Through the years, several unexplained and unidentified sounds have been recorded, some repeatedly. Today, I've been reading about them and listening to the sound clips provided by NOAA. It's kind of spooky.

One significant sound is known as 'Bloop' (Wikipeda page). It's relatively recent, recorded in 1997, just a year after NOAA installed the additional hydrophones. They don't know what made the sound, but they've determined based on its properties that it most likely came from some biological source — some sea creature. The odd thing about it, though, is that it was incredibly loud — the signal was picked up by two stations 5000 km apart. Scientists say that a creature would need to be much larger than a Blue Whale to create a sound that loud at those frequencies. Some mysterious sea monster? We know so little about what's going on in the deeper oceans that it wouldn't be surprising at all to discover that some large creature has gone thus far undetected.

Another sound that's pretty spooky is known as Slow Down (Wikipedia page), because it does just that — the frequency steadily drops down from about 30 Hz to zero in about 7 minutes. This one was also very loud, being picked up by three separate stations, thousands of miles apart. They've traced its origin to an area out in the middle of the Pacific ocean. It's an interesting feeling to listen to that recording and wonder what monstrous beast or machine could have created it.

I think I need to watch The Abyss again.

I checked out the website he runs, letsmakerobots.com, and saw that it was a community-based site where you can display your own robots, participate in the forums, etc, so I signed up for an account and got involved in the community. Recently, I mentioned on the site that I was building my own version of his robot, and he excitedly offered to help me out by providing tips and explanations of the way his code works, etc.

Mine doesn't have yellow tank treads, so I'm calling mine Little Drum Machine (construction photos). I've made good progress in building the mechanical side of it — it helps a lot to have a woodworker (and his power tools) in the house. My robot looks a little more finished and refined than Frits' version, and I'm kind of sad about that (his has so much character, from its jauntily angled speaker to the big globs of dripping hot glue), but I've found that my instinctive desire to carefully measure, calculate, and plan ahead is surprisingly difficult to overcome. Still, I'm happy about the way it's coming along. Here's a video of my robot driving around and swinging his single drumstick at stuff. (Yup, I've actually started uploading videos to YouTube now. Sadly, no crazy comments calling me a nazy or a moran so far).

Once I finish gluing up another drumstick motor or two, I get to start the fun part — teaching him to play music.

In Linux, there's a measure of how heavily the machine is loaded, aptly called the "load average." A value between 0.0 and 1.0 means that the machine is only partially being used, and it's spending part of its time idle. A value of 1.0 effectively means that there is something using the CPU at all times, but nothing is being made to wait. That's just about perfect — you're not wasting hardware sitting around doing nothing, but you're also not overloading it. Values above 1.0 mean that the machine is overloaded, and processes are having to sit around waiting for their turn to run. Generally, if you see it reach 2.0 or more, the machine will be running pretty slowly and it'll be really obvious to the users.

For years, BinRock's load average was down around 0.10 — it wasn't even breaking a sweat serving all the web sites, email accounts, etc that are hosted there. But for the last year, the load has started growing steadily, and during the last few months, I'd regularly see it get as high as an astounding 30.0. Hence all the timeouts.

I'd made several previous attempts to figure out what was making it run so slow, and found and solved a few bottlenecks, but the load never got better. But finally this weekend I tracked down the cause — spam. Ever since about last July, the flow of incoming email to BinRock has grown steadily:

Since BinRock was always so lightly loaded and only hosted 20-30 email accounts, I had configured it to be relatively trusting of incoming email — if BinRock was a house, the mail server was a suspicious but not overprotective father, who carefully eyed over anyone knocking on the door asking to see his daughter, and letting them pass unless they had a particularly skeezy look to them. If the daughter didn't want to see them (the email was addressed to a nonexistent user), then the father had to usher them back out the door, and in fact, all the way back to their supposed homes.

That policy works fine when you live in a nice suburban neighborhood, but not when you live in downtown Baghdad. Sadly, the current state of email on the internet more closely resembles the latter case, and dad was getting overloaded carefully eyeing the thousands of callers every day, and wasting hours of his time trying to get all the rejected boys back to their homes, especially since, as it turns out, most of those boys with ill intent lied about where they were from. Dad constantly had a backlog of thousands of boys to deal with. Here's the number of messages sitting in the queue waiting to be processed at any given time (normally, the number should stay close to zero, as every message is handled immediately).

The boys don't have it so easy anymore. Now, any boys knocking on BinRock's door have to run a well-armed gauntlet just to make it in the front door. Dad first checks a list to see if the boy is coming from a house that is already known to be of ill repute, and if so, he doesn't even open the door. If he does open the door, and the boy asks to see Cheryl or Steve or King Ramses III (Dad's daughter is named Katie), he slams the door in the boy's face. Finally, if the boy has made it past those challenges unscathed, Dad lets the boy in and eyes him suspiciously, and if he's got an unsavory look about him, out the door he goes. Only the few remaining boys are let in to see his daughter.

And now, after a year of hectic work, Dad has time to read the paper and catch up on his gardening again.

The green area reflects the number of incoming emails per hour, and the blue line shows how many of those connections were denied. I made the first change (check a blacklist, and refuse incoming connections from blacklisted IP addresses) at about 17:00 hrs yesterday, and instantly about 80% of incoming connections were just denied outright. The next change, refusing connections that tried to deliver email to nonexistent BinRock addresses, was made today at about 16:00 hrs, and you can see that almost all of the remaining connections are now denied. The few remaining connections (about 10 out of 2000 per hour) are allowed to deliver email to BinRock, which means the spam filter only has to look at 10 messages per hour, rather than 2000. And the improvement is visible in the size of the pending message queue:

Ahh, back to zero. The load average is back under control as well, sitting steady around 0.50-0.60. I can handle that. And, more importantly, so can Dad.

I think SupraForums is really really glad it's my birthday.

I have a Lego Mindstorms kit that I've toyed with, but the inherent fragility of Legos was always a limitation. I found that if I tried to fashon an arm to pick stuff up with, I couldn't apply too much force or it'd just smash itself to pieces spectacularly. So the desire to learn to build "real" robots out of metal has stuck with me.

Finally I've started to make progress. I found some well-written, useful books on the subject, and picked up a "learning to program microcontrollers" introduction kit, which includes a microcontroller, a small circuit board, and a selection of resistors, capacitors, sensors, LEDs, etc, and a book that walks you through learning to wire up circuits, and then write programs to run on the microcontroller to interact with those circuits. I worked my way through all the lessons, and soon had a simple lightmeter working, which simply polls a photoresistor and displays a number on the LED display based on how much light it sees (crappy cell phone video). An exciting start. Well, a start, anyway.

But that can't be called a "robot" with a straight face, so my next project was to build something mobile. But I quickly realized that building a mobile platform is a lot of work and requires parts that you don't have access to at 2am on a Friday night (that's right, I was at home building robots on a Friday night), so I opted to start with something that already has wheels and motors — an R/C car. One of the lessons in the microcontroller book had explained how to control servos, so I wrote some code to let my chip control the throttle and steering on the car, then added a sonar unit and programmed it to drive forward until it finds that it's closer than 24 inches from an obstacle, then back up. It's sort of a curious-yet-skittish-puppy-bot (my friend Tony named him Herpe, so I've been calling him that. It's a good thing I don't have more than one). Here's a video. When you set him down, he'll find the nearest wall or couch and drive back and forth repeatedly at it, like a hunting dog. It's fun. For a minute or two.

Next I wanted to build something more dynamic. I found the perfect project in one of my robotics books — a small robot built from an old computer mouse, designed to run around feverishly, seeking the brightest light in the room. The best part is that a lot of the circuitry of the robot is built from the parts that came out of the mouse to begin with, and most of the rest can be scavenged from other techno-junk you've got around the house, like computer modems and motorized toys.

As a card-carrying computer nerd, I'm legally obligated to keep several old mice on hand in the closet, so one of them was sacrificed for a greater cause. It took me a few days to build that one, but this morning I got it working. The building process is documented in the photo gallery, and here's a short video of him running around in the kitchen, chasing a spot of light on the floor. I called him Feivel (aww). One interesting thing I noticed while shooting that video is that occasionally, he'd line up and run along the strip of shadow between the two sections of light on the floor. His circuitry is designed to steer him in the direction of whichever eye sees brighter light, and I guess since both sides were brighter than the line directly in front of him, he had a tendency to stay right on the line. Emergent behavior!

I learned one interesting fact while working on Feivel. The components that make up his "eyes" are actually not designed as light sensors — they're the infrared emitter LEDs from inside the mouse. That didn't make sense to me when I saw it on the circuit diagram, so I did some reading online to figure out what was up. I discovered that, just like a motor can function as a generator (and vice versa), and a speaker can function as a microphone (and vice versa), all LEDs also function as light sensors. When an LED is exposed to light, it produces a small voltage across the pins. Weird.

So now that Feivel is done, I'm trying to decide what to build next. Feivel is phototropic — he seeks out light — but he's powered by a 9V battery. There's another type of robot design called a photovore — they "eat" light (it's kind of like being a level-9 vegetarian). Not only are they designed to seek out light, they're also powered only by a solar panel, so they need to seek out light to "survive". That sounds fun. Of course, photovoric robots move much slower than battery-powered designs. Here's a YouTube video of a really simple one that I like called the Trimet. That should be a fun little project.

Aside from that, I plan to start working on something a little more capable. There's packages you can buy online that include a bare rolling chassis with four motors and wheels, to build a mobile robot on top of, but the cost is too high for me, especially while I'm just experimenting — the kit I linked costs $220. I'm sure there must be much cheaper ways to put something simple and mobile together. I'll just have to get creative.

Anyway, Thursday was a day of constructive interference of a different sort — after days filled with boredom and uneventfulness, Thursday seemed to try to pack in as much enjoyment as possible.

Cat mentioned to me last week that Maria would soon be flying down to Tennessee from Connecticut to visit her grandmother, and she suggested that I contact her to see if we could meet up. I sent Maria an email, and she said that yes, she was flying into Nashville on Thursday morning, and we arranged that I'd drive down there and we could hang out for a few hours before she drove the hour and a half to her grandmother's house. She asked me to pick somewhere to meet up, and after some online searching, I suggested Cheekwood, an art museum housed in an old mansion, surrounded by acres of botanical gardens, and she agreed it sounded like a cool place to check out.

As I got in bed on Wednesday night, Leslie called out of the blue to say that she had gotten her and me on the guest list for the VAST concert in Knoxville on Thursday evening. I explained that I was heading to Nashville in the morning, but I should be back in time to make it to the show.

So that morning I got up early and set off on the 3-hour drive to Nashville. I met up with Maria, we explored the botanical gardens scattered with creepy sculptures, sat and enjoyed the silence of the Japanese rock garden, and then tracked down a real Japanese restaurant, which I'd been craving for a while. It was fun, and I really like Maria, so I had a great time getting to spend a few hours with her exploring and conversing.

The VAST show was fun as well — you feel so cool walking up and saying, "I'm on the list," and them looking you up and waving you through. I got there just as VAST was about to go on, and since the show wasn't packed, Leslie and I were able to get right front and center. The other nice thing about the fact that there weren't tons of people there is that there was more of a social atmosphere amongst the audience — we got to know the people around us.

During one song, Jon Crosby (the band's frontman) brought out a camcorder, saying, "You guys are always putting videos of us on YouTube, so we're gonna do the same." They shot video throughout the next song, alternately filming the band and the audience. Often, though, he'd stop moving the camera around and concentrate on singing, and since Leslie and I were right up front, the camera usually ended up pointed straight at us for a minute or so while he sang the next verse. I hope they edit that video down, because otherwise there's going to be a whole lot of footage of me nodding my head and trying my hardest not to look awkward.

After the show, the band came out and hung out with those of us who were still around. They invited us all to go out to a bar with them, but I'd been up since 8am so I headed home. I'd had more than my share of fun for the day already, no need to be greedy.

As I thought about it, I realized that it makes sense that off-roading would be inherently less efficient than rolling on a surface that someone has carefully prepared for you in advance — you don't spend a lot of time above 15mph on a trail, and you're using a lot more power than an on-road vehicle would need to simply maintain 70mph down the highway. I don't know what kind of mileage jeeps and the other "full-size" offroad vehicles get while driving trails, but I'd imagine it's even worse than I get. When you take that into consideration, I guess it's surprising that I can get close to the mileage that an SUV gets on the highway, even while I'm crawling over rocks. But still, that doesn't change the fact that you're using a whole lot of gas per mile.

But I realized that that's not the right way to look at it, at least in my case. On an ATV, unlike in a car, I'm not trying to get to any specific point — it's the activity itself that I enjoy doing, so if I set out to ride for the day and don't make as much progress as I'd planned, I'm not going to extend my day until I ride every trail on my list. I'll get tired of riding after four hours or whatever, no matter how much distance I've actually covered in that time.

So it's more informative to use time, rather than distance, to compare fuel usage. I added a field to my Excel spreadsheets to convert my fuel usage numbers from miles per gallon into gallons per hour. The ATV has an hour meter in addition to the odometer, so I can do the calculation directly, but for the cars I had to estimate the number of hours driven based on an assumed average speed of 50 mph.

In this case, things look more like I'd expect. The Buick consumes 2.3 gph, the Civic uses 1.6, and the ATV uses only 0.4. It's possible that the ATV's hour meter counts the time that the ignition is on but the engine isn't running, which would make its number look a little better, but just like motorcycles, ATVs have small batteries, so you have to minimize the amount of time you've got the key in with the engine off. I think that figure is pretty accurate.

At first I was surprised by how low the ATV's hourly consumption was, but I realized that, when comparing fuel usage per hour of operation, you'd expect the usage to scale roughly linearly with respect to engine size, regardless of the distance traveled, because the engine will be operating in the same range of revs in either case. It's the transmission that takes care of converting that output into various rates of forward motion — the engine doesn't know or care whether you're going 10mph in first gear or 70mph in fifth. It will be spinning at 3000 rpm in either case, and thus using about the same amount of fuel. I'm curious to calculate the gallons-per-hour figure for a motorcycle. I'd expect that an on-road vehicle with a similarly-sized engine (or smaller) would have a similar (or better) consumption rate, and I'm curious to see if that's actually the case.

Anyway, regardless of the numbers, there's plenty of reasons why offroading is not a very ecologically friendly thing to do, but at least I'm now reasonably confident that jumping on an ATV and riding for three hours (and covering 30 miles) uses about the same amount of gas as getting on a motorcycle and riding for three hours (and covering 180 miles). And that's one relief, at least.

I only rode a mile or two into one of the easier trails, just to get a feel for how the machine handled and see if I got cold. It was amazing. The offroading itself is really fun, and even in just those two miles, I saw some great views. One thing I learned is that you have to expect to get muddy, even if you stay out of the actual mud pits. I suspected that might be the case, so I replaced my Debbie Gibson-inspired Tupperware cargo box with the watertight cooler that Bryan and Cat donated to me when they moved. I planned to carry my camera and GPS in there, so I figured it'd be better to give them a little more protection from the mud. I was disappointed that the cooler matched the ATV's color rather than clashing terribly.

The first time I stopped to enjoy the scenery and take some pictures, I discovered that my spare fuel can had apparently come loose at some point and had been dragging behind me the whole time, getting completely covered in the mud kicked up by my tires. Oops. Maybe it's a good thing I don't have kids.

I'll have to figure out how to deal with the mud once I start carrying my tripod and large-format camera bag — neither would be ruined by mud but I'd much rather keep it off of both if possible. I guess I could just wrap them both up in a garbage bag before strapping them to the ATV. Shooting large-format is slow enough anyway, so I guess it's not a problem to add one more quick step each time I want to stop and take a picture.

As I loaded the ATV back on the trailer for the ride home, I reflected on how much more I enjoy my life ever since I started actually pursuing all the things I've always wanted to do. On the drive home I felt the same satisfied elation that I remember feeling after every flying lesson. How did I go 27 years before finding reliable ways to get that feeling? I always used to shrug when people talked about the "natural high" you get from doing things you like. The concept made little sense to me. Now I realize that I guess I just didn't have any real experience with it.

I always had all these interests, and I'd read magazines and catalogs related to them, but for some reason it always felt like that's as far as I could go with it — it never occurred to me that I could get up and actually go do them. Of course, a big part of it was the financial aspect. Perhaps because of my general interest in machines and technology, it happens that most of my interests involve a significant outlay of money. I'm only now getting to the point where I can afford to fly airplanes and buy ATVs (and even so, only just). Although I grew up in a house with money, my parents were careful not to just buy us whatever we asked for, instead making us save up and earn the things we wanted. Even with my generous $20/week allowance, I guess these multi-thousand-dollar activities just felt impossibly out of reach, so I never seriously considered actually trying to get started in them.

I guess that's the basic situation that underlies both this decision to get into offroading and my decision to begin flight training. It was a sudden realization that, "Holy crap, you know that thing I've always really wanted to do but have always considered impossible? I can totally just go do that now!" And of course that's quite a heady feeling.

I took the opportunity to strap on all of my bulky large-format camera equipment and take some 4x5" Velvia slides in the environment that was practically made for them. And I had a realization. I've had the large format camera for a few years, but I've barely ever used it, mostly because it's so big and heavy that I've been pretty much limited to the kinds of places I can reach with a car, which are seldom worth photographing. I'm not trying to make undue comparisons, but I remember reading Ansel Adams talking about having the same problem. He had a platform on the roof of his car from which he did a lot of his photography — for his longer jaunts into the wilderness, he packed most of his gear on a burro.

I realized that an ATV can be my version of a burro. I've always been interested in offroading, but when I realized that an ATV would both let me enjoy crawling over rough terrain plus let me strap down all my bulky large-format camera equipment and take pictures from places that I couldn't otherwise reach, it did me in — I had to have an ATV.

I wondered if it'd be worthwhile to own one, though. The rental prices were really expensive, but if Sedona doesn't have more than the three or four half-hour trails they told us about, then I'd imagine that you'd get bored of it before long. So I did some searching to see where you can go offroading in the area around Knoxville. I was amazed to discover that I happen to have stumbled into one of the meccas of ATVing. I moved here because I wanted to be close to the mountains, and apparently that decision served me well in this respect too.

I found that in Oliver Springs, the same town where my flying club's airfield is located, there's a large, privately-owned plot of land named the Coal Creek OHV Area, totaling an astounding 72,000 acres, which is entirely devoted to offroading, camping, hiking, etc. There are about 60 different trails, over 160 miles in all, spread out around the mountain. I later discovered that it's rated the second most popular riding area on the ATV Pathfinder site.

Then I discovered that there's three more OHV parks within about 45 minutes of me, all about the same size as Coal Creek. There's the Royal Blue Wildlife Management Area, with 600 miles of trails across 53,000 acres where you can encounter elk, deer, turkeys, beavers, etc.

Also nearby is the Brimstone Recreation Area, with 300 miles of trails in 45,000 acres (Brimstone is also on the Top 10 list at ATV Pathfinder), and the Sundquist Wildlife Management Area, with 74,000 acres. In other words, there would probably be enough new places to explore to keep things interesting pretty much indefinitely.

So with that determined, I set about the arduous process of learning all about ATVs, reading about the various options available and the effect they have, etc. I visited several different ATV dealers and test-rode a variety of bikes to get a feel for how the various options (2wd vs. 4wd, chain drive vs. shaft drive, solid rear axle vs. independent rear suspension, manual transmission vs. automatic CVT, etc) actually feel when riding over rough terrain, and little by little, I started defining what I wanted.

I had originally been hoping to find a used one in the $2000-3000 range, but as I did my research, I found that the only bikes available in that price range tend to be small 250cc machines. Now, I have no problem with a small engine — I test rode a few 250cc-based ATVs and even those accelerated faster than I'd probably ever want to in an offroad situation — but the bikes are physically smaller, since most are designed for teenagers, and I found that the smaller machines feel a lot less stable when traversing hills and handling uneven terrain.

So I set my sights at the midrange quads, in the 300-400cc range, but found that these apparently aren't very popular, because I have yet to see a single 300-400cc machine available used, and the new ones are already climbing well out of the price range I was hoping to pay — I didn't see any below $5000, and the few that were that cheap were very limited in their capabilities, and were designed more for doing work around a farm rather than handling actual offroad trails.

I was starting to resign myself to the idea of taking out a 3- or 4-year loan to spend $6000 on the Polaris Sportsman 400. It had all the features I wanted, though it did look kind of like a Transformers version of Lord Voldemort.

But then an interesting option turned up on CraigsList. It was a 2002 Kawasaki Prairie 650 4x4. I hadn't been considering anything as big as a 650cc, since I'm new to the sport and didn't want to have enough power to get myself in trouble, but he only wanted $3500 for it, so I figured it was worth considering. I did some research on the bike, reading online reviews, magazine articles, and forum discussions to get a feel for what kinds of problems people were having with them 5 years down the line, etc, and the opinions sounded quite positive overall, so I gave the guy a call and went out and test rode it.

I was surprised to find that the power didn't feel overwhelming at all. It was definitely fast if you got on the throttle, but the throttle wasn't overly sensitive, so it'd be easy to stay off the power if you don't want it. I had been worried that my hand could slip going over a bump or something and jab the throttle lever, sending the bike flying. But it actually feels very controllable, and I didn't have any problem keeping the bike from doing anything I didn't want it to do. And I actually discovered that the bike has a throttle-limiting screw to let you mechanically limit how much power it'll produce, if you want to be absolutely sure that nothing will go awry. I don't think I'll need it, but it's good to know that I can stop and screw that in if I start feeling like it's being hard to control.

It's definitely a physically bigger machine than the Polaris 300 and 400cc bikes I had been looking at, but it's actually not significantly heavier. The Japanese ATV manufacturers (Yamaha, Honda, Kawasaki, etc) have a self-imposed "gentleman's agreement" to limit the weight of their ATVs to no more than 275kg (606 lbs), whereas the American manufacturers like Polaris and Arctic Cat don't worry as much about weight. So the end result is that this Prairie 650 has the wider, more stable wheelbase without having to deal with the added weight. It was missing one of the features I really wanted (independent rear suspension), but at half the price of the new bikes, I'm more than happy to give up that one feature. And the fact is, since I'm new to ATVing, I probably won't be throwing myself into the types of terrain that you'd need IRS to handle.

Another advantage of this Prairie 650 is that, since it's a big engined, "full-sized" machine, there's a lot more of a market for it, so if and when I decide to sell it, I'll have a lot easier time getting rid of it. Not to mention the fact that I won't face the huge depreciation that a new machine would have incurred. If I decide I don't like this quad, I could probably turn around and sell it next week for about what I paid for it. With a new ATV, I would have faced a much bigger loss if I decided to sell it.

So I made my decision, and I picked it up yesterday. Of course, ATVs aren't street legal, so I had to come up with some way to tow it to the trails too. Having just spent $1500 resurrecting the lovable, visually unappealing Buick, I decided to make it earn its keep and turned it into a tow vehicle. I put a tow hitch on it this morning, and bought a small 5x8' utility trailer. I'll deprive you of the tedious details of my shopping for safety gear, but suffice it to say that I've made the necessary arrangements so that I'm not going to explode my brain on rocks.

So now all that's left is to go ride. I've been getting to know the members of the Windrock ATV Club, based at the Coal Creek OHV Area, and they invited me to come along on a club ride this Saturday in Coal Creek. I won't bother bringing the big camera gear this time — I'll focus on getting comfortable with the bike and the trails for now. Also I don't want to ask 20 people to wait while I set up my tripod and carefully check focus on the ground glass with a loupe.

I'm really hoping that eventually, once Andrés is established financially, he'll get a dirt bike like he's been talking about, and we can go riding together. In the meantime, I'll probably ride with the club most of the time, since it's safer to avoid riding alone.

But with the prevalence of digital cameras and Facebook photo galleries in this day and age, and the ease with which people can make copies of pictures and videos, you can't really keep that documentation out of the public record. I suspect that in 20 years, when today's college kids have procreated, there will be a lot more teenagers stumbling across a picture of their mom in college kissing another girl while the frat boys in the background cheer and take pictures. I wonder how that will change the relationships between parents and offspring, when everyone is well aware that their parents engaged in the very same kind of decadence that they do. When they realize that people who take off their shirts and dance on tables have no difficulty transforming into conservatively-dressed moms who want you to be home by supper.

It seems that the advent of digital cameras, and the ease of documenting debauchery that they provide, could have a profound effect on the way different generations interact. It will be interesting to see how that works.

But I moved to this new house a few months ago, which meant adjusting to a new fridge, and this one has developed an interesting quirk. I've started discovering little frozen stalagmites of impressive size growing from the floor of the fridge every few weeks.

It took me a while to put two and two together, but I finally realized that it must be water dripping from the Brita Keg, running down to the back of the shelf, and somehow freezing when it drips down to the bottom of the fridge. I'm not sure why it's freezing, since the temperature isn't set drastically low and nothing else in the fridge freezes. It's kind of weird.

I don't think I'll bother trying to fix the leak — the ice sculptures are kind of beautiful. Maybe I'll stop throwing them away when I discover them. I'm curious to see how high this one will grow.

I often turn off my headlights (leaving only the parking lights) if I'm the first car in line at a stoplight, to keep from blinding the cars waiting on the other side of the intersection (and I wish other people would do the same — especially people in tall SUVs and pickup trucks). Apparently, though, the police are not so impressed with my thoughtfulness. Tonight as the light turned green I turned my headlights on and started driving, only to have the car behind me turn his blue lights on. I pulled over once we were through the intersection, and I saw five other cop cars pull to a stop all around me. I'm always impressed when the police devote those kinds of resources to stopping me. It's kind of flattering.

The officer walked up to my car and asked if I knew why he had pulled me over. I couldn't imagine what it could be, and I said so. "Your headlights were off at the red light — you only turned them on when you started driving," he replied. I had suspected it must have something to do with that, since I hadn't done anything else out of the ordinary. I explained that yes, that was on purpose; I do it out of consideration for the other drivers, but that I didn't think it was illegal to turn your lights off when you're stopped. He replied that it's a nearly sure sign that someone is driving under the influence, and asked if I'd been drinking tonight. Sigh.

Of course I said no, but he ran my license and gave me the test anyway. I got to hold my feet close together and follow his finger with my eyes. Following his finger was easy, but it took all of my concentration to keep from giggling, because he had his face right up close to mine so he could see my pupils, and the whole situation was just so silly. I did my best to hold in my laughter though, because I didn't think that bursting into giggling fits would help my case.

I considered making conversation, just to show him I wasn't mad or upset about being stopped. I thought of mentioning to him that it was pretty amusing to be suspected of DUI when I've always been so firmly opposed to drunk driving and often even refuse to move the car until everyone has their seatbelts on. But I figured that's what they all say, and he's not looking for socialization, so I just played along and tried to keep a straight face. Finally he gave me back my license and suggested I stop turning off my headlights at stoplights because "it's just going to get you pulled over every time." I thanked him.

So hey, great, one more item to put in my book of accomplishments. I guess this was the best possible way to go through this kind of thing — secure in the knowledge that I had nothing to worry about, so I could relax and take in all the details. I'm always happy to trade 10 minutes of my time for a new experience.

Since so few of my friends are pilots, I suppose I should explain that it's supposed to be runway lighting. White lights mark the sides of the runway, green is the start of it, red is the end, and blue lights delimit taxiways. I ransacked the internet trying to find a good, clear picture of real runway lights to offer in comparison, but they're surprisingly rare. I guess it's pretty hard to take a good picture at night from a bumpy light plane. Here's the best I could find (originally from this page).

We went up in the Cessna 150, the small two-seater with a tiny 100-hp engine. I was worried that it was going to feel as foreign as my experience flying the Cessna 182 in Atlanta, but (maybe because I had already had some exposure to Cessna-style push/pull controls) the operation of the airplane's controls pretty quickly faded to the background and I was able to focus on the flying itself, and so it went pretty well. I told him ahead of time that, because there were so many variables here that were different than where I had trained, I figured it might take several flights before I was ready to fly on my own, and I assured him that I wasn't in a hurry to get signed off before he thought I was ready. He agreed that that was the right attitude.

We took off from the club's private grass strip (when using Runway 15, your upwind climb is through the valley between two hills, which is exciting) and flew over to DKX, the uncontrolled airport in town. We did a full-stop landing there, took off again and flew back over to the vicinity of the club's field, where I did some steep turns and a power-off stall, and then we did two full-stop landings. He said I was a good pilot (that's always nice to hear from an unbiased source), and that he was comfortable with my flying. He asked how I felt about it, and I agreed that I felt ready, so he signed me off on that plane.

I mentioned to him how much harder I had found the C-182 to fly, and how relieved I was that I had been able to fly the 150 without too much trouble. He said that I'll probably find the club's 172 harder than the 150, because unlike the 150 and the Piper Warriors I trained on, the 172 will float forever if you come in too fast. So I expect that the checkout for
that plane won't be as quick (I plan to schedule it for early this week), but at least now I have the ability to go flying again, and for much cheaper than before.

The instructor told me about the club he belongs to, which I hadn't even heard about while doing my research. They're based on the same grass strip, and they're a little more expensive than the Flying 64th, but they've got some interesting planes. They've got a C-172 and a C-150, just like my club, although their C-172 has a GPS and their C-150 is an Aerobat (a relatively rare reinforced model that is rated for aerobatic flight). But they also have a recently fully restored early 1940s Aeronca Champion and a GPS-equipped Piper Cherokee, very similar to the plane I trained on. The Cherokee would be nice to be able to fly just because of the fact that I have fond memories from my training, but the plane that really interests me is that Champ. I've always loved that family of planes (the Citabria, Decathlon, Champ, etc). This club's Champ is fully mechanical and has no electrical system — it has to be hand-propped. That sounds like a fun plane to fly.

So now I'm wondering if I want to switch clubs. The problem is that the other club is more expensive not only in monthly dues but also in their rental rates. I'd hate to give up my current club's cheap rates, but it'd be really nice to get access to that Champ and to planes with GPSes. I guess I need to find out more about the other club (most importantly, whether or not they have a minimum hourly rental for cross-country flights — that'd be a deal-breaker) and see what I think.

I guess I could always be a member of both clubs. It would mean paying twice as much in monthly dues, but then I'd have the option of flying the
Champ and the GPS-equipped planes while still being able to pay a lower rate with no daily minimum for my current club's planes. Ah, decisions.

The instructor said he offers tailwheel endorsement training in his club's Champ, though I'm not sure if he meant that I'd need to join first. If not, then I think it'd be a good idea to do that before joining the club. I might even find that, once I've gotten those 10 or so hours in the plane, I'll decide that it's not something I'd want to fly often enough to justify the membership dues. Either way, it Seems like a good "try before you buy" opportunity, and I've been wanting to do tailwheel training anyway.