I realized that, now that I moved out of my apartment and into a proper house, I can get more creative with my Christmas lights this year. But as I looked at other houses in the neighborhood for ideas, I realized that all of the common things you tend to see, like lighted snowmen in the front yard, light "icicles" hanging from the roof, etc., don't really appeal to me at all. Then today I realized that I can take my lighting inspiration from another part of my life.

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).

And I've been fluttering all over the damn place.

Since my lease on my apartment in New Orleans was almost up and I planned to move rather than renew it, last month I set off on an 1800-mile roadtrip to check out the various places I was considering moving to. I decided on Knoxville, TN, for several reasons. I've really been wanting to live somewhere mountainous, and Knoxville is certainly satisfying in that respect. Andrés and Amy had just moved there for grad school and plan to be there for at least two years. Geographically it's within a few hours' drive of lots of the places where I have friends — Atlanta, Clemson, Raleigh. There is a healthy aviation scene in Knoxville — there are at least three good flying clubs with great rates, and there's a large commercial airport and a smaller regional airport and lots of private grass strips all over. It's a small city, so I have access to all the stores and resources I want, without having to deal with city blocks and traffic and nowhere to park.

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With my impending move, I've been trying to figure out how I'm going to move both of my cars. I plan to rent a U-Haul truck to move my stuff, so I can tow a car behind it, but getting the second car there would be trickier — I'd either have to drive the truck with one car in tow, then fly back to Covington to drive the other one, or I'd need to pay a friend to drive my other car alongside the U-Haul and then fly them back home or something. Neither option is very appealing.

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On Saturday I had a bit of a 'Dinner And Wine And Board Games' evening with Bryan and Cat, along with Danielle, the pilot from New Orleans I met a few weeks ago. We had a great time living the yuppie lifestyle for an evening. I made lasagna and Cat made pineapple upside-down cake and we played Apples 2 Apples and Cranium and Eat Poop You Cat.

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Today the weather between here and Gulfport, MS was finally clear enough for me to go on my first solo cross-country flight, from Hammond to Gulfport and back, a round-trip distance of 142 nautical miles. And look at that! I managed to stay alive. That was my primary objective for the day, and I'm glad I managed to achieve it.

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My aviation headset arrived today, just as I was about to head to Hammond for a solo flight. This headset, unlike the basic units the FBO provides with their planes, has active noise cancellation, which is a feature I've never had before in a set of headphones. I tried it out in my apartmente before leaving, and it's incredible. A flick of the button, and my annoyingly loud air conditioning unit just disappears. Needless to say, it works great for a droning airplane engine as well (yet retains enough of the sound for you to clearly hear what the engine is doing). I could actually hear the wind whooshing past the plane.

This headset also has an input for a cell phone or MP3 player (automatically muted when anyone talks on the radio, of course). I don't know if there's anything more wonderful than lifting off the ground with Sigur Rós playing gently in the background as the sun starts to set.

Today we flew back out to Baton Rouge to give me some more practice interacting with ATC during the day, when things are more busy. Mike told me to act like he wasn't there — a few times when I forgot what ATC had told me, I asked him what they had said, and he shrugged and made me deal with it as if I was alone in the plane. Which meant I had to get back on the radio and ask ATC to tell me again because I'd forgotten it, in front of everyone (metaphorically speaking). Hehe, that's pretty good incentive to help remember to write it down next time.

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I had mentioned to Mike that I'd like to get some more practice handling emergency procedures, so we devoted today's lesson primarily to that. The flight school's mechanic has a small private grass runway on his land that the school has permission to use for soft-field and short-field landing practice, so Mike had me fly out in that general direction, and then when we got close, he cut my engine back to idle at 2500' and had me go through the engine out checklist and set up for an emergency landing. Man, things happen a lot faster when your engine is "off."

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Last week I discovered a pretty sizeable aviation messageboard called Pilots Of America, and made a few posts introducing myself and contributing to conversations. They're a very knowledgeable and friendly bunch of people.

Last night I got a message from a girl on the board named Danielle who lives in New Orleans and just got her private pilot's license a few months ago. She invited me onto this web-based chat hosted by the messageboard, and it turned out there was another pilot there, Steve, who is also in the general area — about 100 miles north of here (which isn't all that much in an airplane).

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Wow, flying at night is actually quite pleasant. It feels a lot more relaxed and peaceful than flying during the day. I think a big factor that contributes towards that is the fact that the wind is a lot calmer at night, but it also had to do with the fact that you can't see most of the world below you, so it feels like flying over nothingness. Kind of like at the end of the Langoliers, except you don't have to fly through a time warp while asleep to get back home.

Landing wasn't too hard either. You do have less visual reference with which to judge your altitude, so you have to be careful not to flare too high from the runway, but really I never felt uncomfortable or out of control while landing. The runway lighting actually makes the dimensions of the runway easier to see than during the day.

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Today Mike and I flew down over the lake to the New Orleans airport, MSY (or Moisant Field, as apparently every other pilot knows it — apparently the name was changed in 2001 and most people still use the old one), to give me a taste of flying into a Class B airport (the busiest classification). I had the option of flying to Baton Rouge instead, but I wanted to try flying into an airport that I had actually arrived at as a commercial passenger. It went surprisingly well. And when I checked my logbook later, it turned out this was my 50th landing. Hey, look at that.

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Today I set off with Mike on my first cross-country flight. We flew from Hammond to Gulfport, Mississippi, and then back again. Of course, it didn't start there. There's actually a lot more involved in planning a flight than I would have thought.

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Woo, I soloed today. When the lesson began, I did a few touch-and-gos with Mike, my instructor, just like we'd been doing for the last few lessons. When I landed the third time, Mike told me to pull off the runway and let him out. Hehehe. He signed the section of my logbook that says I'm endorsed to fly solo, grabbed a handheld radio to keep in contact with me, and off I went. I didn't expect it to happen so soon — I only had 9.1 hours of flight experience at that point, and I'd always heard that your first solo usually happens around 12-15 hours. But, surprisingly, when I was off on my own, I felt very ready and in control, and didn't feel frightened or anything.

Heh, and the fates didn't wait long to throw a little test in my way.

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As anyone who knows me is well aware, it has long been my dream to fly. I've loved airplanes since I was a little kid. I first started to suspect I might need glasses in fifth grade when I realized that I could no longer focus clearly on the airplanes that I'd gaze at when they passed overhead.

When I was 15, my father took me to the small airport in San Juan to have a demo flight lesson. That cemented it — I was determined to get my pilot's license. I despaired over the several-thousand-dollar cost, but I was willing to set aside my puny allowance each week to do it.

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I picked up the Evo from the body shop a week after dropping it off. They did a good job. It's so nice to have the car whole again.

Amy graduated last week, so on Monday night she and Andrés planned to fly down to PR for a two-week visit before going up to Boston to find a place to live. However, their flight out of Chicago was cancelled due to bad weather, and the next flight didn't leave until the next morning, so they had to spend the night there. And apparently, the airline won't give you a hotel room for the night if the flight was cancelled due to weather, so they had to find and pay for one themselves. Fair or unfair? (All) Unfair!

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For the last month or so I've had this insidious and steadily increasing desire to get back into flying, and finally get my pilot's license like I originally planned to do when I was 16 (because of the relative priority I gave to the idea, I remember musing that it was very likely that I'd find myself having a pilot's license but no driver's license — needing my parents to drive me to the airfield when I wanted to go up, hehe). Even the harrowing experience of landing in a light jet in tropical storm-force winds hasn't done much to allay my enthusiasm. As a recreational pilot, I can simply choose not to fly if the weather looks like it could turn ugly.

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