March 30th

I put together a short video from my flight at the weekend.

March 26th

I went to the airport and flew up to Lake Oroville to see it pretty much full.  It was getting more turbulent, so I flew back down the other side of Beale Air Force base and on to Auburn to meet Chris and Vic for lunch.  Because I was low and in the middle of nowhere, there's no track for me :o(

It was still quite sporty on the way home, and I could probably have landed on one of the East / West taxiways if there hadn't been anybody around :o)

Oh, and Tilly likes the gourmet French squirty cream, if anybody was wondering.

March 25th

I went to the airport early and flew a couple of Young Eagles...

The second one was longer because there was a Citation in the pattern and three of us extended South to let him in :o)  I ended up on a 3 mile final.  Into a 15kt headwind.

Afterwards, I hung around for the Air Traffic presentation at the EAA, then headed home.

The inverter for the solar panels has been cutting out...

(The lighter blue line is the solar output, the big jump is the car charging)

so I'd called the manufacturer (because the company that installed it has gone out of business.)  SMA told me to get an installer to work with me, and they came out and looked at it today.  Billy wasn't impressed with the factory wiring - it seems they've wired the ground to the neutral - but he's aiming to talk to SMA, and fix some of their bad wiring.  The fact that it's run fine for 9 years suggests that it's the AC board though, so that'll probably end up needing to be replaced.  I'm expecting an argument about the warranty, based on my call with them - the inverter was manufactured 12/12, but wasn't installed until 5/14.

March 19th

It was raining, so we went and met Chris and Randy for lunch, then I mostly did dumb paperwork for the afternoon.

March 18th

John came up, and we went to the airport to meet Don and Matt.  Shane and Liza were there with the family, and when everybody had taken off again, we pulled the plane out and went for a short flight - Shane actually landed as we were taxying out.

Don and Matt had headed back to Cameron Park, but the rest of us met Vic for lunch, then headed our separate ways.

In the evening, we watched "Violent Night," even though it (like this) is an Xmas movie.

March 15th

While I'm working, I generally have cup after cup of Lift, and Tilly comes into the kitchen hoping for a treat while I'm boiling the kettle.  So this time I give her a baby (cut) carrot, and go on with my day.

A little while later I looked at her, and she had a lump on the side of her face.  We went through the usual "don't touch me" thing when there's something I want to look at, and it was a hard lump... I was having visions of getting to take her to the vet and so on.  I pressed on it a little harder, and it moved.  Moved?

It was a piece of carrot stuck between the top of her teeth and her cheek.  It fell down into her mouth, and she ran off happily, as it was free carrot.

March 12th

It was another crappy day, so we ran Tilly through a game for the Dog Aging Project.  Basically it was a test of remembering where the treat was between 3 boxes.  Tilly did about as well as you'd expect a random sampling to do... she remembered pretty much none of them.  I'm so proud.

March 11th

We'd been hoping to fly up to Oroville for their March Madness fly-in but the weather sucked.  Still, I went to the airport to tinker with the plane, and Shane and Liza arrived to test out their new intercom.

When I got tired of changing zip ties, we went and got lunch.

In the evening, Vic and I watched "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever."

March 6th

We had a "Wellness Day" at work.  Well, most people had it on Friday, but I get it the following Monday so whoever's on call doesn't have to worry about support from 14:00 when the guys on the East Coast leave.

I got up early and went to get the 30,000 service (an inspection and a wheel rotation) done on the car, then went home for a nap.  On the way home, I stopped and picked up some envelopes to post the taxes (state is $20 online with the software we use, federal is free.)  When you put in your phone number at the checkout for whatever discounts, you'll get these coupons to correct your buying.  Anyway, I got a coupon for gourmet, French style whipped creme.  We buy the whipped cream for Tilly.

After my nap, I went and posted our state taxes.  Sadly I couldn't charge the car while waiting to get to the counter as the Chargepoint charger was down.  Again.

At home, I pulled the door of the van apart to try and figure out why the central locking wasn't working.  Then I pulled the dashboard apart and couldn't get the fuse for the controller out.  All the force I put into it seems to have made it work again, so it's probably corrosion and I'll need to look at it harder at some point, but for now that's fixed.

March 5th

It was another odd weather day, where it looks fine then rains, so we drove up to Auburn to meet Chris and Jeff for breakfast.  Jeff wandered in from the flight line, making me think he's flown the RV-6A he's in a group with, but he'd just got there early and been looking around.

When I got home, I knuckled down and finished my taxes.

March 4th

I went out to the hangar to work on Shane's intercom.  Getting there before him, I plugged my headsets in and they worked just fine.  When he got there, we plugged his headsets in and they squealed.  We went through the dip switches on the headsets, setting them to stereo and changing the mic gain to match mine, and everything worked fine.

After testing everything worked, we installed the jacks into the tub and one ear piece stopped working.  We futzed about for a while and bent the jack slightly to make connection, then everything worked again and we could zip it all up.  A final test showed everything on the gyro working as expected, so we went home to install the headsets into the helmets.

We got part of the way through, only to find I didn't have the tiny Torx bit we needed, so we went over to Shane's and rounded the tip off of his T6 bit.  We figured it wasn't going to be easy to refit the headsets to the headbands anyway (there are parts you have to cut out,) so we broke them apart and fitted them to the helmets.  Now we just need an aircraft to test them, and then test the whole setup in the air.

March 1st

A new month, so here's the power stats...

Power billed

Power generated

After work Shane picked me up and we went back to the airport.

We fiddled with the radio connections to get that transmitting and receiving correctly, then installed the pilot sockets.  We were testing the passenger sockets again when we got the awful squeal, and couldn't immediately figure it out.  It was cold, so we called it a night and headed home.

February 28th

After work Shane picked me up and we went to the airport.  He's finished the wiring for the radio connector, and I spent about 30 minutes figuring out how to get it all back together.

We plugged everything in and got a nasty squeal that we eventually figured out was the headset connectors touching (it sounded like a feedback loop but we thought that was unlikely when we were wearing the headsets.)  After that we swapped the audio out from the radio and everything's working as hoped.

Shane drilled the holes in the tub, and we decided to call it a night there - there's not an awful lot left to do now.