Home again!
23 hours total on the road, and we still didn’t finish the new Harry Potter on audio.
Archive for the ‘Wanderings’ Category
Gone
We’re off for Mobile!
Dallas, CFII Orals
I’ve not been in a writing mood, but it seems like Joanna’s not going to do it either, so…
So I was supposed to take my oral exam last Thursday morning. Instead it was sprung on me on Wednesday afternoon. Both my instructor and I thought I was well-prepared. After the first question I realized I’d studied for the wrong test. After much studying, my recheck was this afternoon. It was difficult, but not impossible, and I passed. The flight portion of the CFII practical test is tomorrow morning at 8am. I have absolutely no idea what the flight is going to be like. I don’t even know how much of it I’ll have to fly, and how much of it I’ll be merely “instructing”. I get the feeling I’m going to be demonstrating and simultaneously explaining quite a bit.
Joanna and I went to Dallas this weekend to visit our friends Todd and Gianna. There’s a smattering of pictures on the photos page. We passed some huge things on very long trailers and coudln’t identify them. My best guess is that they’re blades for a windmill, but it’d be a bloody huge windmill. They’re something like 50 feet long. You can look at the photos and make up your own mind.
Flat Stanley
Flat Stanley came to visti us last weekend. Flat Stanley is a classic children’s book (Mardel carries it) that Berck’s cousin Brian was reading in his third grade class, which sent Flat Stanley to visit 50 States. Here’s the report we sent back with Stanley. (Pictures are in Photographs.)
FLAT STANLEY
State visited: Oklahoma
Date of visit: May 21, 2005
Person visited: Berck and Joanna
Stanley’s Adventure:
Stanley visited us here in Norman, Oklahoma. Norman was named after Abner E. Norman, who had been hired by the U.S. government to survey the Indian Territory (which later became Oklahoma). Norman is the third largest city in Oklahoma, and it is just south of Oklahoma City, the state capital. Norman is home of Oklahoma University.
The permanent population of Norman is about 96,000 people, but it grows during the school year by the 30,000 enrollment of OU.
OU has one of the most successful college football teams (they lost last year’s Rose Bowl after being only one of three undefeated teams in the country). College football is like a religion here. Under the American flag, businesses fly the OU flag instead of the state flag. People all over town have red and white rock gardens in their front yards spelling out “OU;” at Christmas time, there are lots of roofs with “OU” laid out in strings of red lights on rooftops. The team is called “The Sooners,” but no one knows what a Sooner is, so instead of putting pictures of OU’s mascot (a covered wagon) on their cars, people put on upside-down Texas Longhorn insignia (they are OU’s biggest rival team). (By the way, a Sooner is someone who settled in the Indian Territory before the U.S. government officially opened it to settlement.)
We are living here in Norman because it is also the home of the cheapest and fastest flight school in the world. Berck is studying to become a pilot. Oklahoma is one of the best places to learn to fly because this state is so flat with few trees or mountains to crash into. The weather is usually very clear (though it is usually also very windy). When the weather isn’t nice, we tend to have very severe thunderstorms with lots of tornadoes and hail.
Because it’s so windy here, one of our favorite things to do is fly our stunt kite in a park near our home. We took Stanley kite flying during his visit. He wanted to ride on the kite to get a better view, and since he’s so flat, he flew with the kite quite well.
State Troopers out in force
We’re trying to figure out what to do for my three-day weekend. Berck announced last night that we were going somewhere, and I had to figure out where. I was exhausted last night, so I told him we’d go to Colorado…where, specifically, I’d figure out when I got home from work.
I was so exhausted because I’d just worked an eleven-plus hour day starting at 6 that morning. See, when Barry told us all to go home on Wednesday because of the fire, he instructed us to plan on everyone coming in at 7 a.m. and pulling orders like crazy. But we were to call his voicemail beforehand to make sure the warehouse was actually open. So I called at 10, right before I would have headed to bed if I had to be at work at 7. The voicemail told everyone to come in at SIX. Six?? So I went straight to bed after setting my alarm for 5 a.m. Berck took forever coming to bed even though he said he would be right there, and then I couldn’t fall asleep until long after midnight.
As it was, half the people didn’t show up till 7… they’d called right before the time they were leaving for work to make sure to come in, but by then it was too late to get the message. The voicemail also told the college kids to come in at 10:30 or as early as they could. But Barry had told all of them the day before to take Thursday off and call to find out what time to come in Friday.
Even so, we got several store orders pulled in record time. The couple of college kids who called early enough to know they could come in on Thursday stocked all day. I finally went home at quarter-to-six. I was tired.
I got more sleep last night, heading to bed before it was even dark yet. Worked from 6 to 4:45. Got home and hit the Internet right away to tell Berck where we were going.
“San Isabel National Forest,” I announced. “The Spanish Peaks. It’s the nearest interesting part of Colorado.”
That was when Berck said he didn’t want to go anywhere. He was too tired.
I’m thinking a weekend staying off the roads, relaxing and watching movies, maybe using our new grill that Berck’s mom bought us, would be really nice.
Actual Fact: About 70 percent of the earth’s fresh water is made up of glacial ice. And if you had to replace it all, you’d need 60 years of the entire globe’s rainfall, and then you’d have to figure out a way to freeze it all.