guapacha.com

(You may have noticed that this blog has kinda died, I’m posting most things on my tumblr or Facebook, not sure there will be much to see here going forward)

Today I was flying to San Francisco and while walking through the departure area the boarding pass of a guy sat near the newsstand caught my eye: it said Paul Sanders on it. I thought what is the chance of that! So I circled around and got a better look – he was on the same flight as me. Now, the chances of that really are amazing. So amazing that I decided to point this out to him.

Not sure English was his first language or at least listening to (English) English wasn’t hs thing and he protested that no his name was (something garbled). I pointed to the name on my boarding pass and the name on his and said “same!” and he nodded, and I walked away.

Standing in line to get on the plane he was just ahead of me and that’s when I started to worry. This all started to seem way too coincidental! Had I been picked to be the innocent victim while my namesake took part in act of terror? They scanned my boarding pass and I was denied. Crap.

I had to go back to the checkin desk and explain it, he called the guy at the gate and said stop boarding you need to get the other guy off the plane. The desk guy showed me a boarding pass in the name of Fred Sadners, saying this is the guy who walked onto the plane as me. The theory is that he had asked for a boarding pass reprint and the agent had printed out mine and given it to him.

Anyway, I was told to go to the plane and as I walked down the aisle I met my “namesake” coming back up. Shortly after I was seated he came back on the plane.

Flying can be an adventure!

This week I had to renew my FAA 3rd Class Medical Certificate, an event that has to happen every two years once you get over 40, 40 being the official age from which everything goes downhill it seems. Everything was groovy until the vision test which I knew was going to be a toughie. I’ve had 20/20 vision all my life until the last couple of years. People told me that my eyesight would do downhill rapidly at 40 which I thought was kinda silly, everyone is different. But it seems not, my near vision has taken quite a hit in the last couple of years.

So I get to the eye machine and to my amazement I can read the bottom line each time, I’m doing great! But then the doc says “now for the near vision test”, first slide and I could feel my eyes go every which way but focussed. After my fail the doctor welcomed me to the “long arm club”. I got my certificate but it has been endorsed with “Must have available near vision correction lenses”. I think I am officially old.

Thought I’d share my latest, um, pastime – I’m going to try building my own plane, and so I’ve created a website for it:

Not sure if I have the skill, time or money to get it done but we’ll find out, click on the image to go to the site and subscribe for the day by day progress.

There’s also a Flickr collection that will carry photos as I take them. I’m currently about a third of the way through the rudder but the project is on hold while I go to the UK for some work and some vacation.

Today marks 41 years since Neil Armstrong took that first step onto the moon’s surface. Which made me think of this great bit from Eddie Izzard:

They went to the Moon and they brought back rock. Trouble is, we’ve got rock. That was the one thing we didn’t need, wasn’t it? “Rock, Neil? I don’t know whether you looked at the planet before you took off, but it’s made of fucking rock!” “But it’s Moon rock …” “Oh, fucking hell, this is Earth rock, Neil, come on! Have you heard, on the stock market, rock’s gone up three points? No, it hasn’t, has it? ‘Cause it’s fucking rock!”

Last weekend, as part of our 8th anniversary celebration, I took Teri for a balloon ride at the Temecula Balloon and Wine Festival. She had said for a long time that she’d love to take a balloon ride so I had been looking at all the options nearby and discovered that, for an extra fee, you could go up during the festival when 40-50 other balloons would be doing the same. Sounded like the way to do it so I went for it.

I thought I’d find the heights hard to deal with because I don’t do well near balconies on tall buildings but there was actually no sense of height from within the balloon at all. I was happily leaning over the side looking around and down. And the balloon moves effortlessly with very little sense of motion. It is cosy in the basket, and quite hot from the burners, but I’d highly recommend it.

I had my trusty Aiptek video camera with me and once again it took some awesome video for such a cheap camera. Here is a video from the balloon:

and some video of the pilot and crew taking the balloon down:

Finally, there are some pictures on my flickr account. Unfortunately neither of us had a proper stills camera with us to have taken more.