Welcome Spring!

Winter is fun because we get to go skiing and I like to snuggle under warm blankets and beside a good fire. But, being from the south, I'm glad when the frosts are done and the warm air rolls in. Each year, our front yard tree is one of the first to welcome spring in with its' burst of white flowers. This was by far the lovelist and prettiest showing of our tree. I thoroughly enjoyed it for the week of first flower to last flower!

Then last weekend, we took a trip to Mark's mothers house in Arkansas. They had a horrible ice storm this winter and so many of their trees in the whole area were basically cut in half. But everything is starting to bloom up there now too. Of course, I had to take pictures :)

The field beside their house, filled with small purple flowers....of course, I had to lay in the field of flowers and just take it in!


The kitties, just strolling on a lovely weekend.....

Then, the kitties playing in the flowers. The funny thing about this last picture is that I was taking a picture of the black kittie roaming in the right-hand side of the picture. However, I couldn't believe it when I opened this picture on my computer the first time. If you look on the left, there is a leaping kitty flying through the sky! He's a little above center of the picture and nearly all the way left, right next to the tree. (Click on the picture and it will get bigger if you want to see the kitty easier). I could not have taken that picture if I had tried!


The yard with cool shadows from the sun....

Oh, there were so many birds out all day long when we were there....I was absolutely lovin' it!! Here's a redbird hanging out in the tree.

Then, Keith's geese. They used to be in the garden, but they were downright destructive and mean so Keith made them their own little pen in the front of the yard. Now I know the meaning of a mean goose! You can't tell from this picture, but they are making quite some racket for me. Of course, the gray one is just interested in what was on the other side of the fence.

Keith's caution sign. They definitely let you know when someone is driving up the driveway! Oh yeah, and then occasionally, they just quack to hear themselves quack I suppose.

Keith has built a firepit in the backyard and loves a good fire when they have company. It was pretty chilly the first night, and Keith had prepared a huge bonfire.....so we enjoyed the fire! Here's Mark and his Mama chattin' by the fireside.....

Of course, I love the challenge of taking good pictures and the fire had a lot of color to it this time. Here's one of many, showing the deep blue flames at the bottom. It was a good, hot fire!

Then on the last day before we left, Mark's mother was telling us about a new bike trail going through Fayetteville. We had brought our bikes and wanted to go for a ride, so we drove into town with the bikes and set out on an hour bikeride. It was a very nice trail...I'm jealous! It winds through many of the neighborhoods and you can just get on and off in your neighborhood and then ride through the town via the bike trails. The trail goes all along a river through town. Here's a picture showing one of the several small waterfalls along the way.

Then of course, finally a geeky picture of us on the bikeride. Helmets on for safety!

Our Annual Ski Vacation

Our ski vacation this year took us to Breckenridge. And actually it was designed partly around the fact that Mark was DYING to go back to the vertical wind tunnel (to relive the skydiving years). So we went with a few of our old skydiving buddies to ski and to play in the tunnel. Here we all are outside of one of the ski resorts. (Mark, Angela, Paul, Greg)

Then of course, here we are playing in the snow!

Mark with his requisite thumbs up....

A couple of awesome scenery pics...

I just thought the icicles on the underside of the snow falling off the house just looked really cool.

Then a few sunset pictures from the drive home....most excellent. Sun sets behind the mountain with awesome cloud cover as a backdrop.

I just liked this picture of us and thought I'd share.

Here's us just hanging out at the end of the day. Mark sharing pictures on the computer and me, I decided that since we were skiing I wanted to knit a ski hat :D

And here is the fruit of my knitting....Now to end with, a picture of us with the awesome mountains in the background...how awesome!

Flying Out for Dinner

We had fun last night, I got some good flight experience, and I wanted to share… I normally fly on Friday’s and 1) since Angela didn’t have a soccer game this Friday, 2) her Birthday is this weekend, and 3) she likes flying places, I thought flying her out for a nice dinner some place we had never been would be nice. So where’d we go?? Well, I found this little Bed & Breakfast called Carson House in Pittsburg, TX. They’re also open as a restaurant to the general public. How’d I find it? I usually pick an airport to fly to and then look for places to go around it. It happened to come up in the search. Turns out it was really nice!

Our destination airport was Mount Pleasant Regional. If you draw a line from Meacham airport (where we fly out of) to Mount Pleasant, it goes right over the top of DFW airport. This is considered “Class B” airspace, and requires a special clearance to enter. We could do it, but for the trip over I just decided to fly around it to the South.


The trip over to Mount Pleasant was as expected… We actually saw a ground speed of 145kts (167mph!) and the flight took us barely over an hour.

I had arranged earlier in the day to get one of the airport courtesy cars for the evening. I had talked to Butch at the airport a couple of times setting this up and he’s a super nice guy. The airport was basically closed for the evening but he arranged to have a car available for us (thanks Butch!)

We drove South from the airport, and eventually found the Carson House. We had a very nice dinner, the people were extremely nice, and Angela told me all about her experience with the kids at the Good News Club earlier in the day. As all good things normally do, dinner came to an end way to early. Angela & I headed back to the airport. We left some money for the gas we used, gave the plane a quick once over, and then loaded up for home.

After taking off we turned due West, this time planning on going around the Northern part of the ‘class B’ airspace at DFW. We new we’d be fighting a bit of a headwind so we settled in for a longer flight this time.

The plane we fly has some really fancy-dancy equipment in it that calculates the winds you’re flying in (quick lesson… the airplane flies a certain speed through the air. In our case ~135mph. If the wind is not blowing at all we would be moving over the ground at that exact same speed. If the wind is 10mph in the same direction the plane is flying, then the plane is moving across the ground at 145mph. If the wind is 10mph in the opposite direction, the plane is moving at only 125mph across the ground. Make sense…) Anyway, it became apparent the winds at altitude were a little stronger than originally forecasted. We saw the winds coming at us were 34kts (39mph)… ugh! We tried different altitudes, but it didn’t matter. And unfortunately 34kts would be the best we’d see for the remainder of the flight! The farther we went, the stronger the winds got.

The winds eventually peaked out at 53kts (61mph), yikes! There’s no way around it… the only way to get home is to keep going the direction we’re going, but we’re only moving across the ground at a “measly” 78mph. Heck, we could almost be driving that fast.

The controllers seemed to have a relatively light workload during our flight and actually cleared us to fly right through the middle of the class B airspace. He told us to fly right over the top of DFW airport at about 3,400ft. Once we FINALLY got there (seemed to take FOR-EV-ERrrrrrrrr) we were both checking out all the big jets parked at the terminal gates, and the enormous size of the runways. Angela & I have both flown into and out of that airport numerous times but never right over the top of it… in a Cessna! Sweeeeet… We had plenty of time to enjoy it too since we were going so SLOW!

Once back at Meacham the approach to landing was pretty bumpy, and we touched down almost an hour and 45 minutes after we took off… ugh! This is the first flight I actually felt the need to do some quick fuel calculations just in case. We had plenty of fuel when we took off, but you really don’t expect to have a 60mph headwind for the majority of the trip! Turns out we were more than fine, but I was definitely thinking about it.

So, all is well, we both had a wonderful time, and we both experienced some new things. Can’t beat that!

A nice lunch on the go

Mark hasn't been flying much lately....either too much going on or bad weather or something else preventing him from taking flight. He has had this lunch flight on the schedule. We were supposed to be taking along a friend of ours, but unfortunately, he came up sick this past week so wasn't able to join us. We flew down to Georgetown for lunch. We had a nice little lunch at a restaurant in town named Wild Fire. After lunch, we walked around the square for a few minutes and then headed back for home.

Us in front of the airport.

Here's the airport from the air right after we took off....

After lunch I was very, very sleepy........good lunches make for good naps right?!! Mark had the airplane under control, so I settled in for a nice little nap for the flight back :)

It was an awesome day for a flight and it was good to get back in the air. It was also good to spend some quality time with my honey since we've both been working wierd hours here lately!!

Awww....aren't they cute when they're sleeping?!

Well, it's been too long and Mark is giving me a hard time for starting this thing and then not adding to it..... so for now, I'll introduce you to the rest of our family!

We have Sylvester - she is the black cat. And yes,she's a girl not a boy.......my mom got her when she was a kitten to help out with a mouse problem, and my mom named her after Sylvester from the cartoon, since she looked so much like the cat in the cartoon. My mom was perfectly fine with me taking her with me when I left home and she's been with us ever since. She's absolutely the coolest cat EVER. She loves people and actually loves riding in cars (thank goodness since she has made the drive from Florida to Texas!!).

Tweety is the tabby next to her. I know, how original right? Oh well, we love her just the same! She's not quite the social kitty that Miss Sylvester is, but she's sweeter and softer. :)

In a Nutshell.....

So I was perusing my sister Tiffany's website, and found this personality test. I was curious to see if it was any good so I went on and took the test. It's actually fairly accurate. There are some things not so right though. The thing that stands out most is the fact that "Intellectual" is only at 30%. I'm a stinking engineer and the description is a subset of my personality! I'm just curious which questions I answered wrong for that one?! The other one is stability. Reading the description, I'd probably rate myself fairly high.

The trait snapshot is a pretty darn good description. Except one thing. The "likes large parties" cracks me up. Let's just say, they probably got that one wrong. Anyway....here's me, in 100 words or less :D

Advanced Global Personality Test Results Extraversion |||||||||||||||| 62% Stability |||||||||||| 50% Orderliness |||||||||||||||| 66% Accommodation |||||||||||||||||| 74% Interdependence |||||||||||||||||||| 83% Intellectual |||||| 30% Mystical |||||||||| 36% Artistic |||||||||||||||| 63% Religious |||||||||||||||||||| 83% Hedonism |||||| 30% Materialism |||||| 23% Narcissism |||||||||||| 43% Adventurousness |||||||||||||| 56% Work ethic |||||||||||||||||| 76% Humanitarian |||||||||||||||| 63% Conflict seeking |||||||||||| 43% Need to dominate |||||||||||||| 56% Romantic |||||||||||||||| 70% Avoidant |||||||||| 36% Anti-authority |||||||||||| 43% Wealth |||| 16% Dependency |||||||||||| 50% Change averse |||||||||||||||| 63% Cautiousness |||||||||||||||| 70% Individuality |||| 16% Sexuality |||||||||||||| 56% Peter pan complex |||||||||| 36% Family drive |||||||||||||||| 63% Physical Fitness |||||||||||||||||| % Histrionic |||||| 30% Paranoia |||||||||||||| 56% Vanity |||||||||||| 43% Honor |||||||||||||||| 70% Thriftiness |||||||||||||||||||| 83%

Take Free Advanced Global Personality Test
personality test by similarminds.com

Stability results were medium which suggests you are moderately relaxed, calm, secure, and optimistic.
Orderliness results were moderately high which suggests you are, at times, overly organized, reliable, neat, and hard working at the expense of flexibility, efficiency, spontaneity, and fun.
Extraversion results were moderately high which suggests you are, at times, overly talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting at the expense of developing your own individual interests and internally based identity.

trait snapshot:
clean, self revealing, open, organized, outgoing, social, enjoys leadership and managing others, dominant, makes friends easily, does not like to be alone, assertive, hard working, finisher, optimistic, positive, likes to stand out, likes large parties, respects authority, practical, high self esteem, perfectionist, dislikes chaos, busy, not familiar with the dark side of life, controlling, high self control, traditional, tough, likes to fit in, conforming, brutally honest, takes precautions

Sunset Flying... with the Camera ;-)

Angela was out of town for business again this week :-( I used the opportunity to spend some "quality time" (whatever!) at work, and got some things done that have been buggin' me. Then to close out the week I decided to take the camera up with me and see if I could get some good shots of the sunset with the inside of the plane visible... not exactly an easy picture to pull off. Ok, maybe it is... but not for me yet! So anyway, I played around with some settings, and took as many pictures as I could before the sun disappeared. It was a fun flight, and here's one of the better shots.


I learned some things, and I'm excited about going up to try it again!!!