Me at 20

I was repairing an old briefcase this week, and I found a pile of pictures in it.

When I was 19 I announced to my father that I was not going to go back to college for my junior year. I was moving to Australia. The discussion around this was lively. It consisted of, "bullshit you are." Followed by, "yes I am." It was the first time I'd really stood up to him.

Eventually the "yes I am" side won. I won't digress on the whole story, but I ended up being qualified as a 'foreign expert' in satellite technology, and the Australians gave me a work permit.

This is a picture of me with my VW pickup truck. I'm not sure if I felt like such a badass, but I look like something straight from the bush.

Nice shorts.

It flies again

I flew my airplane today.

In and of itself not big news. But it's been down for seven months after a catastrophic engine failure. I haven't written about it. History and all. But it is enough to say that my engine self-destructed on takeoff in early June - I'd only owned the airplane a couple of weeks. I made it back to the runway and landed.

I have been working for many months to negotiate a new engine. It worked.

We got it all back together 12 days ago, and it started instantly. Then we found a rather important sensor was broken, so we've waited for a new one to come.

Today Mechanic Bob called to say it was time. We fired it up, and went to the far north end of Boeing Field. It's 10,000 feet long - it's a huge runway. We powered up, flew the length of the field, did a left turn, flew the pattern and landed, took it back to the hangar and disassembled some things and looked around. It was all fine.

So we went off for a real flight. Took it out to the Cascade foothills and did some laps north and south, took notes, watched everything. Not a single thing happened that we thought, "gotta look into that..." Usually there's a thing or two, but not this time.

It runs like it's supposed to now. No more mysteries. I just need to learn to trust it again.










This is Bob the Mechanic, who was along as an extra set of eyes. And I think also to say, "I trust it. It's fine. Don't worry." And he was right. It was totally ordinary. It also looks like I might have woken him up with this turn.









And this is the machine post-flight. I finally exhaled about here.

Karla and Kaj come from Canada

The most alliterative title I've ever penned.

Kaj is going to be an engineer. He's 14 and he knows engineering is in his future. What I'd give to have had that kind of self understanding. Karla wants to encourage this. So they came down for an overnighter and a trip through the Museum of Flight, and the DaVinci exhibit before it goes away.

From dinner last night, to breakfast at the Georgian Room (they stayed at the Oly Four Seasons and I got there for the waffle course), to the Museum, it was just a nice change of pace for me. It was interesting running as a pack of Amazonians, too. (Karla: 6'; me 6'3"; Kaj - age 14 - 6'3".)

Kaj was impressed with a lot of stuff. Yet...he couldn't understand why a person would fly in an airplane with only one engine. Perhaps one day I'll help him understand - maybe upside down at 200 mph.