Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

Happy Birthday to Me

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I get another year older and think about my added experiences.

Tomorrow is my birthday.

I’d rather not say here how old I am. I will admit that I’m one of the oldest pilots at Papillon (although not one of the most experienced). And I’ll admit that among my circle of friends, I haven’t been the youngest in quite a while. And I’ll also admit that the signs of age are beginning to show in the way I look and feel.

But I’m not over the hill yet. And I certainly haven’t even reached the top of that hill. I don’t expect to do that until I’m in my 60s.

What has happened in the past year? Let’s review.

On this date last year, I was at Bar 10 Ranch on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, hanging around with the pilots and the folks who were preparing to take a trip down the Colorado River. I’d spent the morning at the bottom of the canyon, chatting with the river runners. I played pool in the afternoon, with pool cues so bad that I bought two new ones when I got home and immediately shipped them to Bar 10 as replacements.

PhotoI wrote a bunch of books, mostly revisions. Quicken 2004: The Official Guide, which I finished earlier in June, was published. That was followed by Microsoft Word 2003 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther: Visual QuickStart Guide (expanded to 600+ pages!), Microsoft Excel 2003 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide, QuickBooks Pro 6 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide. As I write this, I’m finishing up Quicken 2005: The Official Guide and have two new titles and a revision under contract for the rest of the summer. Oh, yeah. I revised the Spreadsheet chapter for the latest edition (I’ve lost count) of The Macintosh Bible. The Panther book sold like crazy and continues to sell well, although returns from the Jaguar book are eating into royalties now.

I also wrote two 10 QuickStep Guides for David Lawrence. One is about writing a book proposal and the other is about the new features in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.

I don’t think I wrote a single magazine article. I did, however, write a white paper for FileMaker, Inc. about using Excel with FileMaker Pro. They paid me a nice sum of money for the work. And I got to revise it for FileMaker Pro 7, too. (I really ought to finish that up.)

PhotoI bought a new car. It’s my midlife crisis car, a Honda S2000. Very fast. Very difficult to keep clean on the dusty roads where I live. In 10 months, I put only 4500 miles on it. Heck, this car has to last the rest of my life. I’ll drive the Jeep into the ground first. I sold my RC Helicopter, which I wasn’t flying. Heck, it’s easier to fly the real thing.

I flew my R22 all the way to Placerville, CA. I discovered, on arrival, that I’d forgotten to pay my insurance bill. I got that settled and flew home via the Owens Valley. I’ll never do THAT again.

I leased Tristan Charney’s R44 for the winter, using it to give short rides all over the desert. That convinced me to buy my own R44.

I got a job with Papillon Grand Canyon Airways, doing helicopter tours over the Grand Canyon. I learned a lot and I’m still learning a lot.

I gave up my contract as the Fuel Manager at Wickenburg Airport. Or at least tried to. I’m still on the hook until August. Am I going to party THAT DAY!

And now, as I sit in my sweltering office (the air conditioner must have turned off a little while ago), I’m trying to decide what to do for my birthday. I’m not coming up with too many ideas. On July 1, I have to report for duty at Papillon again, so I only have one day and I’d better not blow it.

Tonight, I think we’ll do a night flight to Falcon Field so Mike can buy me dinner.

Not Especially a Good Day

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I have a day.

Well, I shouldn’t complain. It certainly could have been worse.

Trouble began early, when I got an e-mail message from the person I thought wanted to buy the assets of my FBO at Wickenburg. He was trying to get out of the deal. He said he didn’t need me. He said my asking price was outrageous. This coming from a man who practically begged me to sell to him and didn’t even attempt to negotiate the price.

Let’s not go there.

I contacted two people at Robinson Helicopter via e-mail. The first was to try to get my local mechanic in on the September maintenance course. Fully booked, I was told. But there was no one on the waiting list for October. The second was to see if the Robinson Helipad that comes with the purchase of a new R44 would work on my property. It was designed for rooftops, I was told. It wasn’t big enough to eliminate the dust problem I had. I should consider laying down concrete.

Not what I wanted to hear.

I was so worked up over the FBO deal problems that I couldn’t think well enough to write. So instead of knocking off two chapters to my Quicken book revision, I did only one. And that was a no-brainer chapter with very few changes to the text.

That means I’ll have to work on my birthday to get the damn book done on time.

Someone kept e-mailing me all morning at the pilotcharts.com e-mail address, asking me questions about a specific product, shipping, etc. We must have exchanged a dozen messages. I warned him that if he wanted the item shipped today, he’d have to order before 2 PM. The last message from him requested a phone number. The last message from me gave him a fax number. By 2 PM, there was no fax and no order.

What a waste of my time.

My sunglasses, which I’d ordered two months ago, finally arrived. That’s a good thing. My old ones were about to fall apart.

In fact, that’s about the best thing that happened to me all day.

Mike decided to take a trip to NJ the same week I have to be up at the Grand Canyon. He fully expected me to take the dog, bird, and horses with me. The poor dog would be locked up in the trailer for 13 hours every day, six days straight. (The bird would, too, but heck, he’s used to being locked up.) For some reason, I went along with this. Until I started thinking about it. A good thing: I found a place to board the horses for only $100 for the week. A bad thing: I couldn’t find anyone to take the dog. I didn’t even try to find someone for the bird.

So I have company with me this week at Howard Mesa.

I had to drive to Howard Mesa. If you’ve been reading these blogs, you should know how spoiled I am. I usually fly up here. It’s about 1-1/2 hours by helicopter but 3 hours by car. But I couldn’t very well fit the dog, the bird, and all my gear in the helicopter. So I took Mike’s truck. Now I have three vehicles up here. (Sheesh. It’s almost embarrassing.) The good thing: Mike filled the tank with diesel. Another good thing: because I didn’t drag the horse trailer up here, I didn’t even use up a half tank of fuel. The money I saved on fuel probably paid to board the horses. Yet another good thing: if I get ambitious, I can use the truck to take my bicycle to the airport and get some exercise during lunch breaks this week.

Nah.

It was cloudy up here when I arrived. Cloudy like it might rain. Imagine that. I haven’t seen rain in Arizona in so long, I forgot what it looks like. (It was a good thing it rained in New Jersey when I was there earlier this month. Otherwise, it would have been at least three months since I’d seen rain at all.) But the moon’s out now and I think the clouds are breaking up. I don’t think it’s going to rain.

The darn bird is doing laps in his cage, climbing all over the inside. He’ll do that until I shut off the light. Sounds like a good excuse to call it a day and put this one behind me.

On Dieting

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I lose weight, then gain some back, then work on losing it again.

Throughout my life I’ve been lucky where weight is concerned.

First of all, I was always thin. I was the kind of kid who could eat a ton and still stay relatively slim. And back when I was in college, I had my metabolism up so high that I couldn’t help but lose weight. For a while, I was almost skeletal. Without being anorexic or (heaven forbid) bulimic.

Second, at 5’8″ tall, I can weigh a lot and carry it very well. The long legs help that a lot. Heck, put me in a pair of black jeans and a black shirt and no one even has to know I’m overweight.

As I got older, things changed. Unfortunately, they changed very slowly and I came to accept it. 5 pounds here, a larger pants size there. Over a period of 10 years, my weight crept up and up and I accepted every pound and inch. I won’t say I was happy about it, but I certainly didn’t think about dieting. After all, I’d never needed a diet before.

I reached my high of 180 lbs after a cruise two and a half years ago. I felt terrible. I looked terrible. And it didn’t help that the woman from the other couple we cruised with was a “stringbean” — a name my grandfather used to apply to me.

I tried one of those starvation diets with special foods and supplements. It was called Fit for Life. Jeez. How can people do that? I remember eating a 3-ounce serving of meat one night for dinner. It was so tiny, I could barely find it on my plate. Actually, that’s a lie. There was so little food on my plate that night, the 3 ounces of meat stood out like an olive on an empty plate. And frankly, the supplements and special foods cost a fortune and tasted like garbage. Sure, you can lose weight if you stick to it. But you’ll soon be out of money and wondering what real food tastes like.

Results? I lost 8 pounds in two weeks, then couldn’t lose another ounce. I lost interest when the food ran out and I needed to make a trip down to Phoenix to get more.

Next, I tried Atkins. I don’t care what anyone says: Atkins works. At least for the first 10-15 pounds. That’s what I lost and it stayed off for quite a while — a few months, at least. But I couldn’t lose more. And then I started working at the Grand Canyon and noshing an awful lot between flights. The guys would buy these jello puddings in tiny cups. I had to get some, too. And frozen dinner entrees like pot pies you could nuke and then pick up and eat like a sandwich became a lot easier than making salad for lunch every morning before work. So although I lost 15 pounds, I gained almost 10 of them back in two months, just working at the GC.

The other day, I weighed myself. 169 lbs. I’d been down to 159 at one time. My “I’ll be happy with it” goal was 150. My “I’d love to be there” goal was 140. I wasn’t going to get there eating pot pies and pudding.

So I’m back on Atkins and drinking a TON of water. In fact, my primary exercise is walking from my desk to the bathroom about 12 times a day. And filling my water glass. I lost 5 lbs in 3 days. I know I won’t keep up that pace. But I do want to get back down to 160 before I go back to the GC. And start eating salad with lots of meat and cheese again.

I just wonder how I’m going to handle all those bathroom breaks when I’m flying.

I’m Officially a LOCAL Now

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I finally get my hands on a Grand Canyon Market canvas grocery bag.

Mike came up to spend the day with me on Friday. Thursday had been extremely weird for me — I’ll probably write up a brief description of that ordeal somewhere here — and I got the day off to recover from the weirdness. Mike figured I needed company and volunteered to drive up. Although he wanted to drive in to Flagstaff for the day, I didn’t feel like dealing with the long drive or traffic. So instead, we took our bicycles to the Grand Canyon.

We had lunch at El Tovar (why not?) and took the bikes over to the bike trail that runs from the library to the new Canyon Information Plaza. The trail was pleasant: paved smooth, winding through tall trees, and completely underutilized. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed as if it were mostly uphill. (I later discovered I was right.) We did the two miles to the Info Plaza, looked at some of the displays there, and then continued on to the Mather Point Lookout, which is one of my favorite canyon viewpoints.

We rode back on the main road. But on the way, we made a point of stopping at the Marketplace area, where the post office and grocery store are. That was where I’d get my canvas bag.

As we wheeled our bikes to the bike rack, I saw a woman waiting by the curb with five canvas bags. I pointed at them and said aloud, “That’s what I need.”

She heard me and said, “Do you want one of mine? I have nine of them.”

“Why do you have nine?”

“Well, I’m a LOCAL.” (She stressed the word as if it were something she was proud of that pained her very deeply.) “Every time I come here, I forget to bring my bag and have to buy another one. They cost about $6 each.”

I’d heard they cost $10, but I still hadn’t seen one in the store. I said, “If you’re serious, I’ll give you six bucks for one.”

“Sold.”

She transfered groceries out of the biggest of the bags, moving them into the other bags. Her gallon of milk didn’t fit, but she didn’t seem to care. I got the feeling that she thought the $6 was worth it. I gave her the money and she gave me the bag. I rolled it up and bungeed it onto my bike.

So I now have the bag. I’m a LOCAL. I’m looking forward to using it next time I’m up here.

Decisions, Decisions

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I make a tough decision each day on what vehicle I’ll use to commute to work.

I’m spoiled. I know it. Even though I live in a tiny trailer when I’m working at the Grand Canyon, I have three vehicles to choose from for my daily commute from Howard Mesa to Grand Canyon Airport.

Three! The first is my “airport car,” a 1987 Toyota MR2. I’m the original owner of this little gem and put most of its 130,000 miles on it. I learned to drive a stick shift on it and it still has the original clutch. (Okay, so it’s a little high, but it does still work. Toyotas are great cars.) I remember when it was brand new and shiny and lovingly waxed. Now its paint is faded from the sun, its windshield is pitted from road debris, and it’s covered with dust. Still, it gets about 25-30 miles to the gallon — something to consider when fuel is $2+ per gallon. And it’s peppy. (Read that fast.)The second is my 1999 Jeep. It’s perfect for the 5 miles of dirt road between the main highway and the trailer atop Howard Mesa. Unfortunately, it only gets about 15 miles per gallon and its soft top makes a ton of noise at highway speeds. And it rides like a cardboard box in heavy wind.

The third is my 1999 Robinson R22 Beta II helicopter. Yes, I brought that with me. Heck, why the hell not? It’s not like anyone would be flying it at home. And there’s nothing like turning a 36-mile, 45-minute commute into a 25-nautical mile, 20-minute commute. Of course, it burns about 10 gallons of fuel per hour and with warmup and shutdown time, the hobbs meter registers .5 hours after each commuting flight. 100LL costs $3+ per gallon up here. Ouch. And let’s not even talk about the other cost of operating that vehicle.

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Three Niner Lima and the Toyota parked behind the camper at Howard Mesa.

Of course, they’re not all here at the same time. For example, tonight the Jeep and Toyota are at Howard Mesa and the helicopter is at the airport. The other night, the helicopter and Toyota were at Howard Mesa and the Jeep was at the airport. Sometimes it’s tough to remember where each of them are. But it’s easy if I remember that two vehicles are always where I am. When I drive the Jeep to the airport tomorrow, both the Jeep and the helicopter will be at the airport with me while the Toyota waits patiently atop the mesa.

So how do I decide? Well, when I’m tired after a hard day flying or if it’s really windy at quitting time, I take whatever road vehicle is at the airport to Howard Mesa. If I’m not tired and feel like getting back home quickly, I take the helicopter. Pretty easy decision.

In the morning, it’s also an easy decision. I take the helicopter. I love flying it in the morning. But this morning, I took the Toyota. Why? Because I thought I might be driving to Flagstaff from work. I hate driving the Jeep long distances because of all that roof noise. The other day, I took the Jeep home from the airport even though it wasn’t noisy. Why? I’m still trying to figure that one out. I did discover, however, that the side step on the driver’s side needs welding. So I have to take it back to the airport tomorrow. Bummer.

Why all these vehicles? So I have options. I don’t want to get stuck at the airport or at the trailer. With two vehicles wherever I am, there’s always an option for getting from point A to point B.

And if you’re wondering what I have at home, it’s my sole remaining car, a 2003 Honda S2000. That car will never see the top of Howard Mesa.