June 12th

I played with Tilly until she was too tired to play any more, then we took the motorcycles up to the Golden West Flyin - it's about 45 minutes away.  It didn't seem to be signposted off the freeway, which was weird, but after one U-turn, we got there.  It was a lot smaller than it's been in recent years, and I didn't get to see any of the stuff I wanted to see, but hey, we were there late.  We left at around the same time as the last of the planes flew out, and rode home a different way. 

When we got home, we kicked around for a little bit, then went over to Lincoln, so I could test the radio.  Sure enough, with the engine off, the radio works, but with the tach line from the regulator plugged in, it doesn't.  Stranger - I unplugged it at the regulator end, and that didn't fix it, it needed to be unplugged at the EIS end too, which suggests that it's an interference problem to me.  I decided to look at this later, and we went and threw in a bunch of circuits.  I was pretty tired, and my landings weren't the greatest, but we did get to play with the climb out to see how hard we could climb.  ~900fpm, but the best we could sustain was around 500fpm.  The jump plane took off at one point, using 33 rather than 15 like the rest of us, so we extended downwind and flew orbits to let him out.  That twin isn't cheap to run, and I didn't want him to have to wait for us to get out of his way as we were doing touch and goes.  Kent had arrived as we were leaving, but didn't get his Flightstar off the ground until we were packing ours away :o)

June 11th

I did a little more work on converting the web site to the Google, then went and cut the grass.  It's been about 2 weeks since I last cut it, as it was raining all last weekend.  It took me ages, and required several emptyings of the grass hopper - I usually get away with 2 or maybe 3.  Hopefully the hot weather'll keep the grass growth down for a while.

In the evening we went to the airfield and I put a line in from the regulator to the tach.  We tested it and it reads accurately up to 5500rpm, so we decided to do some circuits.  Well, we were at the runup area when I found that the radio won't transmit.  It wasn't busy, so we did a single big circuit, but swapping the headsets over seems to have fixed that (something not quite plugged in?  Seems strange, as the intercom was working properly).  I'm now wondering if it's interference from the new wire - I'll have to test that out next time.

June 9th

I managed to slope out of work a little early, so I got over the Bay Bridge without too much drama.  Of course, everybody still has to slow down to a crawl to look at every stopped car they see, so I didn't get home until gone 7pm.  Tilly was happy to see the van, bless her.

June 6th

I got up horrifyingly early and took the van to the office.  Yay, my first time crossing the bridge with my FastTrak pass.  Um... why are the lines longer when you don't have to stop?  The other thing is that you still have to stop just the other side of the tolls for the filtering traffic lights, as people have obviously proven to be unable to merge by themselves.  Doy.  As it's $54 a night to park at the hotel (and no, I'm not sleeping in the van - that's on top of the room rate), I'm leaving the van in the parking lot by the office.  I figure I was going to walk to and from the hotel anyway (it's under a mile), so a couple of trips carrying my bag aren't going to kill me.  I also get to live on Coke and chocolate for a week, but I'm planning breakfast at McDonalds at least once, as I'll be walking past there anyway.  Maybe just to remind me why I don't eat there that often.

June 5th

Another rainy day, so I tinkered around with stuff around the house, then we headed to the airfield and installed the resistor.  Didn't work.  As in the tach didn't read at all.  Took it out, and everything's fine, so I think I'll ignore it for the moment, and maybe see about replacing the regulator at some point (you can take the tach feed off the regulator, assuming you don't have a Key West regulator.  Which one do you think I have?).  We put it all back together, and the tach works fine without the resistor.  Bah.

In the evening, we watched I am number 4, which wasn't too awful bad - it looks like there'll be a sequel.  Oooh, I hope it's in 3D </snark>

June 4th

It rained.  Pretty much all day.  So, I ran some errands, including picking up some resistors for the tach feed on the plane... it goes crazy above about 5400rpm, so I spoke to the manufacturer, and they suggested a resistor, so I went and got some because the tach goes crazy above ~5400rpm.

Anyway, I soldered bits of wire to the resistor, then covered everything in heat shrink.  We headed out to the airfield to install it to find that the big tub o' connectors is gone.  Bugger.  Nothing else to do, so we came home again.

June 1st

Egads, what a crappy day it was yesterday, weather-wise.  At one point we saw ~3.75" per hour of rain, and for the day we were at over 0.5"... we've had >24" since last summer, and we usually expect 12-16".  I was talking to Fred, who wants to get his trailer back up to his camp site at Emigrant Gap.  It's at ~6,000', and apparently there's still about 10' (yes, feet) of snow up there.  They're hoping to get in for July 4th.

If this is global warming, you can keep it.

Here's the electricity we've been billed for

And here's the electricity we've generated