Once more in the Saab, dear friend

It feels good to be home now! I've actually been busy since my last update. I went to Ohio from the 13-15th to see people since I haven't been working a lot. I got in later than I wanted on Monday but no one could give me a ride earlier. Had dinner with my mom that night and later went to Jo's. I spent Tuesday out at the KSU airport. It was Kent's turn to host the regional flight competition. I hoped to help judge but they had enough already so I mostly just talked to people I hadn't seen in a while. It was great to see the planes and everyone since I spent just about every day from 2004 to 2007 at that airport it's kind of weird to be away from it now. Had dinner with Tim and my dad and then went to Tim's apartment to play some Quakewars.

Tim (Alkali) and I are pretty good at Quakewars together, and it would be awesome if more people would play with us. We stick together, usually with me as an Engineer and Tim a medic. I sometimes change my class depending on the objective, but typically it's my job to complete the mission and tim's job to revive me when I get shot. I prefer offense and Tim likes defense, but we usually just play on the Strogg (Alien) side. We played for about 2 hours. In one mission we were on the human team and it was our job to construct a generator underground. It's a good map that requires teamwork by the GDF (humans) to get into the highly defended area. If people just rush in randomly you will get mowed down or set off a mine. The strogg side was putting up a strong fight and we were getting pissed off so I came up with a strategy. I waited for some teammates to run in before me to take the fire, then I jumped in onto the generator, setting off the mines and dying. Then tim jumps in behind me to revive me and we got the generator built. After that we were able to rush the map before they could get a solid defense up. I had a good airstrike at a critical time to finish the map too, but it was our classic revive strategy that won the map. I always wish more people would get the game before like Wolf:ET, some people are just too good.

So I get home midday on the 15th and early on the 16th I get a call from Eagle crew scheduling! This is after 2 weeks of not working at all. They need someone to fly Saabs in LAX for 4 days and I'm the most junior guy who has the days open so they put me on a flight leaving two and a half hours later and all of a sudden I'm on the west coast. I hardly got any time during the week at home with Alison! But as long as I'm out there I might as well enjoy the scenery. Flying over $Texas is pretty boring as it's very flat. Cali was very pretty with the blue coast and mountains. There's a lot of people packed into a small area along the coast. The 6am flights they had me doing were okay too since it felt like 8am to me. Aside from being away from home, flying out of LAX was very fun, and I wish it didn't cost so much to live out there. But then I'd be even further away. Anyways here's some pics:

        
         

Minor change to the Friends page - no longer unlimited entries for one week, it's up to 4 entries for 2 weeks. Some people post a lot and take over the page and some don't post even once a month. Limiting it to one week had too many people at the bottom in purple. I want as few as possible to be in purple, so this is a compromise. Everyone should appear at least once on the page. Wed/Thurs/Fri I'll be working on spicing up the Links page. I've got some ideas and we'll see how it turns out.

Oh yeah and KSU ended up winning the flight team competition! We ended Western Michigan's ~20 year streak and came in first this year. It's come such a long way from 04 when I and the rest of the team vowed to turn around our 19 year streak of not even making it to nationals. I feel very proud to have been a part of that and I'm glad to have made a difference in the education of all the team and my former students. I griped about it a lot when I was doing it, but looking back I am glad I was an instructor, a competitor, and a coach.