Things one loves.

2008 will be a good year. I will not let it be otherwise.

Karma sometimes flashes and is fun. The troublesome, lying student and strange parent that caused me so much grief a number of weeks ago came in and annouced he is "Taking a break for a while..." after having missed a month already. Really? I hadn't guessed!Hope you get 20 bucks for your gear on e-bay, you'll find some team sport more suited to your attitude. Why did I ever give up all my interests to teach useless little snots like this anyway? I should have taken up illegal drugs, at least people would feel sorry fo me then.

The phrase I hate worse in this world is, "Wow, it must be great to do something you love and make a living from it!" Hmmmm....ok, I finally put definition to it. I don't love this martial art in the least. I have been highly interested in it. I have been sometimes challeneged by it, but I have never loved it. AND...I have NEVER loved teaching it. I didn't take it up to spend all my time making sure everybody else had fun. I took it up because I wanted to have fun. What I loved was music and writing and anything to do with airplanes, and even sometimes cars. There was the whole world of shortwave DXing too. Can't do that when you are off teaching at the prime time of the day for reception of stations. Pretty much all the things I have no time or money t do as a result of how much time I have spent making sure everybody else is having fun

School is rough, but I make slow progress. I will reach my goals. Nevermind dying trying...its KILLING trying.
Grrrr.

Overwhelmed

It's been a while since I posted. I wish I had some interesting stuff to post, lik the good bloggers do. I dislike cats, so I guess I can't be a real bloger. Why the hell do so many people waste bandwidth with pictures of their cats?

I still haven't reassembled my dead car, the weather has either been freezing cold or raining....which makes it a mess to work on the car outside. In the meantime I am going broke driving the truck.

I am very far behind in school due to the tramas of the end of last year. Looks like I am best served to catch up the labs from last year and test out on that half of the program. I owe twice as many labs for last semseter as I do for last year. What a nightmare. I am feeling the pressure to get things done, so I can get the hell out of teaching for a living.

I am sick and tired of dealing with what are now known as helicopter parents. Kisa today don't learn responsibility, and are all cuddled far past the youthful age that they should be learing responsibility. I've had another bad parent experience, and I just want to quit and go work nights at a grocery store or something to earn my income until school is done. I migt have to anyway, as its not paying the bills as it is. I may lose overall income, but I would lose close to a $1000.00 a month in rental expense, and save untold thousands of dollars of gas and vehicle repair costs.

I need to get caught up with school, thats all there is to it.

Just Keep....Moving...

It's finally a new, better year than last year!

So....the FAA says that the normal passenger or crewmember on an airplane weighs 170 pounds. This number must have been chosen in the late great glory days right after WWII when everybody waqs smaller than they are now, and fit having just fought wars and all the like. I haven't been 170 pounds since fifth grade, and I suspect the years and years of cycling that built my legs up made them into muscle that won't drop below a certain point.

Timing has it that The Girl and I have joined a gym, and paid a Trainer to harrass us into working out better. Hell feels like this. Someday, all those 20-something trainers will also be 46 and know what THIS feels like. I hope I am in the room to see it.

I'd like to get back to cycling, get back to rockets and autocross stuff...plus get my Private Pilot's ticket. I suppose that I need to finish all my labs and get my A & P ticket first, so I can afford to do the other things.

It's an Olympic year, and hopefully that means new students this year. That might mean getting get caught up on bill before all else.

Let the slaughter begin! 2008 is upon us!

Not Long Now....

...until 2007 will be dead and gone. Up until the end it has been a mess. Pain runs rampant as the expense of joining a gym. The gig tonight was canceled, leaving us nothing to do other than try and sleep off the exercise agonies. Just figures doesn't it...the LAST possible thing that was planned for this year gets screwed up. I shall remember 2007 as "The Year That Sucked" for many years.

Here's another picture of one of those damned airplanes that keeps flying around here all the time. Its like they are taking pictures or something. Probably the police department back up to some sort of monkeyshines.

Hurry Up and End 2007.

I can't wait for this year to end. Its been one diaster after another all year long. Cars breaking down, truck breaking down, school becoming overwhelming, Mocha and Peewee BOTH dying, future mother-in-law nearly dying, computer dying, wedding being put off as a result....the whole IRS thing and countless other CRAP. Top it with no trip to Florida to visit my dad.

It gets down to a TERRIBLE economy, in which my business drops everytime gas prices go up another 10 cents a gallon. I don't care what the numbers say, everyone I know who is in business is ready to quit because they are getting nowhere.

In short, I can't wait for this crappy year to be over. 2008 will be a better year.

Goodbye to Peewee

Yesterday just sucked. Peewee has been raging against the effects of very advanced age for some time now, and yesterday he lost the fight.

So many years ago he wandered into my girl's life, when she was only a little girl herself. He took over and became the Head Dog,despite his tiny size. In a malstrom of other dogs he always had his way, displaying a certain lovable pig-headedness that you couldn't help but love. At the time, the family already had too many dogs, and her father didn't really want to keep him, but my girl insisted. Peewee and her dad became fast friends.

When my girl lost her dad, Peewee turned all his love and affection to her. They were closer than close. When she moved in with me she missed him terribly, and one day he just moved in with us. My place became a home on that day.

He was old and fragile when first I got to know him. He wasn't ding so good, so we went out of our way to get senior dog food for him, pamper him and do whatever we could. Of course, he displayed all manner of issues, but when he came walking in with that little confidant stroll, all was just fine in the world. He even got well enough again to enjoy playing and pouncing about...and walks in the park.

Once, on a trip to the mountains, he stood at the top of a mound probably 4 feet tall, surveyed the scene..and then lept! That's a big jump for a 7 pound, 15 year old dog, but he was just fine. H once raced around to met us after we were gone for the day, over-joyed to see us. That was a fine day....until...

...he had the second of some manner of stroke or seizure. He was never quite right after that it seemed. There he was, all himself, and then he wandered off. He seemed increasingly lonely. We worried about him, and so we got Max, to keep him company. Max looks like a giant version of Peewee, and has an equally demanding personality....but he soon learned Peewee was boss and respected that. Soon enough, his pig-headness came back and he was bossing the larger dog around and keeping him from his food.They made a nice pair together. Both seemed happy at the company, and they even got to the point of sleeping near each other much of the time.

These last six months have been hard, Peewee losing control of himself and peeing everywhere. I had decided that all was fine, as long as we had him with us. He was to be part of our wedding, which had to be postponed because of all the other crap. Now, he will neverbe able to take part, and I am destroyed by it. We plan to find and wear lockets with his photo in them when we do finally get married. Still, it won't be the same as having the loving little smelly dude there having his way with everything.

We buried him in HIS spot in the front yard of my girl's house, where he sunned and stood guard for so many years. To hell with the perfect lawn we destroyed doing so,and to hell with the sprinkler system we didn't know was there. I've found a statue that looks very close to him on-line, and think we will probably order it to mark his spot.

I miss you so much Peewee, fare thee well on your journey! I promise to take care of your girl for you, and to keep her from harm.

Let's just start the christmas season depression early.

I haven't been looking, because I am broke, but it seems The Waterboys are playing like 3 dates in the US after not being here for some years. None are near me-so....I will miss them this tour. I have never missed them in the US since the first tour. This is so depressing.

To top it all, Iron Maiden tickets seem to have gone on sale this morning also. Guess that's out too.

I feel like I have wasted my time/ talent and energies to have worked so hard, for so long, to have a place that others may enjoy their interest in the martial art I teach, and its all at the expense of my own security and enjoyment of life. Things need to change. I don't want to waste another minute. I want to be involved in music and writing at the level I wanted all this time, with a job that pays me enough to make progress in them and enjoy them.

Blogging Half life

It seems all cool blogs I follow run out of steam and vanish at some point. Interting people get bored, tired, fired, fat, injured....whatever, and the blog entries slow or stop compleltly. Its a bummer when you've been following some intelligent person, only to have them vanish ith no reason.

Probably worse is the victums of love. They go from having great blogs to googly eyed proclamations of never-ending love for whomever new is in their life. If you keep them bookmarked, at some point they break up and get interesting again. Others, they get married and join the ever increasing numbers of "baby blogs", fully documentingevery poop and fart their child makes as it grows. Talk about embarrassing for the kids. What happens when the never-ending blog is discovered by other fifth grade classmates some years later?Blogmurders? Who can tell.

Oh well, off to class and a mid-term test. I am tired, sick and mentally dull.I hope I get a decent score on the thing....

ALL the candidates are MORONS!

It crosses ALL party lines at this point. There is NOBODY worth voting for. Those in politics never have the people's welfare in mind anyway, its all about power and influence and stuffing their own pockets with money.

The democrats seem to have gone crazy on taking away things like guns (?!?!?!), forgeting that this country exists because of them (right or wrong). Where does that leave folks interested in shooting sports (not even hunting?). or collecting? And just WHY does every useless damned illegal alien that crawls across the boder DESREVE(?!?!?) "rights"??? I've had them RUIN my life twice now, and never take responsibility for THAT! The democrats used to work towardss at east a little sharing of the wealth by the common man, now they bypass him and want to hand his efforts to criminals it seems.

The republicans are so stuck on making money by hosting wars they even turned off their subtle machine and just blatently do so. I don't a DAMN about "spreading democracy around the globe", and neither do they. I just admit it. I couldn't care less about Iraq, to hell with the place, let it fall into chaos and see whp comes out on top. Who knew it was possible to create a larger clusterfuck than ietnam?

Where is somebody the normal, everyday person who HAS to work a job can trust?

AND...I am sick of the everyday "experts" who flail their party flags and can't see the idiocy of their own parties. It no longer splits down party lines...they are ALL useless!

Where can one move to get away from it all?

Getting Too Tired to Care.....

First, I can never remember the password for the googl version of blogger,so I never seem to update anymore. I have tonsof photos to try and upload, but that will be when I get some time.

Life has just sucked, to tell the truth. Was supposed to get married yesterday, BUT, the future mother-in-law worked herself into sickness and ended up in a hospital inducd coma with all manner of illness. It remains to e seen if she will actually survive. I am betting she will, as she's not all that old and always seems pretty tough. Her siblings all seem to think otherwise. I hate people who get into a hospital room and commence with the loud crying and praying crap. Where's the respect? All from the same people who got in the middle of ourlong planned wedding and screwed it all up. Guess who WON'T be invitd to the rescheduled one under any circumstance?

My grades have begun to slip at school as a result of all the stress ( I had scored only 100 percent on tests until last week....). I hope I do ok on today's test, haven't had a moment to study. Off to school I go...maybe I can squeeze 5 minutes in....

Planes of Fame 2007 Air Show-Chino

Hello Jimmy!,

School is out and I have TIME again! I have been madly cleaning my tiny apartment, applied for a daytime job and discovered how to finally get back to my blog and add photos. I had to get a replacement digital camera, so as to better service my website. The old one wasn't doing the job at all at this point. The first day I had the new one, I shot 707 photos with it! This, of course, means I went to an airshow. Looking back over the years, 98% of my photos are of airshows. I am DYING to find the gathering of warbirds from like 1971 I took with my first camera, if they show up I'll scan them and post them too. 707 photos is probably more than I've taken my entire life. 60% of them are crap (but I like them so they won't get deleated..), and I have new found respect for aerial photogs!

Now, on to the photos:

Ain't that a nice P-51 taking off? I have no idea whose it is, but it was clean and sounded great. The geeks among you already know how to look up the N-Number on the FAA website to see who owns it.....

Now here is a cool shot....guys pulling the prop through a few rotations before starting that great, big old radial engine on that cool B-25 Mitchell Bomber. Those of us who are A & P students at San Bernardino Valley College stood proudly by and knew WHY they were doing it. You wanna know...? There ARE openings in the next semester's classes....

Here's one of those Legacy Flights everyone gets so wound up about these days. I have found gas turbine engines to be pretty cool, but still would rather be wrenching on the older plane....but it turned out to be a pretty good photo after all.

The Final shot includes Glacier Girl, An un-named P-51 and a big old jet trying to not fall outta the sky. Yeah- my weekend WAS better than yours....!

It Let Me Sign In....

Since the blogger to google shift, everytime I tried to log in, the machine would not let me do so. I had to go and "reclaim" my blogger account to make one pass at things. Today was the first day it let me sign in on my own. A welcome change. Now lets see if it will let me attach a photo to things....

I think I'll call this one "Restless Passenger in a Biplane...."

Well, I guess it can now upload photos. Let's try again....

OK...Good...except it isn't the photo I thought I had picked. Still, its a cool photo, so I will leave it here.

THIS is the one I wanted..."Glacier Girl" breaking free of earth right in front of me....

Oh My.....

It's been such a long time since I posted anything. School is almost over for the summer, a few finals and I am done. I am like .5 of a point away from an A in one class...talk aout sleepless nights. More later.

Sometimes Dreams Come True....!

Hi Jimmy,

I know you are the kind that stops in the middle of a sentance and looks up every time an airplane flys over. Most airplane nuts are. Some become pilots, others head for working on the things....BUT....everyone of us cranes our necks in wonder and stares when a plane goes by on a trailer. Sometimes its a poor veterean of the air that didn't land so well, other times its just a lost angel waiting to be found in a barn or garage. Always, we wish we weren't doing what we were doing, and were helping this poor bird instead.


Its a lifelong dream to help recover a damagerd plane, no matter what was to happen to it in the end, and yesterday I realized that dream! Our aeronatics class got its hands on a Piper that had trouble at Big Bear Lake a few years ago, and has been sitting forlornly ever since. Through the work of one of our great instructors, things finally fell in place.

We wandered up with a surburban and my big ugly truck, Apollo. The other truck had a borrowed trailer and the pla was to toss the smaller stuff in my truck to keep the weight down on the tralered portion.

***Things to do, have to finish this later***

They've All Gone Deaf It Seems.

Hi Jimmy,

There is an interesting virus taking hold at the fencing center, the more advanced students all seem to have gone deaf. They rarely seem to hear what I say, and to make matters worse, they have begun to pass on their own mis-information to younger students. When I correct them, they don't hear me either. Defenses have fallen apart, terrible form is taking over and everyone is increasingly slow.

The approach I used to use was to show up with my own gear one week, kick everybodies asses and they'ed listen again. Now, my knees hurt too much from the constant class load to consider doing this. Nobody cares enough to compete anyway, so without that extra spark, I will simply have to treat the group as recreational students, as opposed to on-going competitive students. Not much of anyway to teah finer points of counterattack and the like on a group moving this slow anyway.

BUT- I am tearing through basic carbs at school. I have rebuilt dozens in my life, but the theory of why they work is now upon me. Continued learning is always a plus, and though I've torn apart carbs countless times, I always find a new way to look at tings to find yet another aspect of it all.

Guess life without crack codes isn't good enough for most. Oh well, maybe I'll end up in a third world country with little electricity someday.

Shaking Off The Rust.

Hi Jimmy,

School has started yet again, and I am glad to be off the holidays. It looks like the General portion of the program will be much easier with less unapplied math this time.

Powerplant is working on everything under the cowling that's NOT an engine...like Mags, fuel systems, props...you get the picture. Well, at least I will be a whole lot less greasy this time around.

It means that in three months I can go test with the FAA on General and Powerplant and get certified!I can't wait. I had planned yto do more summer courses, bu will probably work instead if I can find a summer gig. Then I can set aside the money to just have the truck painted instead of doing it myself.


Work is going very badly. There is an infection of the current computer game going around, and students waste so much time playing it, that they choose to skip fencing to do the homework they haven't done for school. I have always been concerned hat building your business around kids is a bad idea, and I miss the days when we had mainly college age and above students you could depend on. Oh well, right now I am trying to figure out how to drop a night and bargin for less rent so as to keep it all going. If it gets much worse, the only choice will to be find night work of some kind and close the fencing center.

Oh well, late to leave for school, should have ben out the door 5 minutes ago. C ya!

I Choose To Remember Today....

Dear Jimmy,

Many today will remember that the world lost John Lennon. I still remember that night like it was yesterday, it was a moment that shook time. It was a sad moment, and seemed the end of many positive things before the fall into the 80's picked up speed.

Today, I'll also remember that the world had gained Jim Morrison many years before- and will have a smile for Jim and a nod for John as I pass others on the streets.

Diaster Strikes Gatorland!!!!

Hi Jimmy!

Oh NO!Fire has struck the main building at Gatorland and destroyed it! The Gift Shop is ruined, but the great gator Jaws we have always walked through to get into the park have survived.....

They're gaping and burnt, with nothing left behind them...but look more sinister than ever I remember them.

Management has promised to not close the place down. Its always on the list to visit when in town, and for sure its a must see this year- every dime will count on getting them back up to speed!

School!

HI JIMMY!!!,

It RUNS!

The A 65 I have been working on was on the test stand, in the test cell toda...AND IT RAN REALLY GOOD!

I think all the little extra things I did for this tired old warrior helped for sure....

Details when there is time (meaning I have two more finals and two more tests this week alone...and all the homework is due...)

Apollo Is Getting On My Nerves..

Hi Jimmy,

Got to admit, Apollo is pissing me off. Now there is a charging problem and I can't drive him. I replaced the alt and fixed some mangled wiring to no avail. I have zero time to trouleshoot this....so its off to the local shop to hopefully get it all fixed. I am regretting not having Evie anymore...she NEVER failed me in times of need. (You see, I have to have a way to move equipment for classes...and the Miata ain't designed for that sort of thing...).

Word has it YOU have added shows out here, and hopefully a friend will be able to get tickets...as I'll be stuck in class at the time.