488.2!

I'm 11.8 hours of flying away from being a 500 hour pilot!!! AND I get to fly about six and a half hours today, so I might just have 500 when I finish on Saturday! I also get to spend the night in Owensboro tonight, which will be pretty cool. I flew over Lake Barkley the other day. It's pretty much the greatest lake to spend ones summers, for those of you who've never heard of it before. I looked but I couldn't see the abandoned house or the A-frame, or anything, but we fly over it again today, so I'm going to look harder this time. (It's really difficult to pick stuff like that out at 23,000 feet.) Gotta head off to Jackson now. *Fade in/:"Dixie Land"*

Cincinnati!!

Got to fly out of Cincinnati for the first time today! The three ground radio frequencies (plus two company freqs) are a little confusing on the first go of things, but the flying is really sweet. Went to Jackson TN and Cape Guirado (sp?) Hey I know how to fly, not spell! Anyway, when I got back I just missed a flight into Indy, so now I'm just sitting around waiting for the next one.

The coolest thing in sports happened today as Pete Sampras beat Roger Federer after five years in retirement! He has some pretty amazing tennis skills.

Happy Thanksgiving!

yesterday! I hope you all feasted well and praised God much for the wonderful bounty He has given us. I sure did.

Driving across Amercia

or at least the eastern half of it. I just got of a road trip from Boston to Cincinnati and then to Indy
yesterday evening. I got to break it into two days thanks to the hospitality of the Filberts. Had a super gorgeous snowfall coming down all across Pennsylvania. Applied to get an apartment in Cincinnati and got home late last night. I got to rake leaves this morning, and I think I'm going to do a little work on our addition this afternoon. If you're in Indy this week and want to do something fun just give me a call.

Happy Birthday MOM!!!!

Happy birthday mom
hope you have a great fun day
with lots of good cake

I miss you a lot
you will never be too old
to be loved by me

If I had time I
would make seventeen haiku
and arrange for you

Quite a weekend

This weekend was crazy! Flew to Cincinnati and drove all over with Shawn looking for apartments. Found some nice ones, which means that now we have the hard choice of which apartment to go with. I'm happy though cause no matter which choice we make it'll be a double improvement for me. Then I went home and got to go to church with my family on Sunday, and I got new shoes yesterday that let me go through metal detectors without setting off the terrorist alarms.
I was reading my toothpaste tube the other night (Yeah, I'm still that weird.) and saw "For best results, squeeze from the bottom." OOOHHH! No wonder my teeth weren't getting clean! I'd been squeezing from the middle!
Got to drive with Caleb a couple times. He's a good driver already.
If any of you know of a good reformed church in Cincinnati please tell me about it.

I totally

read all my blog links last night! Haven't gone through the whole list in quite a while cause I usually just pick two or three and cycle down till I get about halfway done and forget where I was and start over again. I was fun to see where everybody is going these days. Speaking about going places> Quebecians are jerks. No, I take that back... too wide of a generalization... Our hotel lady is super great and nice, but the taxi drivers IIIIEEEEEEE. They all wait in a line to pick folks up and the front guy just sat there when we came out of the airport, and he wouldn't come to the loading zone till we waved at him and the drivers behind him started honking. Then he just glared at us and sped off after we got in. Almost hit a police officer and a couple cars on our frantic trip to the hotel. I guess he doesn't have anything to look forward to in American cash anymore since I went to the McD's here (home of the $1.39 menu) and my price went up when I flashed a couple George Washingtons. Its kind of strange because everything is more expensive here and money is worth less so its like a double whammy. Even the beer vending machine is $4 a bottle. See:

pop pop pop

woot! I'm mostly better now. My ears still go off a little but we can do the full 3,000 fpm descent now. I have a pretty sweet trip flow this week with a couple nights out in Canada. Gotta head out to Plattsburgh now though.

ugg

I am feeling quite uggy today. We got up at five NB time (four Boston time) and went to the airport to find that our plane was broken, our flight was canceled, and we were the last to know about it. So, we went back to the hotel for some extra sleep. Surprisingly, they were really fast and we only got an extra half-hour before we headed back to the airport. Flew the plane to our maintenance base in Watertown. It was a pretty fun flight because there was finally a whole layer of clouds at our flight altitude, so I got a nice chunk of instrument time. However the descent to ART was enlightening. I got to finally learn the true agony that comes from changing nine thousand feet of effective altitude with no hope of sinus pressure relief. When we finally landed I half expected my ear drums to burst, and I couldn't hear properly for nigh on an hour. lol I wonder if my posting sounding more despondent of late comes from my currently listening to The Life of David Brainerd (thanks Aaron!!). I had a delightful nap at our hotel and went down to Aldis to get some guava-mango juice. There's nothing like guava-mango juice to help the stuffy head. In fact I'm going to go take another swig right now... mmm ahhh. Ok where was I? Right: Coming back to the hotel. There is a psychic/holistic convention at the hotel right now. I can go learn about removal of embedded items and card/palm reading and NY and UFOs, or even How to Survive to 2025 > an age of UNIVERSAL PEACE!!!! as you can tell, I am in a very typing mood right now, so I will do my freedom trail post as soon as I post this.

Plattsburgh

I got to try out our new run to Saranac Lake and Plattsburgh yesterday. Spent the night in Plattsburgh at a very nice Best Western, but the combination of only eight hours between flights (i.e. >5 hours of sleep) and a couple of below freezing preflights turned my immune system into a nuclear wasteland :( Got deiced for the first time in my life this morning! And the mountains around Saranac Lake are stunningly beautiful in the sunrise. Now I'm on a 15 hour overnight in Fredericton, so hopefully the hazardous waste crews can make some headway on my personal nuclear disaster. Heading out for a quick lunch now, then I think I'll come back and maybe do my Freedom Trail post before I forget all about it.