So a friend had some credit at a flight school that she wasn’t gonna use….and the flight school wasn’t gonna refund it, either……So I thought that I’d use some of it and pay them the amount I used.

I got a rental 172 and a safety pilot and flew from the right seat, rather than the left.

Wow, what a perspective change. And WOW, what a difference using the right hand to fly and the left hand to throttle.

Turns and climbs were ok, Approaches were less than smooth, but ok.

Landings….yeah, not so much. The fine control needed for a good landing is lacking. It’ll get better with practice though.

Plus my shoulder and arm were tired.

But, I did land, even with a quartering headwind of 6 knots gusting 22. Not as smoothly as I normally do, but well enough.
And, best of all, the plane can be used again.

More  of this next week.

Changing sides on a plane is harder than changing sides on a car when driving in the UK.

Seems that Indiana has 14.1 guns per 1000 residents.

Not the most heavily armed state, but (surprisingly) higher than Texas.

Of course, we are undergunned when one compares the number of firearms per resident in Chicago’s West and South sides….. Where guns are highly regulated….

Link found via Wirecutter

Where does YOUR state stand?

The whole “Marked the thing up with a sharpie” meme by the Media is pretty much a lie.

Yes, someone drew on a map with a sharpie.

But it was to demonstrate that, at the time of the prediction on the map, that just off the end of the predicted path was….Alabama.

But since the Media says that the “Orange man Bad”—“Orange man stupid”, and since most Democrats and Liberals (But I repeat myself) WANT to believe that, they buy the story without bothering to actually read or investigate the details.

Even those few Liberals that I respect…Ferisntance some bloggers on my sidebar have jumped into this…..and they show that their bias is enough to lead them astray. Pretty much bad judgement caused by TDS, I think.

But how can we trust folks who publish lies? 

So every year, we have a hurricane come close to, or make landfall, somewhere in the United States.

And every year, when a hurricane approaches, we see the stores run out of bottled water, batteries, plywood, propane and low/no prep food. And, invariably, we see people bitch about the fact that there “aint nothin’ left”.

Yet how hard is it to have a few pieces of plywood for your windows stashed in the back of your garage or in a shed?
How hard is it to stash a weeks worth of cans of food under your bed or the back of the closet?
How hard is it to stock a few cases of bottled water at the start of the hurricane season?

I mean, panic now, beat the rush….prepare early so you have what you will need, that which will be in short supply if and when. It isn’t like cans of food or plywood or bottled water spoil that easily. You can use it for many years.

Why do these folks always wait until the last minute? 

If you want to say Happy Birthday to her, I’ll see to it that she reads the comments.

That is all.

so the total was nine and 33.

Nine dead and 33 wounded.

I was low.

Old NFO came close

I mean, on this date 160 years ago, a MAJOR solar storm hit the planet earth.

Known as the “Carrington Event” this storm caused havoc in the atmosphere and even affected and damaged the (relatively crude) telegraph systems of the day.

Think of what this would do today….

You’d have no internet, no telephone, no TV….(probably no national power to provide it anyway).

No distributed electrical power means:
No refrigeration….your food will spoil quickly, and your freezer will thaw after a few days.
No (or very little) food distribution…Fuel will run out quickly for those that don’t have any stored. No communication to order it even if it could be delivered.
No banking (part of that “No communication bit) to pay for it even if you could order it and had fuel to transport it….
No AC for those in the Southern states…..No heat for those in the Northern states.
If it is harvest time, no fuel for tractors to harvest the grains or fruits or vegetables, much less get it to people that are starving.

And it will take years to fix the infrastructure to make parts to fix the systems that are damaged.

Now, it hasn’t happened again in 160 years. Doesn’t mean it won’t happen tomorrow. Doesn’t mean it will happen again in your lifetime.

But if it does, can you survive for longer than a month? It happened once. It CAN happen again.

“So someone turns you in using the Red Flag laws and the cops come to get your guns.”

“Ok”

“Do you turn them in?”

“Of course…not worth getting killed over the guns they have on a list”.

SO they take…what? 25 guns?”

“About that”

“How many do you still have?”

“About 30”

And that is just ONE of my friends. 

Read:

There is being out of touch with your fan base, then there is totally not realizing what will alienate your market.

NASCAR seems to be doing their best to drive fans away.

And it isn’t like they are filling the seats at the Speedways, or that their viewership is growing….

At the end of this cycle, they won’t have any fans and no one will be watching their races.

One wonders how stupid the folks who make these decisions really are.