John Goes Flying

After putting the possum incident behind us and some supper in our bellies (no, no, no – don’t even think it!) we decided it was a nice evening to check out my new remote control electric motor propeller driven jet fighter plane that Becky got me for my birthday or maybe it was Father’s Day. We loaded up everything into the Saturn and headed over to the elementary school not too far away. Flying conditions were perfect; almost no wind, not too hot; a really near perfect late summer evening in Kansas.

Unfortunately, the plane seemed a little under powered. The first flight pretty much went right into the ground. The second flight was better, but still mostly consisted of a nose dive. The next flight was promising. The next one was really cool, as it actually gained a little height and levelled out and smacked right into a road sign about 200 feet away. Amazing odds, that!

A couple more flights and it was getting to be dusk. We launched one last flight and watched in anticipation as it circled around the parking lot heading straight for a Ford pickup that was mosying along. It missed. We chased after it and, amazingly, it disappeared. We searched until dark and gave up. This morning we went back over to search some more, before making a trip to K.C. to see Louise who was up here for her son’s funeral, which is another story. We searched the area again, with no luck. I was ready to give up when Becky hollered from the other side of the parking lot. Where she found it was nearly back where I’d launched it from. It had amazingly gathered some height after passing on the other side of the truck, and after we’d lost sight of it, and flew a semi-circle back around nearly to where I’d launched from. Or, maybe a dog (or possum!) found it during the night and carried it over there.

I uploaded a few pics at Flickr that you can get to by clicking this thumbnail. While you’re there, you can check out the Sherri’s Family set of pictures I took later during the visit with Louise, plus some that Becky took at Sherri’s a week ago.

Furry Beast

I was, as usual, sitting on my recliner with the laptop when Becky went out to toss a trash bag in a trash can. I had been playing around with Vim, a text editor for those programmer types who love Vi and Emacs and Pine, that sort of thing. You can write all sorts of plug-ins and scripts and things to make it uber-powerful. I was trying to figure out how to make it run Tidy (HTML checker) and capture the output, when Becky came back in breathing hard. “There’s a furry beast in the trash can!” she exclaimed. “With a pointy nose! And it’s alive!”

“Probably a ‘possum,” I opined, and went out to have a look. Sure enough, a small ‘possum, only ’bout a foot long, including tail, looked up at me, weakly. I snapped a couple pictures and went inside to call humane society. Should I just dump it out? Or should I take it to the wilderness somewhere? They recommended just dumping it out.

So out I went and tipped the trash can on its side. The little feller wasn’t too excited about coming out. I figured he/she was taking it easy, being a nocturnal creature and it was noon under a hot Kansas sun. So I went in and got it some water. It wasn’t too excited about that either. But it managed to drag itself out, and I noticed it was having a hard time just trying to stand up.

About this time it occurred to me it was going to die and, sure enough, a couple minutes later it did.

I reckon it must’ve climbed the chain link fence sometime and fell in, or else some unknown slob put it there. Might have been there a couple days; I think today was the first day we took any trash out since Thursday when the trash truck came by.

Later, I lost my remote control airplane.

Geezer Spends $40 – Update

That darn CPU fan was downright intolerable, especially after four nights of silence while the computer wasn’t running at all. So, I took out the CPU, took off the fan, went to the friendly local computer store and bought one for $10 to replace it. Nothing special about it; don’t know why that tech kid thought it would be a problem. So now it sounds good as new. I even got carried away and threw in a little more memory.