Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

Helicopter Calendar

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I order my office calendar far in advance.

Last year, I waited too long to order the helicopter calendar that always hangs in my office. It was sold out and the publisher ran out of stock. I got stuck with a frog calendar that I bought in mid-January. (At least it didn’t cost very much.)

This year, I ordered early — last week in fact — to round out an order at Amazon.com for a pair of DustBuster batteries. The batteries and calendar arrived today.

I’m disappointed. Brown Trout, the calendar publisher, usually has much better photos than these. Most of them were taken from the ground of a helicopter landing, taking off, or just sitting there. Three of them are of Grand Canyon tour operator helicopters (a Papillon Bell 206L, a Papillon Bell 407, and a Grand Canyon Helicopters Eurocopter EC130) and I’m willing to bet all three photos were taken on the same day at the companies’ respective landing zones. Papillon Copter 9 (which I flew several times; it’s a utility ship and rather underpowered when compared to the others) is obviously doing its takeoff run, the 407 is sitting on the pad, and the Ecostar is probably landing. Four photos were taken from the ground or some high place looking up at the helicopter, so you can see its underside. And, if I’m not mistaken, all of the photos were taken in Arizona.

You can see twelve better photos of helicopters in a single issue of Vertical magazine.

But since Brown Trout seems to be the only helicopter calendar publisher, I’m pretty much stuck with this calendar.

And it is much better than the frogs.

Horse Trailer with Living Quarters – Sold!

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Wickenburg is still a horsey town.

imageWhat’s 35 feet long, has four wheels, a bathroom, a refrigerator, a sofa, and a queen size bed and can fit three horses? My horse trailer with living quarters — the one I’ve been wanting (but not trying, evidently) to sell for the past year or so.

How many people do you know who could use such a thing? If you and your friends and family live in a city, the answer is probably zero. Even if you have friends who own horses, the answer might still be zero. After all, you need to not only have at least one horse, but you need a 3/4 ton pickup to pull the darn thing and a real desire to take your horse camping. Even I don’t know too many people who meet that criteria. (Although I do admit that I know at least a dozen.)

I decided on Monday that it had to go. I want to buy a new travel trailer that we can use on helicopter ride gigs. One that’s smaller and lighter and has more space for people than animals. One that would cost the same as what I could get for the big thing, so I wouldn’t have to go into debt.

So I made some calls. I called the place we bought it from and asked them if they’d take it back on consignment. They would and they sounded eager to get their hands on it. I figured they’d move it in about a month. Until then, I could finance the new camper.

I then pulled out all my brochures from the RV show we went to with some friends in February. I wanted an “expandable” camper. That’s a cross between a pop-up camper and a hard-sided camper. I studied the floor plans for StarCraft, which is the biggest maker of these things and settled on a Antiqua21-foot model with two beds and a slide out. The floor plan put the beds on opposite sides of the camper and the dinette and sofa in the slide out. The result: plenty of floor space — the one thing that was really lacking in the horse trailer.

I made some phone calls and found a dealer who had the model I wanted in stock and on display. Then I loaded up the recyclables in Mike’s truck, hit the dump to drop them off, and started on the long drive down to Phoenix.

I took the truck because we’re looking for two pieces of furniture — a desk and a small dining table — and I planned to look for that while I was in the Phoenix/Scottsdale area. If I took my car, I would have found them and not been able to bring them home. But since I took the truck, I didn’t find them even though I could have taken them home. Murphy’s Law in action.

The trailer was exactly what I wanted, although I liked the upholstery color scheme in the 2006 model better than that in the 2007. They didn’t have any 2006 models left. I worked with the dealer guy to collapse and then expand one of the beds. It was a 3-minute job, just as he said. We talked money and I left some info for him to see if I qualified for financing. I was in the Home Depot Expo store a few hours later, looking for a table and desk, when he called me on my cell to say that I qualified for the lowest rate (7.9%, which doesn’t sound so good to me) and 12 years (which is insane). The monthly payments would be only $220. No wonder so many people are in such deep dept. Credit is just too darn easy to get.

The next day, I was doing the brochure rounds when I ran into my friend Suzy at Screamers in Wickenburg. I know Suzy mostly through events at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum, but she and her husband are also horse people. They live near us and have the same cleaning lady. I mentioned to her that I was selling my horse trailer with living quarters and told her what I wanted for it. Ask around, I said.

Later that day, her brother called. He wanted to see the trailer. I hurried down to the wash, where it’s parked out of the flood plain, with Mike’s truck and a rag. Although it wasn’t filthy, it wasn’t exactly clean, either. We still had some stuff in it. I got to work while I waited for him.

He went down the wrong road to get to my house — the only time he’d seen it was on horseback while riding up our wash — and called me on my cell phone. “You have to come around to Steinway,” I told him. “Unless you have four wheel drive. Then you can come right up the wash.”

A while later, his truck and a white Jeep rode up the wash. He and his girlfriend, in separate vehicles. I knew her from the Wickenburg Horsemen’s Association — Mike and I are members, although we don’t attend many rides these days. They checked out the camper and I knew pretty quickly that they liked it.

Today, he called back. Suzy wanted to see it. So I met them this afternoon, just as a thunderstorm was moving into the area. Suzy has one that’s like it, but only for two horses. There were things about ours that she liked better. She gave him the nod. He gave me a deposit check.

He’ll come next week to get it. I figure I’ll use Mike’s truck to pull it into town where we’ll dump the holding tank (I think there’s something in there) and use a power washer to clean the inside of the horse part and the outside of the whole thing. I’d like to sell it to him clean. When the weather cools down, Mike and I will give them a demo of how the awning and screened-in room works; it’s a lot easier to put up if you know how to do it.

It’s nice to sell it to someone in town, someone that we know. But it’s also strange. This isn’t the kind of item that everyone wants or needs. It’s a tiny market, at least in the real world. But this is Wickenburg. Despite the zoning changes and development, there are still a few of us horse people around.

Obviously enough to find a market, through word-of-mouth, for a horse trailer with living quarters.

Melon Investor Services Online

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A poorly designed Web site.

You think that with the money they obviously have to spend, the folks at Mellon Investor Services would have used some real talent to build their Web site. They obviously didn’t.

Sure, it looks pretty, but it’s nearly impossible to navigate without clicking a bunch of wrong navigation buttons. And half the buttons you press spawn a new little window that displays a stop-light graphic and the message that the information is being accessed. The thing that bugged me the most was when I was required to change my pin to a 6-15 character number. It took me four tries to enter a number the system liked, and when I did, the dialog that appeared gave me the impression that I’d screwed up so bad that they were offering to do it for me. I later discovered that the PIN Manager wasn’t a person but a feature of the site that had been unlabeled as such.

Jakob Nielsen of Web usability fame would have a field day with the Mellon site.

I called for help when a feature I was trying to use kept displaying an error message. After various discussion and hold sessions with two different people on two different calls, I was asked to confirm that I was using Internet Explorer. I told her that I wasn’t, that I was using Firefox on a Mac and wouldn’t waste space on my hard disk with a Web browser that hadn’t been updated for four years. She obviously didn’t understand my sarcasm because she told me to “exit” Firefox and “start” Explorer. I repeated that I was on a Mac and if their site didn’t work on a Mac they were alienating a lot of users.

After another hold, I was told that her supervisor could duplicate the error message and that there was probably something wrong with the site.

Duh.

She then suggested that I try another time. By this time (30 minutes after my initial attempt to use the system), I was fed up and ready to hang up. But she had to get one last dig in: “Have I helped you with all your concerns today?”

“No,” I said. And I hung up.

Luxury Toys?

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We’re not impressed.

Yesterday, Mike and I drove down to the new Cardinals Stadium in Glendale, AZ for the “Men’s Luxury Toy Expo and Sale.”

Mike and I are big into toys. It isn’t because we like to be conspicuous consumers. We have so few close friends in the area that there’s no one to show off to. It’s just that we like to play with toys. So it’s always nice to see what’s out there to play with.

If your idea of a “luxury toy” includes hot tubs, sand rails (modern day dune buggies), and garage storage solutions, then this show was for you. Unfortunately, those things don’t fall into what we’d consider luxury toys. We were pretty disappointed, since that’s what dominated the show.

To be fair, there were two or three Ferraris (the definitive sports car, in my opinion) and some very nice, mint condition classic cars. And I did like the idea of buying a room on a residential cruise ship to live out the rest of my life on a nonstop, around-the-world cruise. (Now that’s a house boat! I just find the $1.8 million entry fee plus $90K annual maintenance a bit tough to swallow right now.) But there were also vendors selling beef jerky, overpriced plastic shoes, and miracle mops. (In my opinion, if you have enough cash to afford a real luxury toy, you also have enough to pay a professional to keep it clean for you.)

The weirdest thing was seeing an advertisement for one of the garage storage solution places with the same exact layout and colors as my Flying M Air brochure. If that wasn’t a rip off of David’s design work, I don’t know what is. They could have at least changed the color scheme. The ad was in the show brochure and I won’t dignify it (or spread the word about the company) by reproducing it here. I’m just glad they weren’t pushing helicopter tours and charters. I’m trying to use the design for my new branding and it’s not nice to see someone else trying to do the same thing with the same design.

I’d brought along a bunch of Flying M Air brochures and old Sedona/Grand Canyon rack cards with the idea of leaving a few around on tables with other mixed literature. There weren’t any such tables, so I wound up carrying around the brochures for the whole show. That wasn’t so bad because we were only there for about an hour.

I thought the event might be a good place to advertise the business. Imagine bringing Zero-Mike-Lima onto the show floor, all sparkling and clean. That would certainly get some attention! But when I saw the kinds of people walking the floor, I realized that the dreamers outnumbered the buyers by a good margin. (The beef jerky guy was doing a good business but I didn’t see the residential cruise ship guy handing out too many cards.)

I don’t regret going, though. We got to see the inside of Cardinals stadium, which isn’t 100% finished yet. (Looks like they still have some painting to do in the bowels of the arena.) It’s a nice place — very state-of-the-art and the air conditioning works pretty darn good. The show was on the stadium’s concrete floor. The grass, which was growing nicely outside, looked ready to roll in for a game any time. The only thing I regret was not taking a few pictures. It isn’t often that you get to walk on the field (sans grass) for the newest football stadium in the country.

Would I go again? Doubtful. I’ll call later today to see what the exhibitor pricing is like. If it’s affordable, I might give it a try. Depends on how the beginning of my season goes. The show is in February; my big season here in Arizona starts in November. So I have plenty of time to think about it.

After the Rain

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We go for a helicopter flight after a storm cleans out the air.

We had a storm last night in Wickenburg. It came upon us suddenly, from the west (I think), just as we were going to sleep. Soon the rain was pounding against our newly refinished roof and the bright flashes of lightning were illuminating our bedroom.

It’s monsoon season here in Arizona and storms in the late afternoon and early evening are to be expected. But we haven’t had quite as much rain here in Wickenburg as I’d like to see. The wash that runs past our house has been dry for over a year. And the unpaved roads in town have been just as dusty as they are the rest of the year.

Last night changed all that. It rained like hell. And when I woke up this morning and took a look down into the wash, it was clear that it had become a river during the night. The loose sandy surface was packed hard and wet and the debris that had been left there from the last flow was gone, replaced with fresh debris.

There wasn’t any damage this time around. Just some sand deposited on our driveway. Our neighbor, Danny, was out there with a Bobcat bright and early, working on the steep dirt road we use to get to our homes. He bought it used from a local landscaping contractor and I think he was tickled pink to have a chance to fire it up and use it.

Meanwhile, everything looked really fresh and clean. One of the odd things about living in the desert is that it’s so dry most of the time that dust really gets all over everything — including the trees and rocks. The natural colors of the desert seem washed out when, in fact, they’re just dust-covered. A good hard rain takes all that dust out of the air and off of everything. The desert looks green and alive.

And it feels cool. This morning, the temperature outside was probably in the mid 70s. That’s downright arctic in central Arizona in the summertime. The air was fresh and smelled of the rain and flowers and life.

It was the perfect morning for a helicopter ride.

Mike and I drove over to my friend Jim’s house. Jim lives about three miles due north of Wickenburg Airport. He flies a Hughes 500c helicopter. Years ago, he won a bid to build hangars at the Airport, which was in dire need of more hangars. Jim wanted a hangar so he could park his Hughes 500 in it. He figured he could lease the rest of them and make some money. He spent six months with the Airport Manager and other town powers-that-be to come up with a plan that was satisfactory to all parties. He presented the finalized plan at a Town Council Meeting. The Council members said, “Hey, wait a minute. There was only one bidder on that contract. You couldn’t win it. It has to go back out to bid.”

Jim's HouseJim is like me. He doesn’t take a lot of bullshit. He told them what they could do with their hangars and applied for a permit with Maricopa County to build a hangar and helipad at his house. In less than a year, he had a huge hangar on his 48-acre spread with a nicely marked and perfectly legal helipad out front.

The airport didn’t get new hangars for another three years.

Anyway, the airport is getting ready to close for a month due to construction. Although I’m perfectly confident that I can safely fly in and out of there while construction is going on, they’re closing down the place to helicopters, too. They seem to think that there won’t ever be a safe landing zone anywhere on all that land at any time of the day or night for a whole month. It’s bullshit, but not worth arguing about it. Jim said I could camp out at his place. So it’s not like I’m being inconvenienced.

So after topping off my fuel tanks in Glendale the other day (0.7 hours round trip from Wickenburg), I brought Zero-Mike-Lima over to Jim’s place and touched down right on the helipad.

Jim’s out of town. He and his wife are in the process of moving to San Diego. His house and the 40+ acres still left (he sold off a piece) are for sale. Two houses, a pool, horse setup, shop, garages. And, of course, the hangar and helipad. I’d buy it if I had that kind of money and wanted to invest it in Wickenburg. I don’t and I don’t. If I had that kind of money, I’d be in San Diego. I guess that’s why Jim’s there and other people are living in his house.

Airport ConstructionWe took off to the south, toward the airport. I’d brought along my video camera and Mike was using it to shoot images of the things we flew over. I’ve been wanting to get some good video footage from the helicopter for Flying M Air’s Web site and the wickenburg-az.com Web site I run. But I don’t seem able to get it together. I can’t take video while I fly. Heck, I can barely snap a few photos while I fly.

So today, Mike was in charge of the cameras. Although the video footage was too shaky for use — even online use — he got some great photos of the airport construction and downtown Wickenburg, as well as Jim’s house.

Wickenburg from the AirWe used to do aerial photography together with a Pentax 67 medium format camera. It was a pain in the butt. The camera could only hold 20 shots (I think), it weighed a ton, and although it did have an exposure meter, it didn’t have automatic exposure. That means the photographer had to adjust the shutter speed or aperture for every shot based on the meter reading. Mike didn’t like to do that. He’d set the exposure once or twice during the whole shoot. So half the pictures would be under or over exposed. Of course, the film couldn’t be processed in WIckenburg — we had to send it out. And we had to send out for enlargements, too. It was idiotic.

So now we use a 7 megapixel Canon PowerShot that I carry around with me in my purse. We can take up to 70 images on the card I have in it and even if 80% of them are bad, the remaining 20% are still enough to choose from. So just point and shoot, shoot, shoot.

We were only out for about a half hour. It was still cool when we got back to Jim’s house and put the helicopter away.

Now, later in the afternoon, I see the clouds building to the north. Maybe we’ll have a replay of all that wonderful rain again tonight.

I’ve got my fingers crossed.