Oral Exam Tomorrow

I’ve not been at all worried about this exam up until about, oh, two hours ago. I’m prepared; I don’t know why I’m worried. Maybe something to do with the thousands of pages of material, all of which is fair game, and which I cannot possibly hope to contain in my feeble little brain.

Good pilots deal well with stress. Do I deal well with stress? I don’t know. I’d like to think I do, but the truth is, I don’t think I generally recognize stress, until I’ve been affected for some time. I realized I must be stressed when after reading Jonah’s last post, I wanted to cry. That seems a bit excessive, though she did say she was trying to make it sad.

The nice thing about my exam being scheduled at noon tomorrow is that I don’t have to stay awake all night worrying that if I stay awake I won’t sleep.

It was hot in Phoenix today. High of 90°, with more of the same tomorrow. I guess it’s summer here already. It was nice in the Springs too–I drove to the airport with the top down, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s funny, every spring I morn the loss of the winter. I thought perhaps that living in Colorado would cure me of that, but not so far, it’s just made it worse, realizing that all the best snow is gone until October.

In case anyone is interested, it’s permissible to land my aircraft in 0.88 inches of slush. I really would like to know what goes through the minds of the folks who write this stuff.

Subscriptions!

My Mom was complaining that she never thinks to read my blog, but she wants to. Rather than explaining RSS feeds to her, I just installed a plugin that will let you subscribe to the blog and get email updates.

Note that you need to actually have an account on Our Dumb Blog already. If you’d like an account and don’t have one, please send a message to flyboy @ that ever-popular-webmail site, gmail.com.

Also note that you subscribe by selecting the categories you wish to subscribe to, which isn’t exactly intuitive, but that’s the way it is. You can receive HTML or plain text email, and you can receive either excerpts or the entire posts. Let me know if you’ve got any problems with it.

Additionally, I’ve added a check box which will e-mail you about follow-up comments to a post. That way you don’t have to check back to see if someone has responded to your comment.

Please let me know if any of this doesn’t seem to be working like it should.

It’s about damn time.

The Democrats finally found some chutzpah. Finally, they’re standing up to Dubya with something more than a non-binding resolution. It’s nice to see government actually working.

Of course, the bill they passed will never pass the Senate, and even if it did, the president will not sign it. But that’s fine and good. The point is that the Cheney bill would have expanded the FISA court’s powers and granted telecom immunity for illegal wiretaps. Instead, they passed a bill which would instead restrict the current FISA powers.

Jonah has often claimed that were the Democrats in power on September 12th, they would have mounted a far worse attack on civil liberties than the Republicans, but this is pretty darned good evidence to the contrary.