just so I don't get accused of blogging once a month...

...I'm writing this, a sort of throwaway post where I tell what I have (and have not) been up to during my long absence.

To summarize:

READING
I finished A Clockwork Orange and am actually somewhat ahead of schedule with my reading-one-chapter-of-Moby-Dick-per-day scheme. (In case you're wondering, I just finished Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale.") I was originally going to leap full-tilt into At the Earth's Core, but I've thought better of it. I think I'll persevere and finish with Melville's white whale before I tackle anything else. Ahab's duel with his mortal enemy makes for such engrossing reading that I'm concerned I might dilute the impact of the work if I committed adultery with Edgar Rice Burroughs in the meantime.

Now that I've implanted that lovely image in your head, let's move on to

WRITING
Nothing new on the nonfiction front, and the novel remains untouched somewhere in the closet, like a wooden idol some former pagan ashamedly hid from the missionary who converted him. On the short story front, however, I'm making inroads to success. I'm almost, almost done with "Aptitude." I just need to segue into the denouement. To do that, I need a meteor shower. Nothing's worse for a greenhorn mechanic on his first run to the Outer Planets than micrometeorites punching into his starship's hull at 20,000 miles per hour, particularly when he's at the center of a diabolical plot to steal military-grade technology and black-suited agents have been making attempts on his life the whole fraggin' voyage.

Moreover, I need to decide what I'm going to do with one of the characters. He deserves a more prominent role, but up to this point he's been an amalgamation of man-behind-the-curtain/deus ex machina, lurking behind the scenes and protecting the protagonist from above (literally at times) like some kind of fleshly guardian angel, only dropping down to the mortal plane when things get really hectic. I'd like him to be more of the prickly mentor type. Perhaps I can arrange for his fifteen minutes of fame during that meteor shower, huh?

WORKING
I'm done with the café. Seriously. My hours have been cut back to just eight per weekend, four on Saturday and four on Sunday. So I'm working two days for the price of one. Not cool. I feel my time would be better spent looking for (and getting) a bartender's position someplace, so I can start building experience for those pubs in Australia. So I handed in my two weeks' notice last Saturday. My final day will be the 26th of February. It was fun while it lasted, sort of. At least I got some freshly barbecued Sunday afternoon tri-tip out of the deal.

FLYING
Not happening as often as I'd like, but it'll do. I have over 150 hours now, well on my way to the 250 required for a commercial license. Unfortunately we've been working a lot of short weeks lately. The Air Guard has been doing proficiency checkrides since the New Year started, meaning we come in at 7:30 and get done at ten or twelve o'clock. Looks like things might pick up soon...rumors of chase contracts for Grey Eagles (and perhaps even Reapers) keep trickling down the grapevine. But even so, I've decided that there's no way I'll rack up enough hours (or cabbage) to get my instrument rating, let alone my commercial license, before Miss H and I leave to go overseas again. Oh well. I'll just rack up as many hours as I can and finish my flying education when I get back. At least I'm not sick of flying Mooneys yet. On the contrary, I like it more and more. A Mooney is the GTO of the air, with the added advantage of being fuel-efficient. Apparently Mooneys can be safely ditched, too, which is yet another point in their favor.

And the secret's out, so I might as well tell you what I'm planning to do with Miss H on the day we've allotted to celebrate Valentine's Day, the 21st of February (she had both class and babysitting to do on the 14th, so we decided to pick a different day for our private celebration). I'm flying her to Big Bear City for breakfast. It's less than an hour away by plane and not even that far by car. I've been up there quite a few times. Sounds like there's a marvelous little restaurant at the Big Bear Airport (for those aviators hearty enough to brave the approach over tall pine trees, and the departure over the lake). We're going to try it out. I've taken Miss H flying before, but we didn't actually go anyplace. We just sort of flapped about like a dirty great albatross. Now we have a destination in mind, you see. And a delicious breakfast waiting for us there. It's going to be grand. One of the many advantages to being a pilot is well, not to brag or anything, but your date ideas knock all the other schmucks' out of the ballpark.

And on that note, things with Miss H and I are going very well. We had a ball for her birthday (the 13th): I helped her out with her babysitting, then we went to her house and baked some chocolate-chip cookies. We prepared some finger food and had a picnic dinner at the park. We listened to oldies on the radio and watched the sun set over the San Gabriel Mountains. She gave me an extremely romantic gift and a card that nearly brought tears to my manly eyes. Then we went to see The King's Speech (magnificent film). We laughed at Geoffrey Rush's take on Caliban, listened gravely to King George's war address, and then went home all fulfilled and satisfied and romantic and whatnot.

"Anyone who can shout vowels out an open window can learn to deliver a speech."

JOB-HUNTING/DAYDREAMING
Also not progressing as far as I'd like. Case in point, I'm sitting here blogging at you when, by rights, I should be out pounding the pavement. I'm trying to (a) find a place to tend bar in the High Desert, as I mentioned earlier; (b) locate an ESL teaching position overseas, possibly Spain or Poland, or even Chile; and (c) finally, not to any particular point or purpose, I'm looking at aviation jobs in Alaska and Australia. Just fantasizing, you know. Lately I've become hooked on the Discovery Channel's new show Flying Wild Alaska. It's a drug. What Jim Tweto and the Era crew do is exactly what I've been hoping to do when I finally get up there. That is, fly any kind of cargo anywhere in Alaska, anytime of day in any kind of weather in every kind of airplane. I've gotten confirmation that my dream can be made real, now. I'd had some notion about what I wanted to do when I got to the Great North, but I'd never actually known whether it was feasible, or even possible. Now I have proof-positive. Jim Tweto started out with one plane and a lot of dreams. Now he's the owner of a multimillion-dollar aviation enterprise, a linchpin of the Alaskan economy, upon whom hundreds of people in the bush depend on for their very survival.

It's like Bob Dylan sang: "And every one o' them words rang true and glowed like burnin' coals/a-pourin' offa every page like it was written on my soul." Somebody took the dreams I had bound up in my head, feverishly imagined, fervently clung to, desperately feared for, and stuck 'em on the boob tube in documentary format. If I wasn't so joyous at having my life's ambitions reaffirmed I'd probably sue for copyright.

Well, now I know I can do what I want to do. It's a nice feeling.

I don't believe in horoscopes. But I get a kick out of them regardless. Sometimes they can be just about spot-on. The old philosophers have decreed that February is a lucky month for those born in the Year of the Tiger, like yours truly. It's certainly seemed that way. My fantasies became materially possible; the Jeep's been fixed after two months' downtime; the weather's still blessedly cool; I'm racking up flight-hours hand over fist; I have a girl with whom things seem to be working out pretty well; and everything in the world seems new and shiny and potential, somehow. I haven't seen things from this angle in a long while.

It's a pleasure to do so again.

let it rain

Can't hardly believe I've been back from England over a month now, nor that I've been home from Korea for over a year. I returned just about this time last July, remember...fresh off a sightseeing sojourn in the Jeju and Jeollanam Provinces. Man, I was riding high. I thought things were finally starting to work out. I figured I'd rest up at home, grin over the respectable wad of money I'd socked away, and then jet off for Alaska in a month or so.

Well, it didn't quite work out like that. I convinced myself that sticking around home, working and living cheap off my parents was a good idea. I could save up a stupendous nest egg. I could get all sorts of stuff done, like finishing that damn novel and the remainder of my flight training. Well, I did both those things. A year's gone by, an entire year, and my money (and my pride) has gone down the tubes. But I got some stuff done. The novel's finished. It's in the hands of my beta readers. My flight training's done. I just need seven hundred bucks, that's all. Three hundred for a three-hour review session with JM1 and $400 for the test proper. Then I'll be free and clear: free to hightail it to a forgotten corner of this mysterious world, and live like I mean it.

Unfortunately there's some things I need to before that. It was a real scramble this month trying to save up enough cabbage to pay off my car insurance. I just got that taken care of this morning. Now (besides paying the bills next month) I've got to worry about my Jeep. The tires are getting bald and the shock absorbers have taken a real beating from the dirt roads I live on. I'd like to replace the entire suspension before I do anything else, and that'll take some real money. Then I can worry about flight training. And even after that's done, I must concern myself with saving up something like $1500-$2000, enough to pay for a ticket to Spain or Japan or Australia or Antarctica and find a job.

I don't imagine I'm going to escape this hellish desert much before spring of 2011.

And speaking of "hellish," that's exactly what it's been. The days are uniformly in the 95-105 degree range. Such conditions are agonizing in the stifling cockpit of a Mooney, without the benefit of air conditioning or even active ventilation (we just have vents we can open to the outside, which is fine if you're at 10,000 feet and it's 60 degrees, but if you're sitting on the runway or flying low you're "sweating your balls off" as JM1 says).

It's been windy, too ("feels like you're standing in a hairdryer," JM1 says...JM1 is a very observant man). I wish it would rain. No, I take that back. If it rains, it won't get cooler. It'll just get humid. And our flying will probably get canceled, too, which is one hit I literally can't afford to take. The job is going well, by the way. JM1 and JM2, our new pilots, have got the program down now and are flying regularly. I haven't seen Dawg, Spud, or Mr. Mooney in weeks. Mr. Mooney and Spud are in Hawaii right now, flying L-29 Delfin jets for the Navy; and Dawg is in Colombia trying to strike up a new contract. All of them are quite happy that JMs 1 & 2 are working out so well. I've been a big help, too, they say, ushering the two of them through the routine. I didn't realize it until someone told me, but I'm actually the most experienced guy in the company now as far as UAV chases are concerned: I've done more than anybody else. I've done almost all of them, in fact, whereas the pilots keep rotating and taking turns. So I'm just helping everybody to get broken in. JM1 got the program down like a flash (he's a very experienced pilot himself, thousands of hours in everything from jets to puddle-jumpers). JM2 was a bit shaky at first, but now that he's over his nerves and has done it a few times, he's feelin' fine. As I may have mentioned, I'm doing all the radio work now, and have become proficient real fast.

I still can't find a second job, though. I've been all over town. Nobody's hiring bartenders around here. Looks like it's Wal-Mart for me. I wouldn't mind learning how to drive a forklift, that's for sure.
So, in short, work's going well, even if I'm not doing it enough; the weather has been blasphemously hot, but I'm coping somehow (drinking a lot of water and going swimming with bikini-clad girls helps; I'm doing both regularly). Flying is on hold until I get some more money; traveling is on hold until I get some more money; and the novel's on hold until I hear back from my readers (and get some more money for copyright applications). Noticing a pattern here? I'm a pauper. This is déjà vu all over again. I'm living exactly like I was a few months back, after I'd purchased my insanely expensive tickets to England, trying desperately to save up enough for the trip itself. I thought I was done with that rot. But no, car repairs and insurance payments blindsided me. So here I am again, scrimping, saving, hardly socializing, putting off all the lovely Led Zeppelin albums and graphic novels I'd like to buy, forgoing the enticing bottles of booze on the shelves (except when the folks take pity on me and buy me some; they brought back some Mount Gay from BevMo the other day, sah-WEET!). It's a hard, hard life, let me tell you. But I could be breaking rocks in the Sahara. That'd be worse. At least I have an air-conditioned home and a soft bed to come back to every night.

And I'm not bone-idle at home, either. I've been helping the folks tear apart the kitchen in preparation the renovations that are taking place this week. New cabinets, new counters, new appliances, new floors, new everything. The whole shebang is being upgraded. And I got to pick up a sledgehammer and smash every last piece of the old tile counter, raising a cloud of dust that settled on every flat surface in the house. That was nice. But I'm also writing. In the absence of my novel, I'm working on my short stories. I'm trying to break into the fiction market, did you know? I wouldn't mind being a published science fiction writer like some of my idols, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft and Isaac Asimov and H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp and John W. Campbell, Jr. Those four stories I mentioned earlier are coming along nicely. One of them is finished. I'm handing it off to a friend for proofing and then I'll package it and send it off to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. Looks like a likely market, and based on what I read of it, I'm up to the challenge of competing with their published writers. And that's the news. In short, I've got a lot of obstacles in my way, but you know me.

I'll get over 'em somehow.

showdown time

There are two runways at Apple Valley. The primary is composed of runways One-Eight and Three-Six: in other words, it's straight north-south. It's the primary runway because the wind usually comes out of the south around here (if the word "usually" can be applied to desert winds).

The primary is 6,000 feet long, 150 feet wide, and a real pleasure to land on. You can see it from miles away. Crosswinds can be a problem, but they are usually negligible. The landing pattern is easy to fly. There are no obstacles or obstructions at either end. The approach is a piece of cake.

The other runway is 08-26, conforming almost precisely to 80 and 260 degrees of the compass, roughly east-west. I'm going to focus my attention on Two-Six, because I haven't trucked much with Zero-Eight, and it's Two-Six that really causes me problems. I hate runway Two-Six. I've hated it ever since I first set eyes on it. I can't stand the damn thing. It's only 4099 feet long and a piddling 60 feet wide. Compared to its perpendicular big brother, it's tiny. It looks no wider than two-lane road from 2,000 feet above ground. Then there are the obstructions at either end of the runway. To the east and west, mountains rise out of the valley floor, 500-700 feet or so. That makes the pattern runs for 26 something of a trick. To land in a speedy airplane like the Mooney, you have to ride quite near the eastern mountains; and you need to make your crosswind turn rather early on takeoff to play it safe with the western bunch.

Two-Six and I have a rather...adversarial relationship. I've had to do a disproportionately high number of go-rounds on it. (Go-rounds are aborted landings, where you don't actually touch down, but rather power up, retract the landing gear, and "go 'round" for another try.) For that reason alone, I came to dislike the runway. It's just so—dang—hard to get it right. The runway's so freakin' narrow that, on top of all the other stuff I'm doing to ensure that the Mooney is actually coming down at an appropriate angle and speed, I have to work extra hard to line the plane up on the skinny little strip of asphalt.

Matters came to a stormy head this morning. I was flying with Spud, and I'd elected to fly the morning mission: takeoff, climb, descent, and return, with Spud just doing the chasing stuff. There was a 15-knot wind coming out of the west-southwest, as well. That would provide a minimal crosswind component on a west-facing runway—less than 10 knots—but it would be a different takeoff than one with no wind at all. We preflighted N214SH and climbed in. I taxied Sierra Hotel to 26, feeling nervous as usual. I never feel like I'm completely in control of that airplane. The rudder pedals are tiny, and I it seems I have to push quite a bit to make any difference. The throttle settings are sensitive, and the throttle lever itself difficult to manage. Furthermore, visibility in Sierra Hotel is the worst of the two Mooneys we fly, and I feel like I'm craning just to see down the taxiway. We reached the end of 26 and did a run-up. Then I called over the radio: "Apple Valley Traffic, Mooney 214 Sierra Hotel is taking Runway Two Six, departure to the west, Apple Valley." This was it. Just another takeoff. I'd done about six or so in the Mooneys already, and nothing eventful had happened. No big deal, right? It was. No sooner did I push the throttle all the way in (smoothly, like I'd been taught) than the Mooney began yawing to the left. We accelerated: 20, 30, 40. I pushed the right rudder pedal in, desperately. No good. The Mooney continued to swerve left, faster and faster. I looked up and saw the edge of the pavement looming near, and the dusty margin beyond, lined with creosote bushes. We were going off the runway. "I've got it," Spud said calmly, taking the controls. We straightened out. The Mooney lifted off. Spud raised the gear and we flew on to Victorville.

That crashing, sinking, virulent, feverish feeling of horrible shame came washing over me like a cloudburst. I was becoming intimately familiar with it, particularly in the cockpit. "Okay," I said, endeavoring to keep my voice level, "what'd I do wrong?" "You didn't apply enough right rudder," Spud said. We went on to have a long and (fortunately for my pride) extremely non-accusatory discussion about P-factor, propellers, throttle settings, crosswinds, and takeoff procedures.

See, propellers are rather heavy. And they spin fast. Unless you're flying a twin with counter-rotating props (spinning in opposite directions), your airplane is going to be affected by the torque coming off of the spinning propeller. Known as P-factor, this force means that, when you're flying at high throttle settings, you have to keep your foot pressed down on the right rudder pedal, just to balance out that left-pulling torque. Nowhere is this more important than during takeoff, when you have a lot of torque and not a lot of airspeed. Apparently, I just didn't add enough rudder. Perhaps I was thrown off by the crosswind from the left, and figured I didn't need as much. 

Whatever the reason, I was red-faced for the rest of the day, even despite Spud laughing it off and telling me that I have a whole career of doing stupid things in an airplane ahead of me. I took his word for it. Wouldn't do to neglect the advice of a former Top Gun instructor, you know. I also hated Two-Six more than ever. Spud noticed my chagrin, and good man that he was, he let me do the afternoon takeoff, too.
"Otherwise," he grinned, "your previous landing would torture you all weekend."
"You know me very well," I said.
"Well, who wouldn't be?" he pointed out.

So it was agreed, and so it was. I found myself sitting at the end of Two-Six, staring down every single one of those 4099 feet, the heatwaves coming up off the ground, the unfettered desert sun blasting down, Sierra Hotel's engine roaring and raring to go. I was literally sweating the takeoff. It was 95 degrees outside, and even hotter in a closed cockpit under a merciless ball of cosmic radiation. The tension screamed through every pore, oozing down my forehead like vitriol. Runway 26 sat there, short and narrow-eyed, laughing at me. It was high noon. Showdown time. Well, actually it was more like 1:30, but who gives a crap?

(Photo courtesy of Picasa. Yes, that's the actual runway.)

I took a deep breath. I throttled up. The engine howled and we started to move. I sat up straight, kept my eyes on the runway. I didn't want to swerve a foot off that dotted center line. We went rolling down the runway, Spud sitting calmly and watching the proceedings. I stuck to my guns. I tenderly pressed the right rudder pedal, then the left, then the right, until I'd gotten the feel of how much rudder I needed. When we got fast enough, I gently pulled back on the yoke. And off we went, thundering into the azure heavens. I kept 'er straight as we lifted off. I nudged the nose down a bit so the propeller wouldn't over-rotate. I raised the gear, jamming the hefty Johnson bar into the lock on the floor. I pulled us right, so we wouldn't scrape Bell Mountain on our way north, and then we were climbing into the blue, free and clear.
"Eat that, Two Six," I muttered as the sweat dried on my forehead.
"You owned it," Spud told me, his trusty grin on his face.

Redemption accomplished.

the sea in the sky

There was something new in the firmament as Dawg and I lifted off from Apple Valley: clouds.

I can't begin to fathom why—all that nonsensical blather about global warming notwithstanding—but the weather here in the Mojave Desert has acting strangely for months. First we had a winter that was unseasonably wet. Now we have a spring which is unseasonably long. Windy, too. Spring's only supposed to last about, oh, two weeks around here. Normally, you have winter, which lasts about two months, with temperatures in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, accompanied by that wet stuff that falls out of the sky. Rain, I think they call it. Then you have spring, which goes for a couple of weeks to a month, temperatures in the 60s and 70s, with sprightly breezes (read: howling gales).

Then comes summer, which lasts about eight months, and is characterized by the sun being directly overhead, blasting torrential amounts of blasphemous heat onto the heads of the insane people who willingly choose to live here. There's also a paltry amount of wind (usually in the afternoons), perhaps a few cotton-ball clouds, and plenty of dust devils. Temperatures usually range between 98 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit. To escape the heat, animals dive underground and pant heavily. People go inside, shut the doors and windows, snap on the A/C and watch godawful daytime TV. In the evening, when the temperatures go down into the low 90s, animals and humans alike emerge to eat, drink, play and procreate.

It's those precious few weeks of spring which are to be cherished. One can actually stay outdoors the whole day through without melting into a gelatinous puddle. Things may actually be accomplished outside, such as chores, gardening, and home improvement, as well as more recreational affairs like exercise, picnics, even the consumption of a good book or a glass of lemonade. The Mojave Spring of 2010 has been going on now for two months. It's May Frickin' 27th out there, and it's currently in the low 60s, with winds of 25 miles per hour, gusting to 35. If that doesn't sound bad to you, that's enough to rattle the frame of my sturdy hacienda and howl around the eaves like a ravening monster. Makes the old folks at the airport huddle into their fleece and grumble about it being "still winter."

Normally I wouldn't mind this state of affairs. Sure, the wind dries out the eyeballs. Makes me look like I've been out on a bender the previous night. But hey, some days I really was out on a bender the previous night, so there's truth in advertising after all. However, wind is very bad for drones. Unmanned aerial vehicles don't fly so well in wind. Did I tell you that one of them went flipping off the runway at Victorville a few weeks back? Yep. Wind caught it just when it was landing. Knocked it into the dirt. Totaled it. That's three million dollars, shot. All because of a few fast-moving air particles.

Another thing we've been getting a lot of during this two-month spring is that wet stuff. Rain, is it? Yes. Showers of wet stuff, occurring every few weeks, have been falling out of the sky. There's been enough wet stuff to make an unprecedented amount of green stuff come up. Ordinarily the spring rains bring grass, some wildflowers, and turn the sagebrush and other shrubs green instead of brown or beige. This year's rains have worked miracles. I was out walking the other day (down by those high-tension lines I told you about). I actually saw lilies growing by the side of the track. Yes, real lilies: pale and somewhat desiccated, but lilies nonetheless, their green parts flapping in the "sprightly breeze."

This is exceedingly odd for a place that's only supposed to get 10 inches of rainfall a year. It's still cool, and it's not even all that dry. Why, I bet Death Valley barely got into the nineties yesterday. We actually had a fire in the wood stove a few days ago. Downright wacky, that. When it's windy, we don't fly, because Predators don't like too much wind beneath their wings. But winds weren't our only worry this morning. We also had clouds.

Now, I've never flown in clouds before. Not in, around, or near them. Clouds themselves are something unusual in the Mojave, down below 10,000 feet, anyway. I'm not qualified to fly in clouds yet, being only a student pilot, not having gotten my instrument rating. See, pilots who don't have an instrument rating are supposed to remain...let me see here, now...[consults the Federal Aviation Regulations, section 91.155, basic VFR weather minimums]...500 feet below, 1,000 feet above, and 2,000 feet horizontal, clear of clouds. ("VFR" stands for "Visual Flight Rules, and "IFR" stands for "Instrument Flight Rules," where you fly by using your instruments. Only pilots who've done an extra 40 hours of flight training and gotten their instrument ratings can fly IFR, but they can now fly through clouds, above 18,000 feet, and in poor visibility.)

So you may imagine, when Sierra Hotel lumbered off the runway, and I banked 'er left, into a climbing 180-degree turn, and the sun broke through the layers of clouds, lines and patches and streaks of them, all laying over the sky like a forest of cloud-trees cut down and strewn everywhere... Well, it was quite something. You know what it was like. Remember the first time you were in an airplane, and it climbed above the clouds, and the sun broke over the cloudscape, and all the multitudinous castles and skyscrapers and cliffs and buttes and towers and minarets, all inchoate white, spread themselves out beneath you like another world, an entire continent laid out in the heavens, a stormy sea in the sky? That's what it was like. Only I was flying myself through this white wonderland, and I had a much better view.

Dawg and I had gone up at the request of the Guard, so that we might ascertain the altitude of the cloud bases. This was because the Predator doesn't like clouds either, and the FAA doesn't like it when the Predators fly through clouds, particularly in civilian airspace. So our job was to determine whether we could escort the UAV through the clouds, up through the scattered cloud layer, through the holes and apertures, flank the lines of battle, make an end run around the puffy things. So it was that I, a student pilot, a greenhorn, a cloud virgin, got to fly above the clouds.

It was pure magic. It was not a single layer of clouds, not at first; they were scattered everywhere. It was more like an island chain than a continent: here there'd be a line of cotton balls; farther on some solid chains, cruising northeast, tall and proud, flags flying like battleships, the shortest of them easily 20 miles long; higher up the skies were streaked with cirrus and contrails. Everywhere were tiny wisps, huge buttressed watchtowers of cumulus, and odd-shaped clouds of no description which bridged gaps, hurried everywhere between their bigger brothers. The sky was turned into a patchwork quilt through which the sun shone, two horizons sparkling in the distance, one white and one brown, entrancing patterns of light and shadow dancing on the dusty ground below. I held the Mooney at a steady climb. Going 110 miles per hour, climbing 500 feet per minute, engine roaring at 2500 revolutions, we climbed ever higher. We reached the picket line, the first hurdle of clouds, and leaped over it, breaching the fortress walls. Then we were in the thick of it. We turned left to dodge a monster, a lumpy white beast with spikes along its back, its clawed limbs stretched out to the side; then we swung right again and headed for the mother ship. A solid, unbroken layer of clouds hovered over the Mojave River, 15 miles north of Victorville. It looked bad. The cloud base was down to about 8,000 feet. The restricted areas were capped with an inexhaustible supply of water and ice, suspended in the sky like a blanket.

Two hours later we went up to check again. This time conditions were good enough to bring the drone. Dawg piloted the Mooney like it was his old Navy jet, calmly relaying instructions to the drone driver. "Hold course 040." "Come right." "If you come ten degrees left, Grizzly, there's a nice big hole there you can probably make. Come left and give it your best climb." And so we went, following the drone as it clambered up an invisible ladder, turning right, turning left, dodging the extended arms of the clouds, which came from all sides and swiped at it like giant cat's paws. Up the drone leaped, straight it flew, curving through gaps, breaches in the cloud's defensive line, rabbit-holes in the sky. Once the gray ship ran straight into a cotton ball and disappeared entirely. It was a tense moment. Anything could happen. It was as if the clouds had opened up a maw in the middle of the blue and swallowed our charge whole.
"Keep your eyes open," Dawg said, tersely.
Seconds later, the Predator burst from the far side of the cloud, like a whale breaching in the breakers. It was a Nantucket sleigh ride at 8,000 feet. And then we'd made it. The skies cleared. The sun came down, and the cloud shadows danced. It was a clean shot to Four Corners. "That was great, chase," came the voice of the drone pilot. "But we just got word of severe turbulence, and we've been ordered to go home." A regretful grin lit up Dawg's face, the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

Another day on the job.

fasten your safety belts

Hot air rises. This is the reason that blimps and zeppelins stay up, that eagles and vultures can climb to ridiculous heights without flapping their wings the whole bleeding time, and that certain politicians are elected to high office. Due to the increased energy of its heated molecules, air becomes less dense as it gets warmer, thereby rising above the cooler, denser air down below. Trust me, this information will come in handy later.

Hello there! And a Happy (Early) Mother's Day to you. This post shall chiefly concern the latest work-related buzz, and recent (helpful) revelations about novel-publishing. You probably won't find any links to related websites in here, though. I'm feeling rather independent today.

Where shall I start? How to explain the myriad little things that happen every day on the job which would delight and entertain you no end? The many interesting people flitting to and fro in our little airport here in Apple Valley (to say nothing of the airplanes)? The incidents, the dialogue, the parade of human condition that marches past on a daily basis? It's impossible to document it all. Especially since I keep forgetting to bring my darn camera to work. I'll just give you the highlights.

We had a Cessna Citation visit our humble airport on Thursday, the second one this year. If you don't know what a Cessna Citation is, I'll delineate for you: it's one of those airplanes that was designed to cause civil unrest. Take a look for yourself. As if that wasn't orgasmic enough, a couple of Stearman biplanes sneaked in while we were out on our morning mission. You know, the planes that killed King Kong?
Then a Wheeler Express 90 wheeled in from Tehachapi. And a Bellanca Cruisemaster right after that.

I think I drooled on myself.

Furthermore, I pulled off my first (perfect) landing in the Mooney the other day. It was our new Mooney, nicknamed "X-Ray." It's a heck of a lot easier to fly. Admittedly, this was the morning flight, when the air was smooth as butter. Still, I could've done a lot worse. Maybe I didn't pull back quite far enough on the yoke when it came time to round out and touch down. But I really greased 'er in. As Mr. Mooney said, "you just kissed 'er down." He was full of praise, which made me feel pretty dang good, seeing as how he's a former Air Force pilot and has done more flying in more godawful weather than I can imagine.

Of course, I ruined it. It was later that same day, during the afternoon flight. Things were admittedly a little bumpy, and there were more people in the landing pattern with me. But still—my approach was perfect—straight-on to the runway, good glide slope, ideal speed, everything. I just flared too high, that's all. I was 50 feet off the ground when I started leveling off. Even I could not tell you why I did this. I know perfectly well that 50 feet in the air is no place to start rounding out. When you raise the nose, you get slow, and you do NOT want to getting slow 50 feet off the ground on a landing approach. You're already so slow that the plane might quit flying and fall out of the air. I've just got this hang-up about Mooneys. You really have to point them down at the ground in order to descend. And the M20E's approach speed is 80 miles per hour. So there I am, nose-down, heading for the ground at freeway speed. That freaks me out. Like I said before, I'm used to flying slab-sided Cessnas, which float on down at a leisurely 65. I like to go down slow, I guess. And the thing with Mooneys is, they're finicky. I was ten miles too fast on my final approach, doing 90. In any other airplane, ten extra miles ain't gonna matter. In a Mooney, of course, it does. If you try to flare at 90 you'll start climbing again. You have to have your speed right, or else.

This is where most newbie Mooney pilots get into trouble, on landings. Flare too high (like I did) and they bang the tail on the ground or crack the gear on a hard landing. Go too fast (like I was) and they flare, climb up suddenly, panic, point the nose back down hard, overcompensate, and hit the propeller on the ground, or go off the runway.
"This is why I like Mooneys," Mr. Mooney told me, after we'd parked (and he'd finished explaining to me what I'd done wrong). "They land like fighters."
Oh, great, I thought. In addition to my landing problems, the weather seems to have arrayed itself against me. Now that the spring winds seem to have gone (whew), summer is fast approaching. And being in a wide, flat desert with plentiful sun and lots of open ground (a good mix of sand, rock, and asphalt), we get these things called "thermals."

You probably have some pretty innocuous ideas about thermals. Right now you're thinking, "Oh, right, thermals! Those are those lovely warm currents of air that rise up from the ground, sending eagles to soar and gliders to kiss the azure sky!" That's what you're thinking, right? I must admit, I once belonged to this school of thought. Then I went out flying in a small plane for a couple of days. The sun was shining and the thermals

(convectioncurrentscausedbyunevenheatingoftheplanet'ssurfacebysolarradiation)

were in full swing. If you want to get an idea about what thermals are like from a pilot's perspective, picture an invisible fist, dozens of yards across, rocketing skyward and slamming into the belly and wings of your airplane. Got that? Okay, good. Now picture hundreds of invisible fists, shooting up from the desert floor like a barrage of anti-aircraft missiles, each one a mile high, whooshing through the air all around you, buffeting your plane up, back, forward and sideways. That's what thermals are like.

We're getting into a pattern here in the desert. It's the usual for the summer months. Calm and cool in the mornings, and then in the afternoon, when the sun has heated the air, the breeze kicks up. As long as the sun's shining here, you know there'll be thermals and crosswinds galore below 5,000 feet AGL, especially with all the mountains. (The mountains, in fact, amplify the thermals and winds, like a skateboard ramp.)

So I'm beginning to realize that I'm in for an interesting time during the afternoon flight. Thermals and turbulence are at their worst when you're low and slow. So I'll be climbing out of the airport, only a thousand feet or so off the ground, and those crosswinds and invisible fists will start hammering at me. The nose of the plane will be swerving back and forth like a car on ice. First one wing will be pushed up, then the other. Sometimes the tail gets caught, too, and our attitude suddenly goes from nose-up to level flight! Things haven't gotten really bad yet. But I can only imagine what'll happen if the thermals get any stronger. You all know how strong turbulence can be in a big jetliner. Imagine how it'll be for me, sitting there in my little Mooney. There'll be little else to do but tighten my seat belt, clench my buttocks, and try to keep the plane pointed straight ahead. It won't be the catbird seat, that's for dang sure. The weather is making it warm for me. Literally.

But that's just what I need: a challenge. Think of how much better a flyer this is making me. Between landings, handling a complex airplane, crosswinds, and mile-high geysers of hot air, I'm getting a crash-course in what Mr. Mooney jokingly refers to as "the survival gene."

And now, an addendum about novel-writing: It's continued to be a tremendous relief, taking it easy, not badgering myself to get published. Sitting back, taking a deep breath, and having a think about all of this has made me realize a couple of things.
First, I sent the manuscript out to my readers too soon.
There were a lot more edits I should've made before I did that. It was just too soon to send it out. Through phone calls, I've discovered that my readers having a lot of trouble, even just a few chapters in. They're not getting the most out of the story, and as a result, I'm not getting the most out of their feedback. I should've slowed down, taken it easy, paid attention to what I was doing when revising, and made sure I had a manuscript that was as tight as I could make it before I gave it to readers, to get the maximum profit out of their effort. And perhaps to ease that effort, too.
Second, I've been neglecting the blueprints I laid out in my character bios.
I don't know why I've been writing (let alone revising) without my notes and outline open in front of me, but I have! And a few days ago when I went back into the character bios that I'd written, I rediscovered some data that made it clear why I'd been having such difficulty. The reason for the intangible hardship I've been experiencing in writing/revising became clear on the instant. Now I knew why I thought my first three chapters were so shallow. Why character development in the second novel was stagnating. (All three of these things have put me on the verge of pulling out my hair, no joke.)

There's some things I've left out: my main character's tragic past, for one. The secondary main character's estrangement from his father. Both men's life histories, basically. The reason I've been disliking them so much, the reason I can't seem to have fun making these two guys think and talk and walk and battle, is because I don't know them very well. Reading the outline I'd painstakingly hammered out months ago (to prevent these frustrations from blossoming in the first place, ironically) made me understand what was missing in my work. There were some gaping holes in my manuscript, some vacant opportunities for characterization and plot development that I could now exploit. Armed with this new (or rather, old) information, I can turn my rickety, half-baked, puerile manuscript into a damn good novel.

It was a revelation, to be sure. Boy, I'm glad I decided to sit on this thing for a while! Mind you, I haven't been entirely bone-idle. I'm going to cast an eye over the novel again this weekend, just superficially, you know, in passing. Maybe jot down a few notes, using my character bios and my outline: things I need to change, or add in, or embellish. A few days ago I sat down at the computer and did some real work: character interviews. Recognizing that I didn't know my characters very well, I decided to call 'em into the office and have a chat. I gathered my notes, looked up some good questions on the Internet, and went at it. (I had several questions of my own, of course; like "Well, let's just get the toughie out of the way: what motivates you, MC?") And lo and behold! I didn't believe it, but it worked. I found the words—both my own and my characters'. They flowed off my fingers like wine past a Greek hero's lips. I saw my MCs—both men in their mid-twenties, idealists of a sort, one cooperative and friendly, the other surly and profane, sitting across from me as I peppered them with awkward questions.
How well do you get along with your father, MC #2?
What made you decide to come to Washington, MC #1?
What do you hope to do with your life, you guys? How did you meet each other, anyway? High school, wasn't it?
I finished up with a sense of supreme satisfaction. The plot was rounding itself out. With the info in my character bios, I was setting up some terrific foreshadowing for character development down the road. Most importantly, I felt a great deal more familiar with my characters. Up until this point, I had been talking to them on the phone, reading about them in the newspaper. Now I've met them face to face, and like 'em a little more for it.

Watch yourselves, writers. It's easy for novelists (especially first-time sapheads like me) to get too involved in the story and overlook the characters. Every decent writer I've run across insists that an author must know his-or-her characters like the back of his-or-her hand, the door of his-or-her refrigerator. If you don't know your characters, talk to 'em and have them tell you who they are. It'll make writing about them a lot easier. If I hadn't quit on publishing for the moment—thereby giving myself a much-needed breather—I never would've figured any of this out, probably. None of the all-important revelations would've come to light, none of the important research would have been done. (Oh, research! How could I forget that? Booting the publishing fever has given me ever so much more time for research. I've got five library books on my nightstand and another on the way.) Even if I had somehow realized something with the printing press bearing down on me, I likely would've despaired of ever fixing the novel. Incorporating all of the new (um, old?) information would've seemed an impossible task.

Now, it seems anything but. Fasten your safety belts. There's a whale of a tale coming, Mr.World.

how to land a Mooney

One of the advantages of flying twice a day, four days a week is...well, you fly a lot. And when you fly a lot, you learn a lot—especially if your flight instructor spent 20 years in the Navy doing crazy things like landing on aircraft carriers and riding around with suicidal low-flying Germans and thumping Russian bombers.

Don't even act like you don't know what "thumping" is. Trade secret. Nonstandard navy fighter procedure during the Cold War. The trick is to come up beneath a Russian airplane—bomber, preferably—pile on some thrust, and rocket straight up, right in front of him. This has the twofold benefit of (a) scaring the living daylights out of the Commie bastard and (b) forcing him to fly through your shock wave. (Hence the "thump" part.) It's a ticklish business. You've got to leave enough space between yourself (going relatively slow, climbing straight up) and the oncoming Russian bomber (still flying at 450 knots)...or else, WHAM. You can't leave too much space, either, or the "thump" will be more of a "kerpuff."

Spud wasn't the first instructor I landed a Mooney with (that was actually Mr. Mooney); but it was with Spud that I truly refined my technique. All last week he taught me the finer points of landing, and I think I've finally got it down. Let's get the mechanics out of the way. You'll want to be at 100 miles per hour on the downwind leg of the pattern, and on base—

Aw, crap. I haven't explained landing patterns yet, have I? Here:

As I've mentioned before, you'll want to land into the wind. Therefore, when you're flying past the runway (before you make that 180 degree turn to land), you're going downwind, and are therefore on the appropriately-named downwind leg of the pattern. After the downwind, you turn base: 90 degrees to the left (or right, depending). Then you turn final, and land. From the time you're on downwind, abeam of the numbers on the end of the runway, you should be descending steadily.

Got that? Good. Now where was I?

Oh yes. So, in a Mooney, you want to be going 100 miles per hour on downwind; 90 on base; and 80 on final. You'll touch down at about 65. Gear speed (the point at which it's safe to lower the landing gear) is 120 miles or less. Flap speed (the point at which it's safe to lower the—well, you know) is 100 miles or less. Pattern altitude at Apple Valley Airport is 4,000 feet (because the airport itself is at 3,000 feet; pattern altitude is 1,000 feet AGL in this case). It's left traffic for Runway 18 (which means all the turns you make in the pattern will be left turns).

You might want to write some of this down. It'll come in handy later.

You can lower the gear whenever the heck you want. Mooney pilots know a neat little trick that greatly aids them during landings: the Mooney's landing gear can be used as an air brake. Having those big clunky wheels sticking out into the slipstream slows you down something righteous. This is how it's supposed to go: enter the pattern on the downwind leg at 4,000 feet, preferably at 100 miles per hour; lower the gear to help slow yourself down and lose altitude; once you pass the numbers, pump in some flaps (which slow you down more, and also help you stay aloft at slow speeds).

When you reach 3,800 feet MSL, turn your base leg. Keep the speed at 90. Look around carefully to make sure there aren't any fiery airplanes streaking in from the north to land on the runway you're trying to land on. Then turn final. Pump in full flaps. Keep speed at 80. Pull the throttle all the way out. This is so the plane will actually come down to the ground instead of floating forever 100 feet off the deck. If you've judged the distance and altitude right, the plane will just drift on down to the runway (with you keeping an assiduous eye on the airspeed indicator, keeping the plane at 80). When you get to the ground, flare. (That means raise the nose so (a) the plane slows down; (b) the plane touches down on the runway; and (c) the plane touches down on its two main wheels and not the poor little nose wheel.)

I had a dickens of a time getting all this down. For one thing, the airplane I took most of my flight lessons in didn't have retractable landing gear. The gear was always down; I didn't need to worry about it when I was coming in to land. In my complex Mooney, I've got about three more gauges to watch and a few more steps to take. Not to mention that I have to really yank on that Johnson bar to get the gear down. This Johnson, apparently, is even more stiff than the one in Mr. Mooney's plane...

Gradually I nailed it, though. One of my landings with Spud was so good that he said he wanted to patent it. I just sort of floated down, hardly had to flare at all, and touched down so smoothly that you couldn't tell we were on the ground. That's right. Me. The Postman. I landed a Mooney smoothly. Don't you forget it.

Today, during my landing with Mr. Mooney, I did everything right except pulling out all the power. The flaps were down, the gear was down, the speed was perfect...we were just floating forever 50 feet in the air. It was another gentle landing, though, let me tell you. Grandma could've been sitting in the backseat buttering toast, and never would've spilled a crumb.

Now, if I could only figure out how to trim the dang thing properly, I'd be on Cloud 9. Literally.

I'll sleep when I'm dead

I'm beginning to realize just how low on the aircraft totem-pole I started. When I began training in a Cessna 172, I knew it wasn't exactly sex on wings. I mean, look:


Doesn't compare to, say, a panty-dropper like the F-35, does it?


Of course not. But all the same, I was thrilled.

Wow, the five-year-old kid in me hollered, a real airplane! Awesome!

Now that I'm flying a Mooney M20E, which looks like this...


...it's suddenly become apparent what a primitive flying machine the Cessna is. My Cessna 172M has 150 horsepower. That's less than most cars, a lot less. At sea level, it has a top speed of about 140 miles per hour, something any self-respecting Lamborghini would laugh at. To take off, it needs a ground roll of about 835 feet. It climbs at about 645 feet per minute, and has a maximum service ceiling of 13,000 feet.

The Mooney we're flying is a 1961 M20E. (Aircraft age differently than cars do. If you saw somebody with a '61 Chevy, for example, you'd marvel that they managed to keep it running so long. You might even wonder why it's still on the road at all. It doesn't work the same way with airplanes. You just don't fly them until they wear out and then throw them away, like you would a pterodactyl. When a part breaks down, you fix it. And when it gets too run-down to be fixed, you replace it. If an airplane lives long enough, every single part in it will eventually be replaced. Any airplane more than a few years old is a veritable Frankenstein of new and aging components.) Mooneys, as I've mentioned, are sports cars. Even this '61 model has a 200-horsepower, fuel-injected engine. It climbs like a chipmunk on LSD. Our Mooney has retractable landing gear, a fuel pump, a variable-pitch propeller, and cowl flaps (trapdoors which let more air into the engine block during climbs or slow flight).
My Cessna 172 handles like a truck. The thing just putters along through the sky. On descent, it floats down slowly on those big wings, and flares like a goose when landing. It's about as acrobatic as Rosie O'Donnell. It can turn on a dime, as long as that dime is on the ground and you're at least a thousand feet over it.

Our M20E, on the other hand, is what Boss #1 calls "finesseful." It's a finely-tuned piece of machinery, compared to the slab-sided Cessna. Flying it requires a greater degree of control, alertness, presence of mind, skill, and efficiency...which explains why I suck so bad at flying it. You can't pull up too hard when taking off, or the propeller might over-rotate. You really have to have the thing trimmed out properly during descents, or you'll be fighting for proper pitch ("nose authority") all the way to the ground. You'll want to stay below 140 miles per hour, generally, because if you hit any turbulence at that speed, the wings will crack right off.

In the Cessna, I pull the throttle out or push it in, and watch the tachometer needle fall or rise. At cruise speed in the Mooney, I monitor the throttle with something called a manifold pressure gauge. I'm still not exactly clear on what the heck "manifold pressure" is. It sounds like the kind of obscure mathematical principle a physicist would put on a T-shirt. If I have got this correct, the manifold pressure gauge measures the air pressure in the throttle manifold. Theoretically, when you're sitting on the ground with the throttle closed, the manifold pressure readings will mirror actual surface pressure (in inches of mercury). However, at cruise altitude with the throttle open, the pressure will be a lot less, and you can use it to measure throttle settings. Or something like that, I don't know. Perhaps I'm stewed. Perhaps the manifold pressure gauge actually measures how good the pilot is at flying the airplane, which would explain why it's so low all the time.

I do know this, however: for cruise in our Mooney, you'll want the manifold pressure at 20 inches; descents, 15 inches. During Mooney-cruise, you fine-tune the tachometer with the propeller knob. The variable-pitch propeller, as I so ineptly explained to you, can be adjusted to increase or decrease the blades' angle of attack.

What is the angle of attack, you ask? No, it's not the direction from which you should approach the chicks in the club, wise-ass. And it's not the angle of the Johnson as it enters the coochie, either. Get your mind out of the gutter. This is the angle between the chord line (an imaginary line drawn down from the trailing edge of the wing to the exact center of the curvature of the leading edge) and the oncoming air. Generally speaking, you should keep the angle of attack down to 20 degrees or less. Any more than that and you could stall the airplane. Stalls, if I haven't explained already, occur when the angle of attack is too great to produce lift. If you've been studying the four forces of flight down there at the bottom of this page, you'll know that the force opposing lift is weight. And what happens when you suddenly have 1500 pounds of weight in midair without any visible means of support?


You are correct, Wile E. You fall.

I've practiced stalls several times during my flight lessons, and it's the same sensation as a roller coaster starting down. First there's a buffeting sensation as the air rolls roughly over the wings. Then your stomach flies up into your throat, and you can tell without looking that the plane ain't flyin' no more. Propeller blades have chord lines, too, and an angle of attack. Fixed-pitch propellers can't be adjusted; the air is hitting the blades at the same angle, no matter what. But the blades of variable-pitch propellers can be rotated minutely to change the angle of attack. If managed properly, a variable-pitch propeller makes your plane more aerodynamic and efficient by fine-tuning the RPM, which saves fuel and smooths operation. The gentlest twirl of that knob can send you sailing miles further.

When I flew in a Cessna, I had flying lessons. When I fly in a Mooney, I have flying lessons—on crack. If you want to slow down an airplane, the best method is to raise the nose, and reduce throttle. But my bosses are former fighter pilots. They prefer to yank the airplane into a hard turn, wings pointing straight at heaven and hell, and pull a screaming three-sixty in the middle of the sky. I'm crushed into my seat by two or three G's. My lips and chin go slithering down my neck toward my chest. Shoulders strain to reach my pelvis. My feet are seemingly glued to the floor. Eyeballs bounce off tonsils. I often wonder how my mother (who gets carsick just from reading roadsigns) would react if she were there. The maneuver invariably works. Once we roll out of the turn (eyeballs returning to their accustomed place) we're suddenly 50 mph slower, descending and ready to land.

Adjusting from Cessnas to Mooneys has taken some doing, needless to say.

I still love the 172. It may be slow. It may handle like a truck. It may not be "finesseful." But it's comfortable and forgiving to fly. That's ideal for an idiot novice who prefers not to think too much, you know? My Cessna resembles the placid old Clydesdale that I rode on my grandparents' ranch as a kid. I feel fine just plodding through the sky, floating down on big wings, not worrying about propeller angles or screaming three-sixties.

This week I flew with Boss #1. It was interesting to see Mr. Mooney again. He showed me some spellbinding photographs of his spread up in Montana. It's really coming together. He and his buddy Cowboy are clearing out some willows and putting in a trout pond. The land is surrounded by hundreds of acres of national forest. Elk, trout, flying, all the best of Big Sky Country. I envy him.

We had a good week this week. We earned our pay on Tuesday. There was a possible traffic conflict. Joshua let us know about it first; then I picked up the blip on the TKAS; then Mr. Mooney got a visual. It was a Cessna 182, tracking across our windscreen left to right, right in the path of the climbing UAV. Fortunately it was still a few miles off; we'd had sufficient warning from Joshua. Mr. Mooney radioed the controllers and had them level the UAV off at 7,000 feet, and turn a bit to the left. This they did, and all passed in safety.

Wednesday was warm. We spent the day over at the Victorville airport, and it always seems hotter over there. Perhaps it's all the extra pavement. It was probably in the low 80s, which is just about melting point for me. Or perhaps it was the girls. The FBO at Victorville is called Million Air. It's a swanky flight service which offers plush waiting facilities with leather couches, "quiet rooms" for tired eyes, laundry services, a small theater, free refreshments, weather tracking, and more. And it's staffed by the most attractive assortment of young ladies in corporate skirts and heels, too. Airplanes aren't the only thing they help get up.

I got a lot of work done during our down-time, despite the eye-candy. The second edit of the novel's almost done. Soon it'll be time to send it off to my alpha readers and find out what's wrong with it. I'll keep you posted.

The other noteworthy thing that happened Wednesday was... (Drum roll, please.) ...I got to take off in the Mooney for the first time! I didn't do half bad, either. I did everything Mr. Mooney told me to: push the throttle in slowly and smoothly; raise the nose at 80; don't raise the nose too high after liftoff. I nailed it clean. I flew us out to the rendezvous point and Mr. Mooney took over. He said "good job," which, coming from an old Air Force squadron leader and jet instructor, made my little heart jump for joy.

Thursday was an odd day. We recovered the drone at 12:30 instead of 4:30. Those spring winds were springing up again. But we kept ourselves busy for the rest of the afternoon: it was time for Sierra Hotel's 25-hour inspection. Mr. Mooney had me pull some panels off the engine and battery (a long, painstaking process, involving the removal of about a million screws). We cleaned the engine, checked all the bolts and fastenings for security, the fuselage for dents, the battery for corrosion, the skin for missing rivets, and the engine block for leaking oil. Finding none of the above, we clapped everything back on again and called it a day. I have now officially given an airplane an inspection. I held my head up a little higher as I walked out of the hangar that day. If Jack Ridley had come along at that moment, I could've looked him in the eye and given him a firm handshake.

On Friday we were weather-canceled. Again. I still haven't worked a full week yet. Mr. Mooney and I finished filling out the daily reports, and then split. I went home and pottered about for a few hours until Mr. Mooney called me down to the airport to give him the key to the hangar. Ha ha, I forgot to leave that with him. Whoopsies.

And now perhaps you're wondering why I titled this post I'll sleep when I'm dead (instead of sex on wings). That is because I plan, by next week, to have taken my final bartender's exam. Following my passage of this doughty test (a written quiz and a comprehensive speed-trial), I will be briefed on the intricacies of a POS system, and then placed with a job. I intend to work nights and Mondays, around my flying schedule, in order to save up for the

ENORMOUS STUPENDOUS SUPER-COLOSSAL TWO-WEEK TRIP TO ENGLAND I'M TAKING IN JUNE!!!

It's true! Shortly before I left Korea, my English friends Adam and Elaine invited me to Newcastle to watch the 2010 FIFA World Cup from the comfort and chaos of the local pubs. I, having always wanted to watch a football match in an English pub, readily accepted. The main reason I have been striving and sweating to complete my bartender's training, in fact, is so I can get a lucrative job with plentiful tips and save up enough cabbage to actually go. It's looking tight right now, even with two jobs. But I'm going to try it. I don't fancy I'll get much sleep, flying by day and tending bar nights, but it'll be more than worth it.

I'll be in England two weeks. Two glorious weeks of booze, football, travel, castles, parties, and, as the Geordies say, "good craic." Stick around and you'll hear all about it.

wires, awards, and complex airplanes

This epistle shall leap all over the place, I'm afraid. It's an amalgamation of several different posts, some of which have been in the pipeline for a while, and others that have just cropped up. First, I'm going to tell you a story. Second, I'm going to accept an award. (I spoke too soon yesterday.) Third, I'm going to update you on how the job's going, and the work in progress ("the Novel," with a capital N).

And so, the story: When I go on my afternoon constitutional, I usually head north down Corto Road, then cut east on Ocotillo Way. After about seven-tenths of a mile, Ocotillo peters out at Pioneer Road, which parallels the railroad tracks north by west until it intersects La Mesa. Each of these dirt roads is rougher than the last. There isn't a house within two miles of La Mesa. It runs north to south, from Highway 18 (miles away in the valley below) up into the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains. Beyond La Mesa, my walking path is a mere dirt bike track, winding sinuously through the empty desert further east.

The Pioneer/La Mesa crossroads is a peculiar one. The four dusty trails are joined by the railroad tracks alongside Pioneer, which run for miles to the southeast until they reach the limestone mines. There are also power lines. A row of high-tension towers accompanies La Mesa along its northern stretch, eventually breaking off and curving away north across the valley after bisecting the railroad tracks.

Originally, I was ambivalent about these pylons. Easily a hundred feet tall, they rear their porous gray gantries against the eternal blue and sullen gray of the desert sky. Their black insulators, ribbed like huge accordions, hang from their stout arms like missiles slung beneath the wings of a fighter jet. I used to despise power lines; they mucked up the panorama. I still harbor a bit of resentment toward the structures in general. Not these power lines, though. Somehow I don't mind them. Though man-made, they seem to add something to the stark desert landscape, rather than detract from it. Standing in the midst of empty desert as they do, they seem almost like sentinels, guarding the vulnerable houses to the west against the threatening shades of night. Their angular outline seems to fit the hard, unforgiving terrain, while simultaneously estranging them from it.

These impressions aren't always supported by visual stimuli, either. Last fall, I was heading east down Pioneer on a golden, sunny afternoon. The omnipresent Mojave wind (what Pete down at M—— Aviation jokingly calls "the desert breeze") was blowing energetically. I looked ahead and saw the towers looming. I strode along. The only sounds were wind buffeting my ears and the crunch of boots in the gritty dust. As I approached the towers, I became aware of a thin, roaring scream creeping into auditory range. It was almost undetectable at first, so high-pitched and wispy was it. I paused for a moment, and listened. The sound was still indistinct, so I resumed my walk.

The nearer I got to the towers, the more apparent it became that the sound originated from them. At their very feet, I stopped short and listened once more. An involuntary chill ran up my spine. The thin scream assaulted my ears, louder than ever. It's impossible to describe exactly what it was like. It was as if a hundred thousand hoarse banshees were yowling all at once, or the Devil himself was whistling between his teeth. Memories sprang unbidden to mind: the dusty street of a ghost town in a black-and-white Western—and the timeless, tuneless whisper of the wind, blowing through chinks in the dilapidated buildings, howling across the dusty ground between outlaw and lawman. It was the wind. That desert breeze, coming out of the southwest, was slipping through the towers' pylons and creating that spine-chilling sound.

Goosebumps broke out on the back of my neck. My neck craned upward. My eyes gazed in naked wonder. I couldn't move. I was spellbound by the music. Imagine my delight (and amplified chills) when I returned to the towers in late winter, when the winds were blowing with all February's fury. Whispers became screams. Whistles became shrieks. Howls became a hellish chorus. The towers yammered and whined and moaned like living beings under the onslaught of air.

On that day, and many days after, I stood beneath them and listened to their haunting, ceaseless cries. I soon learned to judge the sounds as a critic would judge a sonata. The wind, passing through the towers, created at once a thin voiceless shriek and a deep, atonal thrumming. Hearing it, I could almost imagine that I stood on the blasted surface of some alien planet, listening to some nameless tribal ritual echoing from the dark and unknown distance. The power lines danced as though legions of invisible acrobats tripped giddily across their expanse. And the wind never faltered or held back. It blew as if it had always blown, ever since the blasphemous days, the very Dawn of Time itself. And I wondered: if humanity should someday vanish, and its trammels fall to ruin, what might extraterrestrial explorers think of these skeletal metal towers? To see them standing there, far from civilization's edge, slowly bleaching in the desert sun, surrounded by a jumbled mass of truncated rubber and copper tentacles? Would they guess their moot purpose, the reason behind these eldritch structures? Or would they misinterpret the find, hold these odd pillars to be cultural icons, rumors of a long-lost and barbaric religion? To what would they attribute the unending scream of high-tension towers in the wind?

A compelling query, in my opinion. Now onto the award ceremony thingy!
Muchas gracias to Christi from A Torch in the Tempest for her generosity. I could be wrong (I've been wrong about several other things on her blog, trust me), but I don't believe this accolade comes with any conditions. You just pass it on to five bloggers. Based on the title, however, I will send it to recipients who exude an optimistic demeanor in their writings, or whose posts retain an intangible, uplifting quality—however subtle or covert.

• The Pollinatrix - The Whole Blooming World
• Jerry - Gently Said
• Jane Jones - Jane Jones
• Mashlip - Bullshit
• Laura - Through Laura's Eyes

Thank you for your dramatic tales, prose uplifting in its eloquence, and silvery consideration, friends. Your posts never cease to make me smile, think, or sit back in wonder.

This is my first full week of flying. The previous three we've been canceled by winds and weather, only working two days. This week I'm with Mr. Mooney again. We're getting a lot done, both in the air and on the ground. I was going to give you a full blow-by-blow, but I think I'll save that for another time. I will say this: I now know how to take off in a Mooney, have negated that accomplishment by botching five landings in a row, and even aided in Sierra Hotel's 25-hour inspection. I took off the cowlings, and—

Well, that's for later. I'm also getting a lot done during down-time. The Novel's second edit is almost complete. Once that gets finished I'll send it off to my alpha readers, and let them rip it to pieces. Once I implement their vitriolic revisions, I'll start down the long, long road to publication. Rejection slips, here I come!

Stay tuned...

Friday at the links

Man, was it ever a beautiful day today. The temperature was in the mid-70s, with lots of sun and a mild breeze out of the north. Absolutely perfect, in other words. Spring is in the air, all right...

Work went swimmingly. There was a lot of traffic in the skies this morning, and the winds kicked up a little in the afternoon, but we escorted the UAV safely out and back. I think I'm even getting the hang of flying the Mooney. It's a tenacious beast, and quite finicky, but if you know what you're doing, it's a hot rod. I just can't get the dang thing trimmed right.

What is "trimming," you ask?

Good question. No, I didn't have to climb out of the airplane in mid-air and take snippets off the wings with a pair of garden shears. You'd like that, wouldn't you?

"Trim" refers to minute adjustments of the control surfaces to keep the plane level and make flying easier on the pilot. In small planes, it's usually controlled by a wheel in the cockpit somewhere. In the Mooney, spinning the wheel moves the entire tail. (That's why it's a complex plane, sweetheart.)

Boss #3, Dawg, let me take over the controls as soon as we were at a safe altitude climbing out of Apple Valley, and I got everything else done as far as leveling out was concerned: pulling the throttle back until the manifold pressure gauge was at 20 inches or so; twiddling the propeller knob until the tachometer was at 2450 RPM; but the trim wouldn't get set right. Either I've got an unsteady hand on the controls, or the plane kept wanting to climb or descend.

Oh well. Everything else went fine today. We cracked the door open as soon as we touched down for a landing, letting the delicious breeze get blown into the cockpit by the prop wash.

Moving on...

The Sententious Vaunter has made some new friends!

Following the Drunk At First Sight Blogfest, we've got a few new faces around here. Plus there's a few new blogs I've found that I'd like to tell you about, so I think I'll take a leaf out of Jon Paul's book and share some link love with you.

• Dr. Bamboo - No, of course mine is not the only boozy blog out there. The good doctor knows a heck of a lot more about the drinking game than I do. Check this blog out for some rare and insanely interesting cocktail recipes and a wealth of knowledge and witty writing about our favorite libations.
• From the Faraway, Nearby - This photographer's been all around, and best of all, he's taken pictures of most of it. For some of the most ethereally beautiful photographs you've ever seen, check this blog out.
• Ftocheia - This blog is not for the faint of heart. Thanatos's writing is dark, certainly, but it's well done. There's more raw emotional power in one of her posts than there is in some tragic novels. For creative fiction and shared thoughts, you must have a look.
• Murrmurrs - A former postal worker muses on some of life's quirks. Trust me, you haven't looked at things from this angle before. Or rather, you have. You just haven't heard them phrased so cleverly before. Her philosophy is "Really, most things are funny." How can you go wrong with that?
• Points of Claire-ification - Claire lives in Japan and blogs with the infectious enthusiasm of somebody who is doing something really cool and knows it (but isn't sententious about it, like me). For tear-jerking graduation stories, writing tales (and jolly good writing), and random Japanese lessons, this blog is a must.

Got that? Now, I'd like each and every one of you who's read this to check those links out (except, of course, your own) and see what they're about. It'll be worth your while. Spread the love. And this isn't the end, either. I might share some more links later on if this trend works out.

To all those of you who clicked that "Follow" button, I just want to say: thank you. I'll try not to disappoint.