in one of its five full-hookup sites. The manager there is looking forward to my return — isn’t that nice?. He was pleased to tell me that they fixed last year’s Internet problems and now have WiFi on site. Sometime the second week in June, I’ll hop a flight on Horizon from Wenatchee to Seattle, hitch a ride to Boeing Field, and climb aboard my helicopter for the flight across the Cascades and back to Quincy.

I might even take one of my Twitter friends along for the ride.

But until then, I feel strangely grounded in Wickenburg, with nothing to fly.

It’s odd. I hardly flew at all in March and April, yet I didn’t miss the helicopter. After all, it was nearby, in its hangar. I flew quite a bit in May, covering it with dead bugs on that last flight into BFI. Now, with May drawing to a close and the helicopter 1000+ miles away, I miss it.

I’m already looking forward to that flight in June.

And hoping for a rainy cherry season in central Washington, so I get plenty of time to fly.

Stress Levels Rise as Blogging Frequency Falls

Posted on by
1

Something I’ve noticed.

You may have noticed that my blogging activity has dropped off again. There are two reasons for this:

  • I’ve tried three times to write a blog entry and all three times the text is moving off on a tangent that leads to a dead end. I’m blocked.
  • I’m working against three deadlines, only one of which is self-imposed, to get a bunch of stuff done. I can’t seem to work as quickly as I used to.

Whatever the reason, I’m blogging less and feeling more stressed. Some people might argue that those two things are not related, but I think they are, at least in part.

When I start my day with a blog post, as I did each day last week, I feel good about myself and ready to start the day. Maybe it’s because I’ve managed to produce something at the very start of my day, before most folks are even awake. Maybe it’s because it sets the pace of my day to get more done. Maybe it’s because writing in my blog often helps get things off my chest or out of my head, stored in a safe place so I can clear them from my mind. In any case, blogging helps me to think and to work better.

What’s on My Mind

This week I’ve got a ton on my mind.

My company was mentioned in Arizona Highways magazine and that has led to a dramatic increase in calls for my flying services. In the past two weeks, I’ve sold three 6-day excursions and have at least two other people seriously considering it. If this pace keeps up, I’ll be flying two to three excursions a month during the spring and autumn months. While this is a great thing, it also brings on a lot of stress — making reservations, worrying about customer satisfaction, thinking about weather and helicopter maintenance issues — the list goes on and on.

This stress is only complicated by the fact that I’m working on a book revision that I need to have done by mid-May. While the software I’m writing about isn’t technically even in beta yet, it’s pretty stable. But there are a few features that simply don’t work. I don’t have access to the bug reporter, where I normally contribute to the company’s efforts to identify and squash bugs, so I don’t know if they are aware of the little problems I’m seeing. And, in the back of my mind, is the possibility that the software’s interface might change. I’m 5 chapters into a 24 chapter book right now — a book rich with thousands of screen shots — and if there’s a major interface change tomorrow or next week or as I’m wrapping up, I’ll have to do the whole revision all over again. How’s that for a stressful thought?

And why do I need the book done by mid-May? That’s another stressful situation. I’ve been contracted for cherry drying in Washington State this summer. Unfortunately, I haven’t been given a start date yet. It’ll take me a week to get the helicopter up to Seattle for its annual inspection, come home to get my truck and trailer, and drive back up there to my contract starting point. But I don’t have any details about where or when I’ll begin work. I could theoretically get a call next week — while I’m on one of my excursions — telling me to report in on May 5. I’d have to scramble hard to make that happen.

Related to this is my need to fill at least one seat on the flight from the Phoenix area to the Seattle area. It’s about a 10 hour flight and the cost of such a flight is enormous. I need a couple of passengers or a helicopter pilot interested in building time to bring in some revenue for the flight. Trouble is, it’s hard to get the word out, few people who hear about it understand what an incredible opportunity the flight is, and those people who do want to go simply don’t have that kind of money. My summer profitability depends, in part, on covering my costs for the ferry flight with revenue.

And on top of all this is the video project from hell, which I prefer not to discuss here until it has been resolved.

So you can see why my mind might not be tuned in properly for blogging.

Taking it One Day at a Time

I know that the best way to work through this stressful time is to take one day at a time and get as much done as possible. My main motivation is peace of mind. The more things I complete, the fewer things I’ll have on my mind to stress me out. While some thing are out of my control — will they change the user interface of the software? will I be called to Washington before mid May? — others aren’t. I just need to plug away at them until I get them taken care of.

And I need to blog every morning. It sure does feel better when I do.

A Quick Story about Gratuities

Posted on by
Comment

Read it. It’s funny.

I forgot to mention this in my “Gratuities ARE Appreciated” post, so I’ll share it now.

In the summer of 2004, I was a pilot at the Grand Canyon, working for the big helicopter tour operator there. They’d often have 10 or 11 helicopters running at once, so when a tour bus pulled up, we could take up to 66 passengers at a time. Needless to say, just about all the tour bus operators used us. Very few of our passengers spoke English.

One day, they loaded us up with a Japanese tour group. I had a petite older Japanese woman next to me. She was probably in her 60s. She was very nervous. And she didn’t speak a word of English.

When we first took off, she grasped the bottom of her seat, like most nervous passengers do. And she continued to look nervous for the first part of the flight. But then we slipped over the South Rim and began our flight across the Canyon. Her eyes seemed to bug out of her head as she leaned forward to suck in the view.

After a while, I realized that she wasn’t nervous anymore.

When we landed and I cut the throttle to idle, she leaned across and hugged me — no small task, given I was wearing a shoulder harness, pair of headsets, a baseball cap, and sunglasses. Then she began rummaging around in her purse. She produced a plastic card and handed it to me with a great deal of excited blabbering in Japanese. She bowed repeatedly before the loader came to help her out.

I looked down at the card, completely puzzled. It had a picture of Mt. Fuji on it and was covered with colored symbols and writing in Japanese. There was a magnetic strip on one side. I put it in my shirt pocket.

During my lunch break, I hunted down Hajame, our Japanese pilot. I told him about the woman and then handed him the card. “What is this?” I asked.

He studied it for a moment, then broke out laughing. Apparently, it was some kind of bus pass for a mass transit system in Japan.

To this day, I prize that “tip.” Sure — it’s completely worthless to me. But it was the thought that counted. She, in effect, gave me a souvenir of the flight. And 4+ years later, I still remember her and the flight that won me such a prize.

Lake Pateros Fun

Posted on by
Comment

Action photos at the lake.

Jetski at Lake PaterosI spent the July 4 holiday weekend at Lake Pateros in Washington State. Most of the time I wasn’t flying — I spent 3.1 hours on Friday drying cherries — I was holed up at the extremely pleasant (and helicopter-friendly) Lake Pateros Motor Inn. Mike and I lounged a bit on the upper deck patio walkway right outside our room. The lake was wild with boaters and jet skiers and wake boarders. On a whim, I took out my Nikon D80 camera and its 70-300 mm lens. I set the camera to continuous shooting, zoomed all the way, and started snapping photos.

To my surprise, a few of them came out pretty darn good.

Chelan, WA from the AirI continued snapping photos throughout the weekend. On Saturday, Mike and I took a helicopter flight around central Washington and we took turns snapping photos out of the helicopter. (He’s a pilot, too, and we had the dual controls in, so I had a rare opportunity to use both hands and decent equipment for aerial photography with doors off.) Some of those photos were pretty good, too, like Mike’s shot of downtown Chelan.

This all goes back to my theory that if you have decent digital photographic equipment, are in a good place to take photos, have good photographic conditions (i.e., lighting), and enough storage space on your memory card that you don’t have to skimp on the number of photos you take, you have to get some good shots. Mike and I took over 200 shots from the air during a 3-hour flight the other day. I bet we only wind up with about a dozen really good ones.

Anyway, I put the Lake Pateros photos online on a new Web site I’m experimenting with: Flying M Photos. I’m hoping to build up a library of stock and fine art images, as well as event images like this, for sale. With luck, this will fund my photography habit, which is quickly becoming quite expensive.

Were you out on Lake Pateros during the July 4 weekend? Check the site to see if I got an action photo of you! If I did and you want to buy a copy to remember your day at the lake, use the coupon code LAKEP to save 20% on your photo order.