It's Back. Maybe

Just when life starts to return to normal...

Last week's CT revealed two small growths: one on a lymph node in my chest, and another on my left lung. The lung could be anything -- TC doesn't spread that way, and I don't smoke -- but the small (1.8 mm) shadow on my lymph node is of concern. I found out Monday; I am still awaiting word if it will need to be biopsied. It probably will... and while people can develop growths like this for a multitude of reasons, many of which are completely benign... my past history points to it being cancer.

Worst case scenario: it's chemo time. Which means this year will end with me losing my hair... ALL my hair... and shedding some major weight. As you can tell, I'm choosing to focus on the positive. Best case is the biopsy reveals it to be nothing, after which point my normal observation regiment resumes, with a wary eye on the lung growth.

In an ironic twist, I was THIS close Saturday to buying a new Mazda 6. The numbers weren't where I had wanted them, so I walked away. Then came Monday... and with the news of a possible recurrence of cancer, comes a cheery call from the dealership saying "okay, you win... come in and sign the papers."

I have changed my mind at least eight times on whether to go for it, despite everything. I'm currently in the "don't" phase... but when this is all behind me, that's the first place I'm going.

It had better be soon.

Retrospecticus

Wow... I had to be reminded by my good friend Monk that it's been two years (and now five days) since we arrived in the land of the Big D. As usual, Monk expressed his concern with the appropriate measure of discourse -- "DUDE, What Is Your Problem???"  With friends like these...

Thing is, I actually have been busy... recovering from Oshkosh (not the same experience as it was last year... but still very cool) and preparing to head out to Albuquerque to spend a couple of weeks with the folks... and at least a few days off from ANN. It will be my first vacation this year that won't involve surgery, and I intend to enjoy it.

I also just finished reading Jimmy Buffett's "A Pirate Looks At Fifty" -- I'm becoming quite the Parrothead lately, as I discover he's a surprisingly good writer of both books and songs -- where he starts by summing up his life in 400 words... and then proceeds to spend 300 pages expounding on those 400 words. Well, as I don't have the time to write a book (as it's taken me 10 years to write the one I'm working on now) I think I'll follow his example and sum up the last two years as best I can, as succinctly as I can.

Arrived in Dallas. Got lost on way into town. Banged on steering wheel of U-Haul in frustration. Monk will never let me live this down. Found apartment. Unloaded truck in half hour. Pissed off other movers. Lost wallet. Followed Quinn and Monk to their new house. Discovered wallet lost. Drove back across town. Found wallet on floor of apartment. Truck was unloaded by time I returned to M&Q's place. Started old job in new city. Cramped office. Same vibe. Goodbye, Focus -- hello Grand Am. Moved to new office. Crappy cubicles, no privacy. Still able to check out Internet often. Restarted flying lessons. Stopped speaking to a friend. Solo again. Wrap up shooting on skating vid with Monk. Friend Jen visits from ABQ. Parents come down for Thanksgiving, cook real meal for the first time. Parents watch as I biff a landing. It ends well. Christmas in ABQ. Discover upon return that Dallas is already feeling like "home." Non-speaking friend apologizes. Life goes on. Sprain right wrist playing hacky-sack at work. Go out for St. Patrick's Day anyway. Can barely drive manual-transmission-car home. Wrist heals. Friend stops speaking to me again. Head to ABQ for vacation, have interesting experience in Las Cruces. Arrive back in Dallas. Cop a ride on the company Piaggio Avanti (above). Way cool. Send in resume to Aero-News for stringer job. Wait patiently for response. Give up on hearing back. Plan summer trip to Albuquerque. I hear from Aero-News! Plans change, heading to OSH instead. Burn out from the customer service gig at AG. Switch to traffic. Have a blast in Wisconsin. ANN offers me a part-time job. Life changes forever. Apologize to non-speaking friend when I return. Other friends promoted. Start weekend editor job. Plan my escape from AG. Get a handle on traffic job. Friend stops speaking to me again. Second verse, same as first. Apologize again, resumes speaking to me two days later. It won't last. Finally get firm date on F/T job with ANN. Put in notice at old job six weeks early. Boss is not surprised, wishes me well. Turn 30. Start feeling old. Leave AG on great terms October 29. Friend makes herself absent when I say goodbyes. And so it goes. Old boss drives me to airport to start new job. All my life's a circle. AOPA, NBAA, back to Dallas. Find I missed it. Lose my grandpa. Discover something "weird" with my body December 6. Ignore it. Head to Omaha for funeral, then ABQ for Christmas. Have to return home hurriedly due to computer problems. Head back out in January. "Weird" thing gets diagnosed. TC. Mom rushes to Dallas, has to fill a gas tank by herself for first time in 25 years. Does so for her little boy. Have surgery. Single scariest experience of my life. Good news -- cancer seems limited to what was removed, on observation for next three years. "No lasting effects." Phew. Still scared. Start shooting second skating vid with Monk. Put on brave face at Sun 'n Fun in April, find still tired. Recovery takes longer than expected. Folks come down for Easter. Finally start feeling "normal" in May. Hire weekend editor, lose weekend editor, hire weekend editor, lose weekend editor. Pay off final residual debt from Fresno. Decide to stay in Dallas for another year. Apartment feels like "home," doctors are here. Others find Dallas to be "home", too. One even buys a new house. Never thought I'd see that. Miss friend. Life seems about right for most people in my life.

Relieved.

Here's to another year

Life's Been Good To Me (So Far)

I should be working right now. I have literally 7,000 words to write in readying sponsor "thank you" messages to run starting Sunday night, thanking them for ponying up the bucks it takes to send 15 people -- myself included -- up to Oshkosh for the week. That, in addition to posting the site... and posting ahead, so nothing is missed while myself and others are on airplanes these next few days... and assorted other OSH-related projects I've been assigned. It's been a fun week... and I have to run to the airport in three hours.

Again, I should be doing it all as I sit here, writing this instead... but here's why I'm not.

I just got back from having lunch with a good friend of mine, Sebastian. I first met him in the summer of 2002, while I was working at DMC. As a lot of you know, that job is pretty much responsible for introducing me to flying... as that August, the company sent me up to Farmington, NM to cover a ground route. I rode in one of DMC's clapped-out Cessna 310s to get there and back -- N591DM. Sebastian was the pilot.

It was Sebastian who introduced me to flying... who first let me take the controls of an airplane (and who then proceeded to show me what a C310 could do -- "you don't have to be so ginger on the controls... see?" he asked, before kicking the plane into a 50 degree bank). I didn't realize how hooked I was, until later, after I'd been back on the ground for awhile... and realized that boy, do I want to be able to do all that myself.

That flight was the proverbial butterfly in China, that kicks up a hurricane in Tampa. A friend of Sebastian's, John, had just gotten his instructor's rating... and was looking for students. John was my first flight instructor, I was his first student, and his training has stuck with me to this day... and will be there for the days to come. He took me through my first solo flight... and would have led me to my checkride, had we both not moved from ABQ a short time after -- him and his wife to Florida, and me, of course, to Dallas.

My flights with John in N9566H, N12341, and... later.... N62507 reinforced my initial interest in flight. Yeah, I could learn to fly a plane... it really isn't that hard... and it didn't really faze me to do it. I was (and am still) easily spooked in the air -- turbulence is an entirely new experience in a small plane, versus an airliner -- but I know enough to realize it isn't a serious threat to my safety. And I've learned when to stay on the ground, when my gut tells me not to takeoff. Of course, that lesson was learned after I had already taken off... but John's training allowed me to salvage the experience, and do so safely.

More important than all of that, though, is that John also showed me how much fun flying... and all things airplanes, really... can be. John never failed to let me know how much fun HE was having on our flights, as well, even as he was doing less and less of the flying as my training progressed. His smile was as big as mine on the morning I first soloed... July 24, 2004. Two years ago, this coming Monday.

And wow... what a trip these past two years have been. My old job relocated me from Albuquerque... and actually set me up pretty well to start another phase in life in Dallas. Working at AG indirectly contributed to my continued pursuit of flight... as well as my job now, with ANN. It's been a weird, wonderful, scary trip... all of it.

"This has been a weird year," I told Sebastian over pancakes at IHOP this morning. "It started out bad, finding out I had cancer. And yet here I am now, seven months later... talking about planes with you (Sebastian is now a First Officer for America West, flying right seat on 737-300s as a reserve pilot. He and his wife also became parents for the first time last month -- so he's living something close to his ideal life, too) lamenting I have to catch a commercial ride in six hours to go to Oshkosh. I feel fine, things are going well... and I'm loving every minute of it."

I then smiled, as I took quick stock on my life today... and I realized, really, that I've got it pretty damn good. A dream job. Bills paid. A comfortable, contented existence, that is just interesting enough to keep me on my toes. Not a whole lot of drama.

"Funny thing," I told Sebastian. "These last few years, I wouldn't want to change a thing. Even cancer. If that's the price to be paid for all this... then OK. Even if I get sick again... which I shouldn't... but if I do, then... well, not OK, but I know I've still be pretty lucky."

And I really mean that. It's a feeling that's been building in me for awhile now, that I finally put into words this morning at breakfast. God, Grandpa Darmody, Tina, Mandy... whoever is up there listening to this... I think I get it now.

And while I can't begin to define what "it" is... yeah. "It's" there. So... thank you, God, Fate, and everybody. I'm doing OK... for possibly the first time ever in my life

The Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful

Well, the last entry was done at an airport, and so it shall be with this one. As I type this, I'm heading into my fourth hour at SeaTac, with another hour and a half or so to go. Fortunately, I've had plenty to do... post the site for Monday, grab a light lunch (I've lost five pounds on this trip!!) and do some planespotting. I've deliberately resisted taking the book I've been reading -- "A Salty Piece of Land", by Jimmy Buffett -- so I can save it for the plane ride home.

After a cloudy and rainy start (which I loved, but sadly dragged the show down) the Arlington air show lived up to its billing by the weekend. On Friday the clouds lifted, the skies turned from blue to gray and, low and behold, the sun came out (I think my order of events there is slightly off, scientifically.) Pilots and crowds alike responded, too... with the pattern full of aircraft all day, and the empty spaces along the field disappearing rapidly under a sea of RVs, Cessnas, Seabees, Pipers... there were a LOT of planes there.

Arlington is no Oshkosh... which was perfect in this case. As we were heading home Saturday, Jim turned and asked me "so, do you now know why we (meaning ANN staffers) love this show so much?"

"Because it's where you can recharge your batteries and reconnect with why we love to fly, before Oshkosh," I replied.

"Bingo."


No news is made at Arlington. No new planes were introduced while we were there, no really cool new products were unveiled. Instead, I got to talk to a lot of pilots, most of them from the Pacific Northwest (hard to believe) and immerse myself in airplanes. I got to fly a plane, a new Zodiac CH601light sport plane... which doesn't look like much on the ground, but is an amazingly stable aircraft in the air (much more so than the StingSport I flew at Lakeland in April) that's also a joy to toss around with abandon -- which meant I also got to take in the Puget Sound area from 1000 feet AGL. It was religious.

I figured coming up here that I'd fall in love with northwestern Washington, and I was right. Mountains + trees + ocean = everything Rob likes in a landscape. Yeah, the rain would grow tiring after a while (so does sunlight in ABQ, for that matter.) And traffic was truly awful -- worse than Dallas, despite having fewer cars overall on the road. It's also a million miles from everyone I care about.

But maybe later... yeah, I can see eventually settling down here, or down south around Portland (another city I love.) I love it.

But it helps when the weather is nice.

Terminal Overload

Well, here I sit inside DFW's marvelous new Terminal D, the international terminal, for a flight to... Seattle. Washington state has apparently seceded from the union while we weren't looking. Smart move, I think.

Even after the protestations of a full 1/4 of my regular readers -- Monk -- I have still been unable to post anything here for awhile. Things have been VERY hectic in the last few weeks, as ANN gears up for our coverage of the Arlington Fly-In (where I'm heading now) and, later this month, Oshkosh. I have seven distinct projects in my "to-do" pile right now, and that's in addition to posting the site, oh, pretty much EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN DAY. More on that in a minute.

I must begin the tales of my current exploits, though, with the story of how I somehow managed to order two computers from Dell. As is the case with a lot of situations like this -- and most nuclear families -- only one of them was planned. As the old Dimension 2200 was starting to slow down just a little with the added workload it's had to perform these past seven months (not bad at all for a computer I ordered from work, back in ABQ, with no prior knowledge of How These Things Worked) I decided to splurge on a new E510 with megamemory and an updated graphics card.

This had nothing at all to do with wanting an uprated machine for Flight Simulator... nothing at all. It's all for work, really... as far as the IRS knows.

ANYWAY, after building several machines online, I finally ordered my new $1600 computer. It arrived promptly, and set up was a breeze. All was well... until I decided to order new ink cartridges for my (old) printer, which I'd forgotten to do.

Somehow... and even Dell doesn't know how this happened... one of the machines I "built" -- and then erased -- got put onto the printer cartridge order. It wasn't there when I clicked "send order," I swear.

Of course, all this happened on a Saturday -- when customer service, such as it is, couldn't access the order or do a damn thing about it... so first thing Monday morning, there it was in my email... "We'll debit your account for $17XX.XX NOW and send your NEW Dell Computer -- you lucky guy! -- in 3-5 days. We're already building it, even!!"

Or something like that. The exact specifics (redundant, I know) elude me, as I was back on the phone to India to rip some poor haj a new one.

Finally, after about an hour of linguistic loop-the-loops, the order was cancelled... but not before sapping my bank account AGAIN. Fortunately... and search me how this happened... the balked transaction did not mess anything up financially for me. No checks at all cleared during the 48 hours it took for Dell to give me my money back. Good news.

Other news... I mentioned earlier that I'm pretty much posting every single day for ANN again. That's because our most recent Weekend Editor sacrifice -- er, new hire -- managed to talk himself right out of a job within two weeks, by attempting to set policy before his time. I understood and supported the decision... while fighting back tears. I'm also pretty sure my hair is even grayer now than it was before.

So... does anyone reading this want a part-time job? My boss isn't THAT bad, I swear... just ignore the whole "tried to base jump from the WTC and, oh yeah, pretended to be a doctor in the 70s" thing.

Wow... typing this only took about 15 minutes. I still have another hour-and-a-half to go before my flight... I swear I'll post again sooner than last time... like, say, 14 days from now instead of the 20 last time.

Don't hurt me, Monk!

Weekend Musings

Hello from a cloudy and surprisingly rainy Dallas. After 38 straight days of sunshine, we actually got a pretty nice storm last night (notice, once again the rain came at night.)  Booming thunder... driving rain... and all at 3:30 in the morning. Absolutely perfect... still nothing like waking up to the sounds of a storm. I slept content the rest of the night.

Not much on the agenda for this weekend. Today's the day we try out the new weekend editor. He should do well... great writer. That also means I mostly have the weekend off, although I'll still be on Sunday. Due to the new guy's schedule -- he can't work Sundays -- we're going to try something new, that should benefit everyone: My sked will be Sunday-Thursday, same as Pete's, which means he and I can hash out the podcast script together (I crib a lot of site content from this script). This also means the 20+ stories I do per day will post sooner on the site... with about 15 for the next day, and room for 5 or so in Real-Time. My mornings will then be more open... with the majority of my workload in the afternoon. I can live with that.

More importantly... I will now have two REAL days off... albeit Friday and Saturday (which has its advantages... Friday evenings are now free of job obligations). So, a victory.

Spent the morning paying bills. As always, it feels good to write PAID on bills and stuff them in the Tax drawer... I guess that comes from the post-Fresno days when I stuffed bills into a drawer WITHOUT paying them. I also celebrated the complete payoff of one of the January medical bills by buying a Dell DJ Ditty MP3 player... I figure it will come in handy on the upcoming airline flights next month -- SEA for Arlington July 5-9, and OSH July 24-30. (At least these flights aren't on Northwest...) I'm listening to Billy Joel's "12 Gardens" concert album as I write this.

Next up on the agenda... didn't I say three paragraphs ago there WASN'T an agenda this weekend? -- is housecleaning. With the warm, dry (for Texas) weather has come the closest thing to a bug infestation I've ever seen here. I killed my first cockroach this week -- a Texas-sized one, ugh -- the first one I'd ever seen here in almost two years. As this apartment is by no means a dump, I chalk it up as a (hopefully) rare, weather-related event. Lots of what look like potato bugs have found their crawly ways inside, too.

Tomorrow morning brings another filming mission with Monk, this one in Fort Worth. We haven't filmed in two weeks... and hopefully, we'll get it off without being rained out. Now that I think about it, we've shot a lot of footage under cloudy skies... which looks pretty good, as far as cinematography, but I'm hoping we can get some more "sunny" footage in, too, before the project is done. We're talking about heading to Austin to film, when Monk's wife goes down there for her massage therapy exam in September... that'll probably be the wrap to the project.

Let's see, what else... still fiddling with the digital camera, as you can see by the pics of the model plane I shot this morning. I'll probably head to Addison this afternoon (if I'm feeling adventurous, I may bike there) to try and catch the B-17G "Liberty Belle" that flew into Cavanaugh this week. It's been VERY cool, hearing and seeing a B-17 fly over the apartment... and while I'll see several of them next month at Oshkosh, it's especially cool having one so close, outside the airshow environment.

Not much else to write about... unless you want to hear about taking the GA to get its oil changed this week. So I'll wrap up for now.

East By Northwest

Phew. Nothin' like being on four airline flights in less than 48 hours to get your hackles -- and, evidently, your blood pressure -- up.

This weekend was an enlightening one. The ANN senior staff -- read, pretty much ALL ANN staff -- got together in Charlotte, NC for a powwow before Oshkosh. We have A LOT of neat stuff planned for the air show (which will also mark one year since I cast my lot with this crazy band of yokels... and I say that with affection) including expanded Aero-cast (podcast) segments. We've also tripled the number of staffers for this year... which means I will be doing less "on the field" duties, and more "in the office" editing and posting. I understand why the decision was made... but it will also suck that I'll mostly be in the office.

The good news is, my individual workload will be more clearly defined... and we've also built in time off for everyone to just go out and enjoy the show. THAT is a good thing... it will give me a chance to enjoy the Biggest Airshow On Earth, without necessarily Having To Write About It. (Although I probably still will.)

While the meetings went well -- and, from what I could see, Charlotte seems to be a nice town, with A LOT of trees -- the trip out there and back, well, sucked wind. I don't inherently dislike airline travel... but after writing about the travails of several major carriers these past several months, including bankrupt carriers like Delta and Northwest, I admit (here) some prejudice against operations that, in all honesty, have already proven to be incompetently managed and ill-suited to the needs of travelers. Which means I carry a chip on my shoulder in regards to both of those carriers... especially Northwest.


If only there had been enough room for said chip on the flights out to Charlotte Friday night... but there was little room for ANYTHING on the CRJ-200s Northwest sees fit to employ on those routes. These aircraft, to be blunt, are total shitcans: 50 passenger max, in a 2+2 seating configuration that gives passengers NO elbow room, and little legroom.

Oh, and to drive home the point that these 30-year-old Canadian planes are NOT designed with ergonomic considerations in mind, there's a large heating duct that runs along the lower cabin walls on both sides. Which means if you're stuck at a window seat, you have to bend your outer leg inward in order to rest that foot on the floor. Which means you can spend an entire flight sitting crosslegged, with little room to adjust.

I'd blame this on the fact the CRJs are regional jets... were it not for the fact that Brazil's Embraer sells RJs, too, that offer the same pax-carrying capabilities and equal (or better) efficiency for carriers -- while also offering something approaching comfort. Wisely, Embraer decided to forgo cabin width for length, which means a 1+2 seating configuration that offers just enough extra room to make the flights livable. Case in point, I flew an American Eagle E-145 last year, nonstop, to Milwaukee for Oshkosh. Three-and-a-half hours, on the right window seat (which meant I had someone sitting right next to me) with nary a cramp at the end of the flight. In comparison, by the time I landed in Memphis after 55 minutes Friday, my right leg wasn't speaking to me... and I STILL had one more miserable CRJ flight to go.

Things were slightly better for the flight out of Charlotte -- I was on one of Northwest's ancient DC-9s. Northwest operates the largest fleet of these Forest Lawn-aged airplanes around -- 148 of them, at last count, the newest of which was built while Reagan was still president and coherent. Age is not necessarily a bad thing with airframes, so long as they are maintained (the window I was seated next too had "6/2005" etched on it, so the plane had been in for heavy-line maintenance fairly recently)... but efficiency is, and these ancient "Mad Dogs" (named for McDonnell-Douglas, the company formed after McDonnell bought out Douglas Aircraft, original maker of the DC-9, in the early 80s) use equally ancient, loud, smoky, fuel-guzzling engines. Northwest can barely afford to fuel its own planes... but it can't afford to buy newer planes, either (the DC-10 trijets the carrier still flies transatlantic are even older than the DC-9s)

On the positive side, the DC-9 was A LOT more comfortable than the CRJs, and the flight to Detroit was something approaching enjoyable. Yes, I said Detroit -- a flight from Charlotte, NC to Dallas, TX was routed through Detroit-Wayne County Metro, in Michigan. It's Northwest's largest hub (Memphis is another, much smaller one) and, due to the realities of the hub-and-spoke routing system employed by most domestic airlines, meant I travelled nearly 1,300  miles for a trip that, point-to-point, is just over 800 miles.

Fortunately, I didn't have to actually SEE Detroit -- instead, we came in over Lake Erie, which was really cool and very pretty in the late afternoon light (woe is me that I left my camera in my bag, stuffed in an overhead bin five rows ahead of me). And, surprisingly, from what I saw of DTW, it's a very nice airport. Very clean, modern... very unlike it's host city.

Notice I haven't really said anything to justify my dislike for Northwest so far, however. OK, let me interject here what I saw on my four flights on this beleaguered carrier: baggage handlers throwing bags -- literally -- onto the ground while unloading another RJ in MEM; flight attendants, still haggling with NWA over their new, payroll-gouging contract with the bankrupt carrier, that acted like they worked for a bankrupt airline, and gave no smiles and little assistance to speak of on all four flights; and three out of four planes weren't just unkempt -- they were truly filthy, inside and out.

(A passenger seated behind me on the DFW-MEM run -- in the CRJ -- summed it up perfectly: "Welcome to Yokum Air." To which, snarkely, I added "We're bankrupt, and we show it. And if you'll look off to your left, you'll see a beautiful Continental 737 that you could have chosen to fly instead. Thank you for flying Northwest Airlines.. but may we ask why?")

The exception to most of those issues -- except for the grumbling FAs -- was the last leg of the flight, back home to DFW, in a fairly new and clean Airbus A319. Before that flight, I'd never been on an Airbus plane -- just Boeings, and various McDonnell-Douglas planes -- but I'd heard Airbus planes, as a rule, offers slightly wider cabins than their American counterparts (Airbus is a consortium between France's EADS and Britain's BAE Systems.)

They do. Whereas my shoulder rubs the wall when seated at the window of a 737 -- be it for Southwest, American, United, or AirTran -- I actually had about an inch of space between the seat and the wall on the A319. That made the plane feel positively cushy, although legroom was pretty tight. The trip home was by far the best flight of all of them. It was also the most scenic -- I got to see several other airliners sharing the skies with us (including an AirTran 737 that passed above us at 39,000 feet -- an RVSM-approved 1,000 feet higher than us. We even got bumped slightly by its wake turbulence.)

It wasn't all brickbats for Northwest, though -- they did manage to do a few things right, too. Three out of four flights were right on time, or early (the Airbus was delayed by 30 minutes for a maintenance issue) and Northwest has hit on a good thing by offering a snack box for $3. While I still feel you should at least get a bag of peanuts or pretzels when riding on a commercial flight, I will say that for $3, you do get a full meal... albeit one of snack food. Still, all the five food groups are covered -- raisins, meat, cheese, crackers, and... um.. Oreos. Yeah, those are the five.

Other news... Monday's appointment went OK, all is well.. except my blood pressure shot up since my last visit. Not sure why... weight is probably the reason, or added stress. Hmm... can I blame Northwest for that?