Category: General
Oregon Gone Wild – Columbia River Gorge
So I finally made the trip to Portland, OR to visit Adam and meet his wife Stacey. I flew in Thursday night. Stacey was flying home to visit her family for the weekend and Adam was able to drop her off and pick me up.
Adam and I went back to their condo to drop my stuff. He has a great place in downtown Portland. We spent the first evening walking around his neighborhood. It has just about everything you could ask for and a nice vibe to boot. Eventually we stopped at the Blue Moon Tavern which is a McMenamins. We only went to a couple of them and the Blue Moon was sort of low key compared to the other one we went to (more on that later). We sat outside … Read More »
Housing Bubble
This American Life in conjunction with NPR News had a really good program that ran about a month ago called The Giant Pool of Money. It is all about the housing bubble and subsequent collapse.
I highly recommend listening to the show if you haven’t already.
T-3
I’m back at The Ranch ready to make my third (and hopefully last) tandem jump. I went to watch Harry make his T-4 jump. I didn’t have a reservation and I was just hoping they’d be able to fit me in for my T-3. Due to extenuating circumstances Harry decided against doing his T-4 and opted for another tandem. The Ranch was very accommodating. John (my JM from the T-2 jump) was already paired with somebody; Joe (the head honcho) was kind enough to switch people around so that we could be paired up instead. John had one jump to do and then we were scheduled for the load after that.
This time around I got to learn a bit about winds (speed and direction) and what you need to know to plan your approach … Read More »
Meltdown
It’s videos like these that make me glad I’m a telecomuter …
The video title sums it up nicely, “Office worker goes absolutely insane.”
http://www.break.com/index/office-worker-goes-absolutely-insane.html
This is the same incident, but taken from a camera phone — there is some audio with this one.
http://www.break.com/index/office-worker-meltdown-second-angle.html
At the end you can’t really hear what he is saying, but all I could think was, “Don’t tase me, bro!” Not that the two events have any relation to each other; it’s just what popped into my head.
T-2
Time to see if I really got what it takes – what it takes to jump out of an airplane for a second time. Kenny had been saying throughout the winter that he thought he would like to try sky diving too. So every time we got together the topic came up, and always ended with Harry and I trying to talk any one we could into going, and us promising Kenny we’d go with him once spring rolled around.
Harry did his homework. He went to The Ranch and bought a couple of books about the certification process. He went and observed jumpers to identify the best Jump Masters (JM) to go through the licensing process with. Then on a whim he stopped at The Ranch on his way back from a job one day … Read More »