August 30th

Shane and Liza came by to visit Tilly.  Oh, and to pick up a piece of plastic I printed for Shane.

August 27th

We went to the airport early and flew to Cameron Park for their EAA burrito breakfast.

I performed what Vic said was the worst landing we've ever done as I was trying to hurry up and get out of the way of one of Don's students.  Oh well... the plane can still be flown, so that makes it a great landing.

Judi asked me to fly one of the kids, so I did.

After all was said and done, we headed back to Lincoln.

I cleared out more work stuff, then cut a little video together from the Blackhawk landing at Lincoln yesterday:

After a while, I went back to the airport to meet Chris, where we took his RV-6A to Oroville to meet Paul.

Paul's an interesting character who owns a beautiful Wittman Tailwind and a Midget Mustang.  Chris interviewed him for his YouTube channel and I wandered around shooting B roll with the GoPro and trying to stay out of the way.  When we were done, he even dropped me back at Lincoln :o)

August 26th

It was the Airport Day at Lincoln, so I got there early hoping to watch the hot air balloons go up.  While I waited, I went and flew over Camp Far West Lake reservoir, before toddling back and joining the chaos arriving at Lincoln - there were several faster aircraft and a UH-60 which landed on the taxiway :o)

We were supposed to be down and sorted before 08:00, so I gave up waiting for the balloons and went and parked next to Shane and the powered parachutes for the day - the balloons that were supposed to go up at 06:30 to 07:00 went up at 07:30 to 08:00.

We spent the day talking to people interested in the gyros, a lot of whom recognised us from us flying over their houses :o)

I was pleased to see the Cal Fire aircraft there, as I'd suggested to Richard (the organiser) that he invite them :o)

I was on call, so after Shane and I stopped for lunch, I went home and got some work done :o(

August 19th

I got up early and headed to the airport to fly to Woodland to meet Chris.  I was running a little early, so I took the scenic route :o)

I was flying into a slight headwind on the way home, so I went in a much straighter line.

Back at Lincoln, I built up a front wheel for Shane from the parts Greg had sent and a new tyre / tube I had in my spares pile.

At home I carried on with trying to get my new to me PC running how I'd like it to.

One of the things (other than transferring data) that took some time was setting up an older version of Quicken (from before it was sold and went to a subscription model) - basically you have to install the old version, then copy over the quicken.ini file from the original installation.  If you don't do this, it'll try and get you to register, even though that's no longer possible.  If you start Quicken before the file copy, you'll have to totally remove everything to do with it using an uninstaller (just uninstalling it in Add/Remove won't work) and start over.  Fun times.

August 18th

Good news everybody!  The President's going to be in Tahoe for the next week...

Chris had kindly given me an old PC he had when he retired - it's 6 generations newer than my PC :o)  I kept putting off getting it set up, but finally reset Windows on it a while ago.  Well, tonight I installed my backup hard drive and put it all in place.  Now I just have (a lot of) setup to do.

August 16th

We did a cognition test with Tilly for the Dog Aging Project.  Unfortunately her attention spam is tiny, so as the length of time between dropping the treat and being allowed to go and get it went up, she was actually less accurate than blind chance :o(

August 13th

We took Tilly to the dog park in the morning.  We were there for about half an hour, and she got to walk around it once.  She decided she wanted to go home, then seemed to want me to throw her over the fence to the van rather than walk over to the gate.

I was pretty tired after a bad night's sleep, with Tilly getting me up multiple times, so I decided against flying.  I did go out to the airport because I had a sneaking suspicion that I'd left the gas cap off the plane.  I had.

August 12th

We got up early and celebrated Tilly's 16th birthday with treats.  So many treats.

After that, we headed to the airport and met Randy and PJ to fly to Columbia to meet Chris, Chris, Judi and Matt for brunch, but first got to change one of Randy's inner tubes, as he had a flat tyre.

After lunch we flew back - it was a little bumpy on the way there, so I headed out to the flatter land for most of the flight back.

August 9th

Tilly's still drinking from buckets, rather than her now raised bowl, so I guess bucket water just tastes better.

August 8th

Shane, Randy and I met at the airport after work to try and get Shane's rotor finally dialed in.  We were taxying out when there was a clunk, and then a scraping sound.  The front wheel had broken :o(

Shane and I took turns pushing it back towards the hangar, and Randy went and pulled his front wheel off - we were taking Shane's front wheel off when a jet started taxying towards us, so we pushed it off the side and waited for them to pass.  When they'd passed, we put Randy's wheel on and taxied back to the hangar.

While his wheel was off, Randy decided to change out the tyre, so we got that done, then headed to get some pie to cheer us up.

August 6th

Randy, Shane and I met at the airport and worked on Shane's rotor balance.  It carried on being downright odd, and we gave up and flew to Auburn to meet Chris and Perry for lunch.

 We pottered home again, and headed home.

At home, Vic and I went and dropped off a bunch of recycling.  Vic had pointed out that Tilly's been drinking from buckets, so I made a little table to lift her bowls off the floor.

August 5th

I got up early and flew to Placerville to meet Chris and Perry for their EAA pancake breakfast.

Afterwards, I flew back again :o)

August 2nd

I got back the DNA test results from the Dog Aging Project for Tillamook:

The "Others" part is:

They say she's 10% inbred, which means she has high genetic variation.

They suggest that:

• She's between a Corgi and a Collie in size - yup.
• She's mostly black - yup, with yellow - nope.
• She has a sable pattern - yup, with a mask - nope.
• She has white spots all over - nope.
• She has a short (yup) wavy (not really) coat, without eyebrow furnishings (yup) and doesn't shed a lot (sort of.)
• She has a short tail - yup, and normal length legs - yup, and strangely no genetic adaption to high altitude - who knows.

August 1st

A new month, so here are the stats:

Power billed

Power generated

After work, I took the DRZ for a test ride.  The carb's working fine, but it might be a little lean as there's a fair amount of popping on the overrun.

Randy, Shane and I met at the airport and played with the rotor balance on Shane's gyro.  While we've got it in the green, we think we can do better, so we'll try again.  It was close to sunset when we had to stop.