Dichroic Reflections

Outlaws up

If anyone's interested, our rowing website is .... well, not done, but drafted and populated. You can see it here. Feedback is welcome, as I've only tested it on a couple of browsers so far. We're still battling issues of sizing and placement of links that show up differently on differend monitors/browsers.

Also, you can buy gear with our logo here.

Yesterday, my flight was cut very short - the clouds above masked a low fog layer - it was thin enough to see through, more or less, but not legal to fly in without an instrument clearance. (And of course, no guarantee that it wouldn't thicken on us at an inooprtune time. When you're in the air, any time fog thickens is an inopportune time.) So my flight went as follows: take off, climb less than a thousand feet, enter fog, descend, turn around, land. A very expensive fifteen minutes. On the other hand, experience in dealing with weather and in landing from a lower altitude than standard pattern is useful.

We'd spent Saturday helping clean up the boatyard, then working on stuff around the house. Since I had my Sunday morning back, Rudder graciously acceded to my request that we do something fun with the rest of our weekend. We decided something outside would be more fun - despite the cloud layer, it was a nice, cool, partly sunny day, and decided to drive up north to see whether all this wet weather seemed to be helping the trees on our porperty to do better. The short answer is "no", I think just because trees don't do anything in one-season time increments, but the drive..... well. The desert was unbelievably, lushly Technicolor green. We saw actual waterfalls on the mountains, more than a few of them, in a bizarre desert-impersonates-Yosemite act. There were black-eyed Susans and other yellow flowers and purple lupines along the road. It was spectacular. Then up on the Mogollon Rim (6000-7000 feet elevation) we got rained on and drove through wisps of clous, then saw patches of snow under the junipers. As we rose higher, there were blankets of snow under the aspens and then coverlets of snow on the pines. We drove through rain, snow, and clouds low enough over the snow covering to give me a new understanding of the phenomenon of whiteout - I was trying to imagine navigation if there hadn't been a road visible under us. There are other places in the world that can provide as much variety in a two hour drive as Arizona, but possible not a lot of them. Which reminds me:

Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't

• Hiked through a rainforest to get to a glacier.
• Slept outside on the continent of Antarctica.
• Traveled on a ship through the Drake Passage
• Kayaked in fjords on three continents. (Well, technically New Zealand isn't a continent but I suppose you could call it the Asian Pacific.)
• Stood at the bottom of a Titan missile silo and looked up.
• Flown in F-16, A-10, Space Shuttle, C-130, and A340 simulators (the high-level ones real pilots and astronauts use to train).
• Gotten married in Valley Forge
• Sung at the lighting of the City Hall Christmas tree in Philadelphia.
• Visited the Demilitarized Zone in Korea
• Eaten alligator, kangaroo, and rattlesnake.

Posted by dichroic at February 21, 2005 12:25 PM