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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater Thu, 30 Jun 2005
After a months-long hiatus, I'm finally getting back into flying, I noticed that my medical certificate was expired a few days ago, as I started thinking about the upcoming July 4th holiday, and how much fun I'd had flying around last year on that night. I figured there was no chance I would get my medical exam done between then and Friday (tomorrow), which is the only way I'd be able to fly on the 4th, so I reluctantly gave up on the idea. I called the medical examiner today (whose price has gone from $75 to 85 in the two years since I've been there, I was dissappointed to note), to see when in the next few weeks I could get in to see him. To my complete surprise, there was not one, but two openings tomorrow. Feeling slightly unreal, I scheduled myself, and should be (medically) good to fly by Friday afternoon. Woo! So, I called up Northway, and signed myself up with an instructor and a 172, figuring I'd kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. I need to go up with an instructor anyway, to meet their 60 day policy. I would like to get certified in the 172s, just in case I want to take more than one person if I go up on the 4th (although in the dark with extra people in the plane is not the best way to get acquainted with new flying hardware). Might as well pay an instructor for both things. As long as I was signing up for stuff, I also signed up for my BFR, which I think I did last year around the same time, but I'm feeling pretty fuzzy on a bunch of aviation stuff anyway, so the refresher will be good. Along the "refresher" lines, I tried to fire up Flight Simulator 2004 today and was dismayed to discover that it took 20 minutes to launch (claiming it needed to rebuild some scenery index files, which seemed like a very frivolous thing to do, since it'd already been run many times), and then performed at such a slow frame rate as to be basically unuseable. I've since discovered that there's some kind of disk-related problem, which probably accounts at least for the 20 minute startup, if not the overall performance. That computer doesn't get much attention, and spends most of its time sleeping. I guess I'm paying the price. That tweaks my "computers suck" nerve pretty hard, though. Anyway, overall I'm pretty excited to be doing a bit of flying again, particularly on the 4th if that happens. Posted at 23:02 permanent link category: /aviation Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. |