Weekend Follies

As regular readers of this blog may recall, I often go visiting a friend or family on weekends. This weekend was no different. What was different is that it is pretty late in the year for me to do it by airplane. Often the mornings are cold; frost on airplanes is a killer (literally). Saturday was warm enough.

What turned out to be bad on Saturday was the haze. Every airport was reporting visibilities of 10 miles, but up in the sky, the visibility to the ground was maybe seven miles or less. There was a thick layer of smog that was about 5,000 feet thick. A front blew through and cleared it all up overnight.

I put in a new mailbox for my friend. The box the kit came in said that you were to drive the supporting post in with a hammer and the post goes about three feet into the ground. Unless you have a jack hammer or a John Henry style rock drill, you don't drive *anything* three feet into the ground around these parts. You dig a hole and you pry out all of the rocks that are in your way. She had some cement left over from another project, so I made a slurry of that, put in the support post, poured the slurry into the hole, dropped the larger rocks into the slurry, let it set for a few minutes (some form of "quick-crete") and then filled in the hole.

And now, to the camera files:

One group of the trick-or-treaters. The bird is the adult escorting the kids around.

This is the rear view of a Citation-X. What it shows is the narrowness of the fuselage compared to the size of the engines.

When Cessna first debuted the Citation I, aka the Cessna 500, in the 1970s, it was dubbed the "Slowtation," in that it was not a heck of a lot faster than turboprops and it was slower than the other jets, such as the Lear 23 and 25.

The Citation X is the fastest new airplane a civilian can buy. It cruises at Mach .90 or better and since it is illegal to fly at supersonic speeds over the US, no other jet will fly you from one coast to the other appreciably faster than a Citation X.

This looks like a castle, but it is an observation tower. From over a half-a-mile above, it doesn't look like much. A few weeks ago, during leaf season, the view from that tower was probably spectacular.

(click the photo to enlarge)