OK, so my friends have cajoled and sucked me into using facebook. I must admit their photo page creator is pretty slick, so I used that to upload my photos so far:
Quick Paris Photos
We had perhaps the last good day of weather in our schedule today, according to the forecasts. So we made the best of it! Click on them for bigger versions.
No poop yet; The French DO smile!
I have travel stories already. I made it my goal of staying awake the first day until a reasonable hour. Yay — I did it. 10PM and it’s bedtime on this Friday night! I am dog tired!
Speaking of dogs, I had always read and heard that Paris has dog crap laying all over the streets as people didn’t pick up after their dogs. It must be one of those fallacies to keep people away — kinda like Seattle and rain, because I have yet to come across any of this detrius on the streets. As a matter of fact most are pretty clean actually. Hmmpf. Must hunt for this elusive French dogshit. Will take photos. This is my new mission.
And speaking of the French — I have yet to be truly offended by anyone’s rude behavior yet either. I actually got a lot of smiles and good natured-ness even using my extremely limited French phrases. Although you do get a lot of “matter-of-factness” as I call it. Call it a smooth indifference. They absolutely give you what you want, but just no smile. I say — so what?! That’s not rude. That just…is. Which apparently is very French. Definitely not American style. But that’s why you travel, isn’t it — to get out of your comfort zones, explore and witness that there are other ways of doing things just as good as your own.
OK, I’m nearly hitting the keyboard with my head nodding off to sleep. Pictures to come tomorrow and so does Claire!
Je parle Fran
J’attends avec int
More pink than a Strawberry Shortcake costume competition at a tranny bar…
Safeway assaulted me today. I go in to get my weekly groceries and WHAM! Pink, pink, pink, pink. Pink roses. Pink balloons. Pink banners. I mean, it was 20-feet thick as you waded your way through it at the entrance to the store. It was PINK.
Oh, that’s right, it’s VD .
No, I’m not bitter, or especially so. But with my BS meter set so high these days I was bound to find this utter explosion of forced joy very disturbing and ridiculous. What a waste of time. So this is the only day you can celebrate with the love of your life?
Seems to me a better love is one that lasts all year long and stays steady and becomes your “rock.” VD in my opinion is just an excuse to waste money and feel better about yourself for actually remembering the day.
So I’m not actually bitter on love. Jaded on what people think it “should be”, perhaps.
Happy Groundhog’s Day!!!
More snow…virtually
So I’ve been sick and at home for a few days — no fun. I’m still alive, however!
Anyways, I decided to fire-up Flight Simulator and do some mountain flying. Love winter scenery. So I took a few shots of me in my trusty Cessna 172 “N101GW” departing Lost River in the North Cascades. Also got a vid. Watch video
SNOW!
1970’s JC Penney chic
I usually don’t post misc. emails, but this one is so damn funny I just had to.
Live Seattle Air Traffic Control
Since I moved to Capitol Hill, I’m able to receive Air Traffic Control (ATC) frequencies into Seattle’s Sea-Tac airport. In fact, I live 1,420 Ft from the imaginary airspace “intersection” that marks the start of the final approach from the north to Seattle.
So I decided to sponsor a live Internet audio stream of Air Traffic Control. You can listen to it at http://www.liveatc.net/ (click the “listen to Live ATC feeds” in the sidebar and scroll-down to “SEA Final” — there are a number of SEA feeds, actually. I’m the one with 133.65 as the only frequency)
133.65 is the final approach sector for KSEA — Seattle-Tacoma International. Busiest times seem to be around noon, 4-6PM and 8-10PM.
Seattle has 2 (soon to be 3) close parallel runways oriented north-south — named runways 16/34. You can click on the chart to the right to see a bigger image of this. When landing and departing to the south 16C is used mostly for arrivals, with 16L used for departures. When the weather is really bad or foggy they switch to the Instrument Landing System (ILS) on 16L as the ILS for 16C appears to not support bad weather CAT2/3 operations anymore because of contruction of the third runway.
In the summer, and in better winter weather, Seattle usually lands the other way to the north, using runways 34C for arrivals and 34R for departures
After-hours this frequency can be combined with one or all of the feeder arrival sectors, so you’ll hear ATC, but not pilots. Also sometimes you’ll hear some bleed-over of a Seattle radio station in the background — their main broadcast antenna is only 1 mile from me, so with it’s huge power output sometimes you’ll be stuck listening to Seattle’s best smooth jazz — sorry! Could be worse…
Here are charts and info for KSEA
Here is an airspace illustration I created of major arrival and departure routes into SEA. The triangle symbols are the major intersections along the routes (Imaginary places in the air programmed into aircraft navigation databases) The hexigonal-type symbols are actual radio navigation stations on the ground. The 3-letter acronyms you see are the codes for other radio navigation stations outside of the chart
This is far from complete, but a good intro into how traffic is sent in/out of the Seattle area.