Canopyflyer

Back in 2000 I lived in Loveland, OH which is just north of Cincinnati, OH. There used to be an old fashioned barber shop on Loveland-Madeira road.

I walked into the barber shop and was greeted by the barber and told to take a seat. There were two other men in the shop. One was in the chair and getting his hair cut and the other was reading a newspaper and I was unable to see his face at all. The barber finished with the guy in the chair and looked over at the man reading the newspaper and said:

“Neil you’re up.”

The man closed his newspaper and laid on the chair next to him…

And I found myself looking at the first man that walked on the moon.

I completely blew every circuit breaker in my brain. Somehow though I managed to keep my composure and didn’t turn into a complete idiot. As he got his hair cut we talked about mundane things, never once talking about space flight, although we did discuss aviation. At the time I was a skydiver and he actually had some questions about it. He told me that he had a ride under a parachute… I replied, yeah I’ve seen that video.

And that is how I met and had a conversation with Neil Armstrong.

Irrespective if the meaning has been reversed over the years.

What most people miss about this saying is… IT GOES BOTH WAYS.

If someone mistreats you and uses their blood relationship to you as an excuse, then that is not a member of your family. Family supports and goes through things together. Friends can become family. At this stage of my life, I have cut off my entire blood relations due to their toxic and stupid behavior. My family is the woman I married, my kids, and a few choice friends.

In the movie “Stripes” the scene where Bill Murray’s character stops the cab in the middle of the bridge and throws the keys into the river was filmed on the 2nd Street bridge in Louisville, Kentucky. My family and I lived on the Sunny Side of Louisville, otherwise known as Hell… errrr I mean Indiana.

One of the cars passing by Bill Murray is my Dad in our family car. He was going over to downtown and the production were by the side of the road asking people if they would be willing to drive by for the scene.

Nationals is going on in Houston this weekend. A local robotics club here flew there on Spirit.

They’re supposed to fly back to O’Hare tomorrow. Kind of wonder what they’re going to do.

Xanadu

No, not Olivia Newton John’s version written by Jeff Lynne…

Rather the one by RUSH.

The University of Wisconsin Madison Arboretum has several acres planted with a combination of; magnolias, crab apples, and lilacs.

During April to early May that field smells AMAAAAZING.

I think Lemmy is doing a pretty good job of that already. :-P

After many years, I finally found decent LED lights to replace the incandescent bulbs on my two McIntosh amps (MC7108, MC7100).

Not a huge project, but it was something that I had been wanting to do for many years.

Here is a photo of my MC7108 with the new lights installed.

I have a wicked sense of humor and a penchant for puns and word play. I also have a very large vocabulary from being a voracious reader from an early age which feeds my puns.

I can trace the point in time when my wife and I fell in love with each other was when we spent an entire car trip doing puns and word play. Not just any puns but as the trip went on they got more and more esoteric. We discovered that we could keep up with each other and we’ve been together ever since.

Not to be “that guy”…

But doing crap like this on guard should be grounds for getting a ticket pulled… Permanently.

It shows a complete lack of decision making ability and safety awareness. There are plenty of places to screw around and have this kind of entertainment.

On the guard frequency is not one of them. It’s not a stretch to say people’s lives could be affected due to this utter stupidity. People have died in the air due to a lot less.

The only time you truly fail is when you give up prematurely.

Every Chess Grandmaster has lost more games than the average person has played.

My oldest has moderate to severe dyslexia. The poor kid finished 1st grade at just a Kindergarten reading level. He was going to fall behind very quickly as he progressed through school. Fortunately in our hometown there is a very good program for Dyslexics, and other learning disabilities. The tutoring program used the Orton-Gillingham method.

Fast forward 13 years and he was just accepted to Northwestern for the next fall quarter. Northwestern uses a quarter system rather than semester. He read the first 3 books of the Stormlight Archive (~630,000 words each book, or longer than Lord of the Rings in its entirety) in the span of about a month. He has turned into a voracious reader and had not had to make use of any of the accommodations afforded to him as being a diagnosed dyslexic.

Stargate

Lost in Space: Season 3 You’ll never guess who composed this one. Go ahead and look it up, I want you to experience the sheer awe I did when I found out.

My god, it’s a crying shame I had to come down this far to find this one.

It’s really really good.

I love Farscape…I’ve been a huge fan since discovering it in 2001. I’ve watched the show from start to PK War many many times and have introduced my wife and kids to it. They have subsequently watched the whole thing multiple times as well.

I skip the intro every single time. Sorry, but it just grates.

Due to a hail storm last week, I’m getting ready to put the 4th roof on my house in the 20 years I’ve lived here. The first time I had a storm chaser do the work and honestly they did a great job. The next was done by a local contractor because my wife wanted to change some colors and I wanted to upgrade some of the materials. The local contractor did a great job, the only real difference than the storm chaser was they took a lot longer. In the end though the job they did was really good.

Three years ago we had the basement finished by a local contractor. Very happy with the work and the few minor issues that were revealed during the final inspection were quickly fixed. The only complaint was with the plumber. They spec’d the cheapest crap for the bathroom and I missed it on the bid. I’ve had to replace the toilet and am getting ready to replace the sink faucet already.

I have found the secret to picking contractors for working on a house is asking people involved in the industry. The realtor we bought the house through is the wife of MY wife’s coworkers. She had decades of experience in the housing market in our area. So we asked her and she gave us several contractors she trusted. We then asked those contractors who they liked working with and so on and so forth. So now 20 years later I have a full list of contractors to do just about any type of work on the house.

It’s been great as the house ages. When the hot water heater failed, the plumber was out here with a new unit, installed it and was out the door within 8 hours. We didn’t even miss a shower. Just a note, this is not the same plumber that did the installation during the basement finishing. I would not go back to them.

Vertical Horizon: “Instamatic”.

Did a little research and… Holy crap… Turns out that Neil Peart was a guest drummer on the song. It’s amazing how a truly talented drummer can make such a massive impact on a band.

There she was just walkin’ down the street

Singing…

I’m 6 years away from getting Social Security… Which means I’ll get to it about the time to see some billionaire buy another boat with what was left in the Social Security fund.

I wish my wife would be up for this, but I’m damn close to selling everything and buying a boat then fucking off to the south Pacific until I die. The problem is she gets motion sickness from standing still. She’d never be able to live on a boat.

Plane crashes.

Not in a morbid sense, but rather I like reading the NTSB reports about how the holes in the Swiss Cheese model line up. There are several Youtube channels that give detailed breakdowns on accidents that I like to watch as well.

Why?

It started when I was 19 when I saw the aftermath of United 232. My parents and I were driving through Sioux City IA about 4 hours after the crash. Fortunately, the highway was far enough away that only the larger parts of the plane could be seen. Bodies were not visible or had already been removed. That was 37 years ago and I still remember it like it was still happening.

I launched into learning everything I could about what happened to that airplane.

I had done the same thing with other accidents as well. Like many my age, I watch the Challenger accident live and Chernobyl happened that same year as well.

Add to that, in the 90’s I started skydiving. My home DZ flew two Beech 18’s. In one aircraft I experienced engine problems twice that elicited a bail out of all the jumpers. On both occasions the plane landed safely and put back into service after the engine was repaired, or replaced. The other Beech 18 I actually experienced a crash. It was fuel starvation on climb out and the pilot, who was the Drop Zone Owner, was flying. He put the plane down in a corn field off the end of the runway. All the jumpers except one got into the other Beech and jumped.

That just fed my curiosity. And yes, I still jumped after all of those occurrences. The crash actually happened first. I just tell it chronologically backward as it was the most serious of the incidents.

I also think that my studying of aviation accidents made me a better and safer skydiver. I was always thinking in terms in how things were lining up to allow bad things to happen. Not that I didn’t have close calls, I even wrote about one of them in a previous post, but I never experienced any major injuries in my 4500 jumps.