Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

Another Sleepless Night

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About my unfortunate sleeping problem.

I can’t sleep.

It’s Tuesday morning, at around 12:30 AM. I’m wide awake, typing on my PowerBook in front of the TV. The TV is off.

I have a weird sleeping problem. I wake up very early — usually around 5 AM — without any assistance from an alarm clock. I can’t even claim that the sun is waking me, because the sun doesn’t rise these days until nearly 7 AM. I go through my morning routine, which includes making coffee for me and scrambled egg for Alex, my parrot, at a leisurely pace. By 7 AM, I’m ready for work.

The day goes quickly. These days, I’ve been starting my day at the local airport, which I kind of manage. My morning guy went back to work as a pilot and I’m looking for a replacement. Until I find one, I’m the morning guy. I work until about noon, getting lots of paperwork done and spending lots of time talking to the people who come in. Then I usually go to my office, where I spend a few hours catching up on the things I neglected while working on my last big book project — in this case, my Mac OS X Panther book. (Next week, I start another book project — Excel 2003 for Windows.) Around 5 PM, I head home. Mike and I have dinner and usually watch something we’ve “tape” on Dish Network’s version of TIVO. Last night, it was an episode of “Choppers” from Discovery Wings and a “Nova” about string theory. (We don’t watch network TV.) By 8 PM, I can barely keep my eyes open. I go to bed.

I’m dead to the world for the first half of any night’s sleep. You could set off a bomb in my kitchen and I don’t think I’d wake up. After that, things are iffy.

On the worst nights — like tonight — I wake up about four to five hours after I’ve fallen asleep and I’m wide awake. Tonight is worse than usual because I still have a cough, so when I woke up, I spent some time coughing, waking up Mike, too. When I’m like this, I can spend at least two hours wasting time watching TV, reading, or writing. Then, if I’m lucky, I can get back to sleep.

Other nights, I’ll just wake up and snooze and wake up and snooze for the rest of the night. Or I’ll just sleep lightly and wake to the slightest outside sound: dogs barking, coyotes howling, wind, etc. Or be kept awake by the sound of Mike breathing. Since I can’t get him to stop doing that, I’m often in a semi awake stage for hours. These nights are particularly bad if I have a lot on my mind. Then these thoughts parading through my head make it impossible to sleep.

Of course, other nights, I’ll sleep right through.

The sleepless nights usually come in groups. They might be triggered by the moon or by some internal clock that my body keeps winding. So I’ll have a week or more of sleepless nights. Then, one night I’ll sleep right through and wake feeling very pleased and surprised. For a while, the sleepless nights went on for months. It got to the point where I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a good night’s sleep. Then, suddenly, I could sleep straight through again. I was extremely pleased. The thought of never sleeping well again wasn’t sitting well with me.

I don’t believe in taking medicine to help me sleep — unless, of course, I have a cold. I’m a firm believer that when you’re sick, sleep is extremely important. If you don’t get sleep, you won’t get better. So whenever I’m sick, I purposely take over-the-counter remedies that include sleeping aids. Of course, they seldom work because I’m sick and too busy coughing or fighting a runny nose to sleep.

Anyway, tonight is one of those nights. I just spent 20 minutes writing this, sitting on the sofa with my legs tucked up under me and my laptop on my lap. I’ll write something else during the next hour or so. By then, I should be ready to get back to sleep.

I hope.

Flashback: February 6, 2002

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I take Mike’s cousin Ricky to a real ghost town.

Swansea is a ghost town about 60 miles west of Wickenburg. Located on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere (or as close to there as you can get), it takes about 3 hours to reach the place by car. But it takes only 40 minutes by helicopter.

Mike’s cousin Ricky was in town on one of his annual visits. (He doesn’t come annually anymore and I’m not sure why.) Mike had to work and I needed to play. So I took Ricky to Swansea in Three-Niner-Lima.

We landed on the site of what had been the mine manager’s house. The area was flat, covered with the same fine gravel that seems to cover about 90% of Arizona’s desert. The town was deserted — at least I don’t remember anyone being around.

Swansea
Ricky stands near Three-Niner-Lima, on the site of the mine manager’s house.

We explored the town for about an hour. I’d been there before and although I found it interesting, Ricky really seemed to enjoy it. The town has quite a few buildings, many of which have enough left of them to explore. BLM, which owns the townsite, has a walking tour, with numbered stops, and a brochure that explains a lot. It really is worth seeing, but whether it’s worth a total of 6 hours spent in a car, most of which is on dirt roads, is debatable. Having the helicopter for transportation really makes places like this much more accessible.

Ricky at the Wheel
I don’t know why, but I like this photo of Ricky behind the wheel of a desert wreck.

This year, if Ricky shows up, I’ll take him someplace new. I have a few ideas for places to explore.

Flashback: October 11, 2000

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I fly my new helicopter solo for the first time.

I was going through some old files on my computer today when I discovered a folder full of photos of me flying my helicopter, N7139L. While I have lots of photos of me in flight, these are special: they were taken on October 11, 2000, the day of my first solo flight in my own ship.

I’d picked up Three-Niner-Lima in Chandler the previous Friday. Masahiro Nakamura, my flight instructor, took me for a flight around Phoenix’s Class B airspace, pointing out the landmarks I could use to avoid this airspace while flying between my home in Wickenburg and Chandler. I’d been flying on and off at Guidance Helicopters in Prescott, so flying with an instructor wasn’t a big deal. (I don’t think I’d comprehended yet that the helicopter was mine.) What was a bigger deal was the flight back to Wickenburg a while later with Mike. That was only the second time I’d flown without an instructor since getting my private certificate in April 2000.

That flight went well. It must have, because I don’t remember much about it. I don’t remember much about any flights I took during the weekend, either.

But I do remember my return trip to Chandler the following Monday morning.

Flying an R22 solo is quite different than flying it with a warm body beside you. The problem is weight — the weight and balance is completely different. With full fuel, which I probably had that day, weight shifts to the back. But without that warm body, weight also shifts to the right. So the helicopter lifts off front-left first and back right last. It scared the hell out of me on my first solo and since it had been more than a year since I’d soloed at all, the thought weighed heavily on my mind as I prepared to depart.

N7139L
Here I am, lifting off near the fuel island at Wickenburg. Even in this shot, you can see that the skids aren’t level.

I did fine lifting off. But I did make one mistake. For some reason, I thought I could take off directly to the south, past the light posts and over the hangars. What was I thinking? Although the ship had plenty of power, it was a silly, dangerous thing to do. And I remember thinking just that as I came closer than I wanted to to a light pole.

N7139L
Mike took this excellent photo of me in flight — from the ground!

I was a nervous wreck all the way to Chandler, although I don’t remember any details or even why. It must have been the knowledge in my mind that I was a 90-hour pilot in solo control of a new helicopter. A pilot that had flown less than 10 hours in the previous 6 months. A pilot who had never navigated around the Class B and Class D airspaces in the Phoenix area alone. A pilot who was very short on confidence.

N7139L
Isn’t this a cool shot? Mike took this one, too, as I flew overhead.

Things change. Time at the stick changes them. I have 700+ hours now and have trouble remembering the fears I had when I was a new pilot. I have confidence, but I don’t think I have too much. There’s always more to learn.