All Is Right With The World

I had intended to blog today about three sightings of members of the species Homo douchebaggus: 1), the male juvenile mini-van driving one who interprets "right turn on red after stop" to "right turn on red while sailing into the intersection at 20mph"; 2) the four females who congregated right by the door to the supermarket to chat, forcing everyone going in or out to detour around them; and 3) the (presumably) male who parked his huge-ass pickup truck right by the entrance to the supermarket in the clearly-marked fire lane because he probably needed a few things and it was too much hassle to go park and who cares if everyone coming out of the store has to detour around the big-assed truck.

But I'm not. For I went flying today, the first time in seven weeks. Between cracking a rib and the snows, I've been unable to go flying until now. And I really hadn't intended on it today, I went out to the airport to check on the airplane. The snow was gone from the taxiway, other than a couple of lumps left in front of the tiedown from the plows (a minute's work with a snow shovel to push them away). This afternoon was forecast for low clouds and scattered showers. It was indeed overcast at around 7,000' and there were a few clouds at about 3,000' AGL. The engine fired right up with two shots of prime.

I flew to an airport that's about 20 minutes flying time away so both the oil would warm up and so I could shoot a couple of landings. Having been off for several weeks, I wanted a nice flat and wide runway to play with to knock the rust off. I did two full-stop landings there and then flew back to my home base, for 1.2 hours logged.

Just a few minutes north of my home airport, there was still lots of snow. I really like flying over snow-covered terrain. There is sort of a sleeping-beauty-like aspect to the landscape. Most of the trees around here are deciduous, but there are some conifers. Sometimes you can see an plot of large conifer trees that probably was a Christmas tree farm at one point and nobody harvested the last crop. Airports are a lot easier to find when there is snow on the ground.

It was warm enough that the rising moisture from the melting snow gave an impression of a wall of fog about 20 miles away. It was late enough in the afternoon that most of the other fliers who had gone flying for a lunchtime visit were home, there was little traffic. I was tied down by sunset and home just about when it was dark. It was a great day to be flying and you probably can tell that I enjoyed it.

Around 6:30, I turned on the TV to watch the news. Since the lead stories were about the presidential campaign, I figured that nothing notable had happened today, so I clicked it off. Why spoil the niceness of the day by watching those yammering bastards, I figured.