Category

Life

Things I do, things I think, etc...
Anything that doesn't fit the other categories usually gets thrown in here.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Christmas in Review

Despite sounding like a christmas special, this is how my christmas went:

Spent the vacation in Sonora, CA which is about an hour and a half east of San Francisco.  Very quiet little town with lots of cows and little cell phone coverage.  Most of my mom’s side of the family were there, my grandma and my aunt and cousin Kendra, and us. 

Installed windows on tim’s macbook pro finally and played some trackmania nations.  He finally understands why Rick and I bought the mbps for games as he has now installed CS and stuff on it.  Windows XP has no good way to set up an Ad Hoc wireless network.  In fact, I don’t think there is even a way to do it.  We got it to work by setting up a network in OS X, connecting the windows computer to it, and then restarting the OS X machine into windows.  The network stayed and we could play.  Manual IPs.  Oh well.

I wasn’t very happy for the most part of the week.  I had told my mom that I wanted a Battlestar Galactica Season DVD set for christmas and she replied with “well you’re getting a trip to CA, cant afford anything else!”.  I’m not a scrooge or anything and I understand that being with family is more important than material gifts, but she didnt even seem to care about anything I wanted.  Especially when I went all out showing her how cool iTunes is and why iPods are so cool and successful, getting her 7 beatles albums, a 30 gig iPod, and a TV cable (all split 50/50 with Tim except beatles songs thx ben).  I felt like the scale of caring was a little one-sided.  Combine that with my general not caring too much about christmas, being away from Alison, and my mom’s getting crazy stressed over holiday travel (which went so smoothly it was no prob even with the Denver thing) I wasn’t in a good mood.

So christmas morning comes along and I’m all happy to be with family and my mom loved the iPod and everything which made me feel really good.  She ended up giving me one of those visa prepaid credit card things for $100 which is about twice the cost of a BSG season, which I would have been more happy with probably.  All in all I liked being with my family and seeing them happy and I may have been stubborn and immature in what she said, but I can’t really help how it made me feel.  I am in no means perfect.  I also got some shirts and moneys which will go to a brand new iPod and phone after macworld.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Merry Christmas

I will be in California until the 28th.  Call cell if you really miss me that bad.  Otherwise see you then!

Merry Christmas!

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Graduation!

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Geminids and Felines

Late last night my mom and I decided to go watch the Geminid meteor shower since it was clear, dark, and semi-warm for this time of year.  We always used to watch the Perseids before school started in August, but with weather and internships and lots of other stuff, we haven’t done it in years.  The geminids aren’t as numerous as the Perseids, but they are slower, bigger, and burn up nice and slow so they are easier to see.  We went to Tinkers Creek on Old Mill road to escape the city light and though there were some clouds, it was an okay show.  We saw two really good ones and a bunch others before it got too cold.  It’s been a long time since I got to see some good meteors.

Also there was a stray kitten that came up to us and was even sitting on my lap before we got up to leave.  It’s fur was pretty rough and there weren’t any houses around so I dont think it belongs to anyone.  We felt bad to leave it alone in the winter so we brought it home and it’s in the garage.  I’ll take it to a shelter today.  Pretty nice cat for a stray.  It should get a nice home.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Flight Instruction First Thoughts

I think that to be a teacher, one of your inherent motivations should be the desire to teach. To search for the means and methods to instill new knowledge onto your students. I know everyone’s heard the start of this rant before. But here’s the twist. I am complaining about myself. I call myself a teacher in the strictest sense because I interact one on one with my students to teach them how to fly. I spent a few thousand for the knowledge and skill needed to become a flight instructor. But now that I am one, I find that any desire I had to teach people to fly has been eaten by the demoralizing bureaucracy and endless paperwork of a government institution. Disastrous Ohio weather also has its part to play. My students don’t make any progress. They are pretty lazy, especially when I remember the effort I put in to flying when I was in their place. They don’t study, they don’t make an effort to fly when they can, and it comes down on me as the instructor when they do not do well. It’s my reputation that they are risking as well as their own, and for that I have to find extra ways to supplement their learning. This equals more work for me, which as a general rule I am opposed to. Through all the pain and suffering I find myself asking where is the desire and devotion as a teacher that I am supposed to have? I think it disappeared when I went to Dallas and felt closer to my career then I do now. I feel that flight instruction is a step backwards although I was not even flying in Dallas. It’s something that I do only to return to that which impressed me so. I hope that in the days to come I will find something that will return the joy of flight instruction to me. Or maybe it’s just been a bad couple of days.