June 28th

I've been trying to get rid of the armoire in the bedroom (long term plan is to mount the TV in the front room on the wall, and put an OLED in there when they drop in price), and a guy came and gave me money for it.  The bedroom is a lot bigger without it :o)

After her usual late afternoon run around the garden, Tilly settled into the pond to cool down.  She's upset that we don't have her paddly pool out (there's a drought - I don't think she's been following the news).

June 27th

It's been bloody hot recently, so the chance to have a day where it only got to the low 90s was nice.

We watched the excellent race for Assen - I don't care what anybody says, Marquez wasn't going to make that corner the way he charged up under Rossi, so I'm glad Valentino won.

In the afternoon, I went over to the airfield.  I've been playing around with the idea of noise cancelling headsets, so I've bought one.  I played with it - it's interesting, as it cuts out the lower frequencies, but leaves the higher ones.  That means the engine sounds a little weird, but the microphone doesn't kick in unless I speak, so that's a plus.  Anyway, I was out for an hour, but the updraughts under the clouds were a bit exciting.

June 26th

We went to a bar that Vic goes to with one of her friends and watched a live band play.

June 23rd

John and Mike are in town for work, so we went and met them for dinner.  It was funny, as it took forever to get our order, so they brought us something else to tide us over in the meantime.  I have to wonder - if you can cook and bring us salmon, why can't you cook and bring us what we ordered?

June 21st

I started the day installing a winch system that Dad got me for the bicycle.  Interestingly, it seems to want to mount to the 4" wide part of a 2x4, where that'd be the vertical side.  So I used a couple of spare pieces of 2x4, and mounted them to the beams in the garage, then mounted the winch to those.  It's actually a lot of work to winch the bicycle up, and I'd need to find somewhere to mount the holder for the rope (I'd assumed that it'd hold itself, as there's a sort of latching system).  Anyway, I decided that I could hook the thing up to the old hooks quicker than I could winch the thing up, so we took it down.  I am, however, going to look at maybe winching the hang glider up to the roof with it.

Of course, I felt like flying, so it was windy all bloody afternoon.

June 20th

I wasn't really feeling it, so I didn't do anything interesting today.  Yay!

June 14th

We started the day watching the crashtastic MotoGP race from Catalunya, then went out for a shopping expedition (we only seem to have bought animal food).  I tinkered about with various things and stuff, then went to the airfield.  I replaced zip ties, replaced the rear tube in my airfield bicycle (slow puncture, methinks), then took the plane out for just over an hour.  It was still gusty, but I haven't flown for a little while, so I coped :o)  When I got home, we watched the Game of Thrones finale.  All men must die.

June 13th

I spent the morning playing with making a video of the Cozy jet for Frank.

In the afternoon I went over to the airfield and dropped the needles in the carbs in the plane (I raised them when it was colder as I was seeing the EGTs going up).  It was gusty, and I found a couple of old zip ties that needed replacing, so I just went home.

June 9th

After spending the morning killing time, I dropped Dad off at the airport, and went home to try and catch up with things and stuff before I go back to work tomorrow.  Boo.

June 8th

Dad and I went out to get him Jelly Belly beans, and look at things and stuff.  When Vic got home, we went out for barbecued meats.

June 7th

At the airshow again, we managed 30 flights, and, we believed, broke the record for the most passengers flown.  OK, we cheated a little, as we sent up a whole bunch of us at the end (I sent Vic and Dad in my stead, as somebody needed to do the safety briefing).

June 6th

When we got to the airfield, it looked like a bomb had gone off.  Luckily there were several guys staying over, and they'd managed to pull the covers off most of the pop-up shelters, but a couple were just mangled metal.  We spent a while figuring out which covers went on which frames, and then started flying people.  Dad was helping out with the plane handling, and I was helping out with the people handling, and we managed to get in 28 flights before we called it a day.  Thunder clouds seemed to be scaring people away, so it was a pretty early evening.

June 5th

We were at the airfield again, and we decided that we weren't going to be selling any pictures, so we pitched in and helped out with managing the public.  In the afternoon, it started to cloud over, and while we were eating pizza, it rained a bit.  Not enough to solve the drought, obviously, but there was thunder and lightning.

June 4th

We spent the day at the airfield, helping out with the media day.  Gary took Dad up in his Pietenpol, and I took Russ up in the Flightstar and terrified him.  Mike joined us, and took pictures, but nobody was buying any.

We all got to take flights in the Tri-motor, and I managed to get the co-pilot seat and fly the thing :o)

In the evening, Vic went out and got us Chinese food for dinner as we were all too damn tired to do anything.

June 3rd

I spent some time updating the EAA website and writing some documents while Russ and Dad went out to test his new brakes - there'd been smoke on the first test drive yesterday.  Looks like everything works OK now.

We went over to the airfield for the membership barbecue and meeting - Colin, the pilot of the Tri-motor presented information about the aircraft's history.

June 2nd

I went over to the hospital for a check up on my cracked scaphoid, and it seems like it's pretty much healed, so I don't need to wear the splint any more.

We worked on Russ' car most of the day, changing the brake discs and pads all round.  Having done it, we could do it a lot faster now, especially as we now have stuff like a T27 Torx drive and an 18'' spanner.

At the end of the day, we went over to Lincoln to look at the Raspberry Pi I'd built to show slides.  It hadn't worked on Monday, and I couldn't see that there was a problem with the Pi, whereas the projector it was hooked up to didn't want to react to anything other than the power button.  I'd taken my laptop, and that didn't work with it either.

We stopped at Mel's Diner for something to eat on the way home, and when we got home I tested the RPi on my monitor - it worked flawlessly.

June 1st

A new month, so here are the solar stats:

Power billed

Power generated

I dicked about touching up paint around the house for a while, then settled in to wait for Russ and Dad to show up.  Show up they did.

May 31st

I started the day over at the airfield helping put the finishing touches to the hangar that the Tri-motor is being stored in.  While we were working, Richard was swapping text messages with the Tri-motor crew and it looked like it was going to be coming in today, rather than Monday.  When all was done, I went and managed to meet Vic and Jen for lunch.  When we got home, we watched "The Theory of Everything" and tooled around the house until Richard texted to say the plane was going to be in around 19:00.  As it got to ~18:00, we were just getting ready to head out when he texted to say it was going to be in around 19:50.  We went out to the airfield, and it finally showed up around 20:20 - just before it got dark.  Richard had driven up to Redding and ridden down in the co-pilot seat of the Tri-motor, the git :o)

May 30th

I spent the morning talking to Comcast about why my internet bill shouldn't double just because it's been a year since we'd had the exact same discussion.  While I was doing that, I knocked together a Raspberry Pi setup to run a slideshow for the Tri-motor events.  I even built a rudimentary case for it out of several layers of Coroplast so I don't have to worry about some dumbass breaking it.

In the afternoon, I went over to the airport and took the Flightstar out for an hour, despite it (still) being quite windy.

When I got home, we watched "The Hunger Games 3".  It was funny, because the way it starts, we thought maybe we'd missed a movie or something.