Mayday

Yikes... what a couple of weeks. A brief update:

• My grandmother is now in assisted living... and hates it, calls it the worst decision she's ever made, and all-but-screams her family talked her into it against her will. She is used to a two-story duplex; she's now in a studio apartment. I can understand her feelings, really... but she needed to move to a place that had help readily available, and DIDN'T have rickety stairs.

Sadly, the situation has also devolved into a classic Family vs. Family power play... with my aunt's husband attempting to assert control over the situation, most recently by flatly turning down a cash offer my grandmother had for her 1989 Cavalier, telling the interested buyer he was her "executor." Sigh.

• I'm still recovering from Sun 'N Fun. The single coolest part of the show came the Sunday morning before I returned home... when I was able to snag a demo flight of a Cirrus SR22 Generation 3 aircraft. Beautiful plane... beautiful flying characteristics... an absolute joy to fly. There's something about a 310-hp motor (over three times the giddyup of the SportStar's Rotax) powering a four-seat, leather-lined, glass-cockpit, parachute-equipped, composite-bodied uberplane. I loved it. I didn't want to let it go. I almost threw the keys into the Florida marshland after the 45-minute flight, loudly proclaiming "If I can't have it, no one can!!!!"

Now I just need to come up with $555,000 to buy it, and get a year's training. I want to be rich. I hear it's awesome.

• Speaking of the SportStar... I was supposed to go on my dual-and-solo-cross countries last weekend, the first time I was to be at the controls of 6EV since the week before Sun 'N Fun. Alas, what goes up, must come down... sometimes scrapping a wing in the process. Someone bent my plane last week, apparently over-compensating on a crosswind landing. I saw the damage Friday... scraped wingtip, bent aileron, and a few wrinkles in the wing skin. I'm waiting to hear on how bad the damage is... and how that may affect my plans to wrap up the license before I move back to ABQ.

• In better news, the Evektor folks tell me a flight school based at Double Eagle II now has a SportStar. Ironically enough, Bode bought the plane after their original high-wing LSA got bent in a hard landing. Weird.

• With the dawn of the new month, I need to start getting serious about moving -- pretty much the only time I'll have to do it will be early July, before Arlington and Oshkosh. I have yet to sign for an apartment... looking at two, one of which sounds REALLY nice. One bedroom loft, on ABQ's Westside, just up the road from a complex I lived in back in 1999-2000. It's cheap, too... barely more than what I'm spending here now.

• Last Friday, I went out with Shoe, Lee, and another former coworker Dennis to Lower Greenville... the first time I'd been back there in awhile. Did the Crow thing, then had dinner at a new jazz/seafood place that opened where another old haunt, Nero's, used to be. Not bad -- tried alligator cheesecake for the first time -- but horribly pricey: $17 for Fried Shrimp. (If you are gonna spend $17 for shrimp, though, I have to admit this place was a good joint to do it.)

Earlier in the evening, as I listened to Dave and Lee talking about logistics and trucking... my gaze wandered to the bar at The Old Crow. I probably stared at it for a full minute, at least.

"This place has so many memories," I later told Lee. And it does... so does Dallas. Hard to believe it's only been three years... and I admit, there are times I'm having a rough time leaving it behind.