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.

Time Flies When You’re Getting Old

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Why time seems to go by faster, the older you get.

This is the official explanation. Or at least the explanation I came up with. But if you think about it, you’ll realize it has some merits.

First, the question: Why does time seem to go by faster, the older you get?

The answer: time is relative. I think Einstein might have proved that, but I’d like to present it in a far less technical way, without equations.

Look at it this way: When you’re five years old, a year is a FIFTH of your life. That’s a huge amount of your known time. But when you’re fifty years old, that same year is a FIFTIETH of your life. That’s a much smaller chunk of your time on earth. So it seems to go by faster.

What do you think? I’m convinced that this is the answer.

Six Rides in One Day?

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Wickenburg residents come out of the woodwork to go for helicopter rides one Saturday.

The phone calls started on Tuesday, June 1. A woman had gotten a gift certificate for a helicopter ride from her husband. She wanted to take the ride and buy her husband the same ride. When could I do it?

I consulted my calendar and set her up for Saturday, June 5, at 10 AM.

Another call later in the day. This guy had a gift certificate for a Ghost Towns tour. He wanted to do it early in the morning. (So did I.) We set it up for Saturday at 7 AM.

The next day, another call. A woman with a gift certificate for a tour wanted to go this weekend. How about Saturday, I asked. I fit her in at 8:30 AM.

Thursday, Alta called. She’d wanted to send a co-worker on a brief ride so she could see her home from the air. When could I take her? I suggested Saturday at 9:30 AM.

In the span of three days, I’d booked five rides. In June!

Saturday rolled along with the usual beautiful weather. I pulled up to the airport at 6 AM and pulled Three-Niner-Lima out of the hangar. And for the next four hours, I flew. Not just the five rides I’d scheduled, but a friend of one of the passengers — I never did figure out which one — decided to take a ride, too.

One thing for sure: I’ll never set a gift certificate to expire on June 30 again!

Wireless Works

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I find that wireless networking is the way to go.

I’m not on the road right now. I’m in my bedroom, lounging on my bed with two big pillows behind my back. The air conditioning is on and the house is comfortably cool. My laptop is where it should be: on my lap. When I’m finished writing this, I’ll upload it to the Internet without moving more muscles than it takes to click a mouse button.

And look Mom! No wires!

I had cable modem installed in my house the other day. It isn’t a traditional cable modem. It’s a wireless one. We live beyond the cable boundaries and depend on Dish Network for television. But satellite Internet service isn’t Mac friendly and I won’t buy a PC just to have Internet in the house. So I went with wireless cable. They put an antenna on the roof of the house and it points at the big transmission tower about a mile west of here. A wire from our antenna comes into the house where it attaches to an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. The base station acts as a DHCP router and shares its signal with an old Strawberry iMac (via old-fashioned Ethernet cable) and any computer within range that has a wireless card. That’s how I can lounge upstairs and surf the net at relatively fast speeds.

My home network isn’t the only wireless network my PowerBook connects to. When I’m up at the Grand Canyon, waiting for a flight at Papillon, I sometimes wake up the PowerBook to check my e-mail. As soon as I flip open the lid, it connects me to Papillon’s wireless network, which has been configured so I can access it. And two weeks ago, when I was in New Jersey for a funeral, I flipped the PowerBook open at Newark Liberty Airport and was surprised to find myself connected to the terminal’s wireless network. There are a few other networks I’ve managed to connect to, too, but there’s no need to go into details. Still, I find it amazing that wireless networks are so prevalent these days.

Makes you kind of wonder what’s traveling around us in wavelengths these days.

I’ve got all the equipment I need to set up a wireless network in my office. I just don’t have the time. I’m working on my Quicken book revision (again) and am too burned out at the end of a day to sit around and configure a network. But one of these days I’ll get around to it.

Hard to believe there are still people accessing the Internet via dial-up connection, isn’t it?