All my life that I can remember I've wanted to fly. When I was very young (maybe 6?) one of my cousins who is an aircraft instructor gave me a plane ride for my birthday, instantly becoming the coolest cousin ever!
I can't remember when I first learned about hang gliding - I do remember watching Hang Gliders at a very young age when my family visited Fort Funston in San Francisco. I can still remember my feeling of awe at the magical way the colorful wings rose, seemingly effortlessly, into the skies to surf the invisible waves of the air. And ever since gliding flight has enchanted me. I've spent happy hours watching sea gulls ridge soar around the rocky point out at Pigeon Point Light House - tiny movements and adjustments controlling their flight, stopping and nearly hovering then wheeling and diving downwind... Somehow flight just seemed wondrous, magical, much more fascinating than the mundane world where my feet were firmly planted.
During my early teenage years a friend of mine found an ancient rogallo style hang-glider in his family's newly rented barn and offered it to me, knowing my fascination. I might still be a little bitter that despite all my pleading my mom said "Absolutely not!"
When I was in my early twenties and planning on getting married I took one hang gliding lesson and made it out to the training hill. But money was tight and I eventually put my dreams of flying through the air to one side and opted for the somewhat more practical but still exciting motorcycle.
And here I am. I'm in my thirties. I have three children - and I don't even have a motorcycle anymore. But I can (maybe) afford to take a flying lesson or two and my job actually has a somewhat malleable schedule that means I might be able to take enough time to go flying occasionally. Can I still pursue my dream at this late date? It turns out that I can!
Eric Hinrichs teaches for Bay Area Hang Gliding and I've been taking lessons from him for the last few months. Or more accurately - I took a couple before December and a couple in the last month. As a result I've gotten to know the path down the training hill at Ed Levin pretty well. I started out with a huge training glider that flies incredibly slowly - the Wills Wing Condor 330 - and Eric had me run on flat ground learning how to hold the glider, feel it rising off my shoulders, and come back to a stop supporting it. I slowly started working up the hill - getting my feet off the ground a little bit on my first lesson and gradually moving higher to make the flights slightly longer. The first few lessons are all about take offs and landing - controlling the angle of attack so that the wing flies when you take off and learning to feel ground effect, find trim speed and slowly push out to slow the glider upon landing.
My fourth lesson with Eric was Friday and I'm still flying high - I moved up a glider to the smaller Condor 225. Losing 105 square feet of sail meant things sped up and it took me a couple of tries to confidently power down the hill on launch and a couple more flights to be able to feel the right time to flare on landing. But by the end of the day my launches were strong, my flares were getting crisper, and I flew straight flights at a couple of different speeds to complete the tasks for my H1 novice rating. One multiple test later - I'm the proud holder of a temporary novice card and looking forwards to flying off the 300' launch on my way to an H2 license.
Eric was kind enough to strap a go-pro camera to my glider and post the footage. Yes - that's me skidding in on my knees the second time - but keep watching. By the end of the day landing smoothly, on my feet, with a crisp flare made me feel a mile high.
Driving home I thought to myself - In some ways I feel satisfied right now. I've accomplished a lifelong dream of mine - my feet have left the ground and I've felt, for 20 seconds at a time, the joy of pure flight. In some ways though I feel hungrier than ever. Those accomplished soarers - the hawks and vultures that spiral up in the thermals that rise around our training hill had better watch out - one day soon I'll be with with them climbing up into the blue skies.
I just bought a new camera and am so happy with it I'm wondering what took me so long to upgrade.
I've had a succession of point-and-shoot cameras since in the last ten years - but I've noticed for the last couple years that I don't take many pictures. And I don't take many pictures because all my pictures seem to look horrible. It's true that I can take good looking picture with my 6 megapixel point-and-shoot: of brightly lit non-moving scenes. But birthday pictures of small children running around in poorly lit rooms? Impossible - either too dark or too blurry or completely washed out by the direct and close flash.
Enter the DSLR. I do have a rudimentary understanding of aperture, shutter speed and ISO and understand that to get the most from my camera I'll have to learn more - but even on fully automatic I'm amazed by the superior light and detail. Compare two successive photos taken on full automatic of a room lit by a window - one from my A570 and one from my new Rebel T2i:
Do I have to say which came from the point-n-shoot and which came from the DSLR?
I'm looking forwards to enjoying taking photos again...
Everybody who knows me knows I like to cook. Learning to cook decent Asian food has been my obsession for the last couple of years but I've also really enjoyed the Tex-Mex stylings of Lisa Fain at Homesick Texan. I've made a enough of her recipes to trust her recommendation and added her newly published cookbook to my Amazon Wish List before Christmas.
Last week I got a chance to use my new cookbook and made four recipes when we had company over for dinner. I think all four are unique to the book - I hadn't seen them cross the blog at any rate. I had 3 winners and one recipe I may have to retry. Not too bad for the first time.
The "Salsa Fuego" recipe was the least successful attempt - I think I got too much adobo on the chipotle pepper it called for and the salsa was really smoky - too dark to be edible to my palette and I didn't serve it. Waste not however - I plan on using the salsa (with some citrus and olive oil additions) as marinade for a tri-tip next week. If you want a roasted tomato flavored salsa I highly recommend my go-to salsa recipe instead - a knockoff of Papalote's Salsa that features roasted pumpkin seeds. I'll probably give Salsa Fuego another try.
On the other hand the Habanero Carrot Salsa was awesome! Carrots gave a sweet flavor (and great color), the habanero adds spicy/fruity notes, and it's thinned with chicken stock which definitely adds to the meatiness of the taste and texture. This was easy to make and universally praised. Don't be scared off by the habanero - this was only low/medium in heat.
I also made the Red Rice recipe from the book and this was excellent if a touch too spicy for my kids. Those canned chipotle-in-adobo peppers pack a punch! Next time I make it I'll probably throw in some diced carrots and a handful of peas...
Finally the main course was Gas Station Style Pork Tacos. This consisted of cubed pork marinated for a 6 hours in a fantastic sauce - then fried in a skillet over high heat and wrapped in freshly fried corn tortillas. The secret to enjoying this recipe is to feature the pork - I made tacos with just a scoop of pork, a spritz of lime and a pinch of cilantro. Excellent flavor - I'll be making these again.
I've still got all sorts of interesting recipes to make from the book and am feeling pleased already after making 4 first-time recipes for company without disaster. If you're interested in some quality Tex-Mex downhome cooking check out the Homesick Texan.
I hadn't done a satisfying side project in a long time. The last one that springs to mind was some simple PyGame typing games I made for my daughter when she wanted to play a computer game but couldn't get the hang of a mouse.
She's a little older now and is in first grade. We have a great home-school/tutoring co-op setup going and really only have to worry about the curriculum for first grade social studies. Recently my wife asked me to put together some worksheets for the "Symbols, Icons, and traditions of the US" portion of the California State Standards for 1st grade social studies.
True to my usual form I took the opportunity to play with software - I wrote a little script that takes directories of YAML files and runs them through some Jinja2 templates to produce a little website. You can see the resulting educational website and check out the code on github.
I took the opportunity to play with some html5 and css3 and didn't even try to shoehorn support in for IE - Chrome and Firefox both support the <audio> element, CSS gradients, CSS transitions and rotations, etc so the site looks quite spiffy in modern browsers but results may vary dramatically in older and less standards compliant browsers.
I preached last Sunday. Right now the lay brothers who share in the preaching duties are going through the Book of James. We just finished Galatians - I guess we're striving to be fair and balanced!
Anyways - anyone interested can listen to my take on James on Sermoncloud. In studying for the sermon I discovered D. Edmond Hiebert who was a long time instructor at Mennonite Brethren Seminary down at Fresno Pacific University. Hiebert wrote a lot of commentaries and has an interesting thesis about the book of James - if you're interested his essay "The Unifying Theme of the Epistle of James" is available online and is worth a read.
Eric Hinrichs teaches for Bay Area Hang Gliding and I've been taking lessons from him for the last few months. Or more accurately - I took a couple before December and a couple in the last month. As a result I've gotten to know the path down the training hill at Ed Levin pretty well. I started out with a huge training glider that flies incredibly slowly - the Wills Wing Condor 330 - and Eric had me run on flat ground learning how to hold the glider, feel it rising off my shoulders, and come back to a stop supporting it. I slowly started working up the hill - getting my feet off the ground a little bit on my first lesson and gradually moving higher to make the flights slightly longer. The first few lessons are all about take offs and landing - controlling the angle of attack so that the wing flies when you take off and learning to feel ground effect, find trim speed and slowly push out to slow the glider upon landing. 
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