100th Blog Post!!

Yup! Since I've been blogging since last fall I've posted 100 times. This is quite the milestone. You can send your celebratory gifts and cards to my home address here in Calgary. :)

Well I've got a few postworthy tidbits so here they are:

Destination Tracker MAP!

I have found this place that uses google maps as a base map for their service. It's mainly to be used to track your friends from around the world and all that, but I've customized it to show all of the places I've flown to. It's quite neat to visually see where I have travelled within North America. And what is also impressive about this little tool is that you can write comments at each pin you put down. So, that's what I have done. On all of the places that I've been there is a little comment about the location. So check 'em out. When it first loads off the webpage it's all the way zoomed in, so zoom it out and it looks like this:

It also has options to view as a satellite image so you can zoom right in and on most of the maps the detail is quite good. I've placed the pins directly on the airports at all of these locations. It took a long time! The link only takes you to a basic page though and I'd like it to just be the image itself but I can't seem to figure out how to use the various html codes so that you just see the image (like the one I posted above) instead of it always being zoomed in closely everytime you click the link. If anyone else knows a way to do this, let me know!

To access the map you can click this link HERE, or you can click on the new picture below the text version of my destination tracker on the right hand side of the page.

Calgary Cold Snap

Yesterday was a little chilly. How's -41 degrees with windchill for ya!? She was so cold that my battery in my Subaru said "screw this" and wouldn't start for me yesterday morning when the temp was -28 degrees (not accounting for windchill). So I had to get someone to give me a lift to help out at work (not flying). Brrr, I was working outside for a good chunk of the day too... it was very very chilly. My lips were not very happy and of course I had left my chap stick at home! Bah!

And it didn't help that yesterday my company decides it's going to do the bulk of it's office move to our new location across the other side of the runway here in Calgary. So of course anyone that's not flying or on days off gets the call to come in and help. So I went in and spent 11hrs of the day loading boxes, furniture, office supplies and many many files into a rented U-Haul making numerous trips back and forth to our new facilites. Hopefully the majority of it is all done, as I just received an email from work stating that we are no operating out of our new facilities 100% now and no longer using the old office/hangars. Woo hoo! The new hangar/office space we have is very nice. Just in the passenger lounge downstairs at the front, I'm sure $50,000 was spent on furniture, TVs, special coffee machines, mini fridge etc. The hangar is brand new and state of the art and can house all of our planes. We have a $32,000 John Deer tractor with multiple attachments. It's main purpose is to tug our airplanes around the hangar and ramp. But it can also snowplow, forklift and do many other things too. Pretty crazy. The offices are great upstairs with lots of room for everyone, and the pilots have a little lounge area as well. So it's pretty nice all around. I'll take some pics and post 'em up as soon as most of the kinks are worked out and it's looking its best.

Poker update... it had to happen

I won't go into great detail, but I took a trip (online) into some cash games (1/2 limit) and got hit pretty good by bad plays and suck-outs. So I opted to hope into a no limit game and play super tight and make it back. It was a success, up until the point when my AA got cracked by QQ on an all in move where the Q came on the turn after all the chips were in after a rag flop. That's poker unfort, I was quite irked and so I'm taking a break for a few days. It was a costly day at profits standing at -$180 for the day. It sucked.

So there's the goods on my 100th blog post. My flying schedule right now has me not booked on any flights until March 9th! Haha, that'll change but it's just not too busy right now. I go on days off this weekend and monday, so I'll be taking it super relaxed and looked forward to my next flight being operated entirely out of our new building.

Benifits of being an Albertan

I must say that for all the grief that some people put upon Alberta, I've been pretty happy within the past couple of weeks.

First off, simply enough, we have no PST. :) That's like an extra 7% per year right there!

Also, Alberta has been making stupid amounts of money in the oil business. By stupid amounts I mean they made 8 Billion freaking dollars last year. They took some of this money and decided to give it back to Albertans. Every person in Alberta, children and infants included, received a prosperity cheque this month for a nice $400 bucks. Not a crazy amount of money, but hey, anything helps! You should see all the incentives in town right now. All the department stores want you to come and spend that money so they're offering deals like "bring in your $400 prosperity cheque and it's worth $440!" and things like that. What am I going to do with my $400? Quite simply I need a new headset for flying and it'll go towards that.

And the other benifit right now is my car insurance. Being a singe male, under 25 with a car like the WRX does not prove to be a great combination for ANY auto insurance plan. Back in BC I was paying around $3,000 per year on auto insurance!!! And here in Alberta it didn't get a whole lot better at $2980, but I did get some extras like a "free accident" and extra free roadside assistance and things like that based on my safe drivers record. That's something that I likely would not have seen for even a couple more years with ICBC.

Now here's the kicker. As soon as you're 25 or older in Alberta the miracle happens. I knew I was entitled to cheaper rates so I called up my insurance company last week to inquire. And yes, for all you bastards out there who forgot my birthday... I'm now 25!!! :)

So I talk to them and explain I want to redo my insurance. Because it was setup in August I would actually have to cancel my current policy and redo a new one. No problem if it's going to save me money, lets get this show on the road. So we do up the new quote. I nearly passed out when I heard the difference in price. Remember my old policy was $2980. My new policy... freaking $1,437! Can you believe that! I simply turn 25 and my insurance rates drop an amazing 51%! So I'm pretty happy about those savings. I wouldn't be seeing rates like that in BC that's for sure. It doesn't help that I'm driving one of the most highly rated (bad thing) vehicles in terms of insurable cars. In the same vicinity that Porsche and other high end sports cars get labelled. Mainly because it's a common car that's been in many accidents, is expensive to repeair and has been a very desirable car to steal as of late. Yay for me.

So getting older pays off once again. Now I just need life to SLOWWWWWWWWWWWW down so I can enjoy my youth. Haha.

Poker updates

Well, it has come to my attention that I'm busier than I thought I would be and therefore not able to keep playing poker daily. So I will get rid of the poker tracker on the right side of the screen but will keep you all appraised as to my progress. I will play when I can and hope to keep the minimal profits in a continuous climb.

As per some stats, for the month of January I did net a total of $354.00 USD. This was over 25 days of play, which works out to $14.16 per day. Didn't quite maintain my average it would appear! Haha, oh well. Pretty close.

I have been playing in a few online tourney's though. My best success to date is recorded below. Click on the pics to enlarge.

Here is the screenshot of me making it to the final table of a 377 person tourney. I was pretty happy to be there, and had a bigger stack then at least 4 other people at the table with me. This was just a $5 event, so the payouts weren't that great, BUT when you get into it this far, the return is actually pretty decent. It was a turbo event, meaning that the blinds were raised very quickly at 5 min intervals. This forced a lot of action that had been benificial to me in the previous half hour of the game.



And it was bound to happen. I was fairly even stacked with another player on the table but the other two players had the most of the cash. I decided to make my move and only lost out due to a smaller kicker. It was OK. I figured I had gone about as far as I was going on this whirlwind ride. It was great fun and I ended up winning $114 USD. So not too bad for just under 2hrs worth of play.



So it doesn't happen to often and I was pretty proud of this. This all occured yesterday and today I decided to enter into a couple more. It was going great in all three of the events I entered. And in the first two I was out within the first hour when my best hands were rivered!!!! Oh it irked me so. But this is poker and I can't get mad at the situation, as I had rivered somebody on my way up to my fourth place finish yesterday. And had it not been for me screwing someone over, the bulk of this post would never have been written.

In the last game I was playing today for a solid 10 mins I was actually the lead chip holder and dominating like nobodies business. Then in 3 progressvily horrible hands I had my ass handed to me! But again.. ALL BAD BEATS! My full house was busted by a higher full house, my KK was busted by AA and my QQ was beat out by some punk who called my preflop massive raise with 67 offsuit and managed to get a straight on the turn after I pushed him all in off the flop when I tripped my Queens. But, I'm not mad because it's a low cost tourney and these turkeys are everywhere! Sometimes it's a turkeyshoot and it's great, but more often than not it feels as if the turkey's have revolted and come after you pecking you to death. Ok, a little odd comment I aggree.

Anyone else wish to share poker great and poker horrible stories?

Back from Sin City

Well.. what can I say. It was a good trip. We were in Vegas from Tuesday afternoon until Friday afternoon. We were extra lucky that we didn't get called back to do more flying. So we partied it up pretty good.

The first night we walked the strip and hit up a couple casino's for some drinks. The first place was Treasure Island and we had a good 5 or 6 drinks there will playing some slots. No luck on the slots but we got downright shitty off the drinks. We were staying in the Excalibur hotel which was at the other end of the strip. So as we walked back to the hotel we made stops in many other hotels and plunked a couple of bucks in the slots and made like bandits on the drinks. By 1am we were back in our hotel and totally gooned. I passed out on my bed and awoke again at 5am with very sore eyes as I forgot to take my contacts out. Ouch, that was painful.

The next day we slept in and then met for lunch around 1pm. We walked more of the strip but we were quite tired of all the walking so we got some bus passes that were good for 24hrs so we could go up and down the strip and not hurt so much. It really is quite a walk. That day we toured around more hotels, including the Wynn which is a really really nice new hotel. We also checked out that mall that Nat was so quick to point out as a tourist trap :) It's okay though, I didn't buy anything. We decided we wanted to sit down on a cheap blackjack game. Most of the casinos just have 10 dollar blackjack and it's hard to find the 5 dollar blackjack except for in some of the older ones. Success, we found what we were looking for in the Barbary Coast Casino. It was an older casino but was full of life. It was smaller and didn't have as much "bling" as the bigger casinos but that was also a great attribute. The drink girls came by every 5 mins and once again, we capitalized. We got sloshed again while playing blackjack and we were doing pretty good. Not winning lots, but not losing much either. With all the free drinks we were having we were definatly ahead. We joked it up with all the other players at the table as well, it was great fun. Even the dealers were having a good time and the pit boss would come up every once and a while and join in on the fun.

Well we played for a LONG time. After about 5 hrs of playing there I started chatting up the pit boss for some free stuff! I don't know what came over me, but I have a feeling it had something to do with the alcohol flowing through my blood. He asked if we had "comp cards" which are those credit card things that you can get to track your play while you're at the casino and sometimes you'll qualify for some free stuff or coupons off of meals and things like this. Well we said we didn't have any comp cards so he asked for our licenses. I wasn't quite sure what the hell he was talking about but the other pilot Shaun did and he threw his drivers license at the pit boss and I followed suit.

Then about 10 mins later Mark the pit boss returned and handed us each a credit card looking piece of plastic with our names on it and that of the casino. Holy cow, now we've been tagged! Well after another few mins I again started talking to Mark about some comps and he asked if we were hungry, I replied "of course!" So he actually got us a couple of free full course dinners at their restaurant! A nice big steak dinner with soup, baked potato, hot dinner rolls.. the full works. An easy $20 dollar meal for free! Woo hoo! This Vegas trip was turning out to be not too shabby!

We headed back to our hotel rooms to regroup and have a couple more drinks (we brought some booze back from our plane stock too.. shhh..). We then agreed to head out and check out the club scene in Vegas. It was now already past midnight but our sense and reasoning was a little sub par now. We started the night by going across the street to the MGM Grand and waited in line for their big club "Studio 54". It was pretty crazy in there, multiple levels with cirque du soliel type acrobatics going on in the middle of the dance floor hanging from the ceiling. Confetti every once and a while and go go dancers. There really weren't many girls there though so we decided to split.

Next stop after consulting a cabbie on the best place to party that night was Treasure Island's "Tangerine". Now this place was happening. We still had to wait in line at freaking 2:30am because it was so busy inside. We chatted up the people in front of us and turns out the young couple was from Edmonton. After a little more talk we found out they had some free passes to get in without cover. They had an extra pass that was good for 2 free covers and so they gave us one. Once inside we returned the favor by buying them drinks. Wow, a pretty nice club. It was packed to the max and had many a hot girl dancing around. They had a nice patio area too that overlooked the strip, so it was nice to get out there for some air. We partied it up for a couple hours and then realized it was time to split. We headed back to the Barbary Coast to try out their $3.45 breakfast special. It was good! We took a cab back to the hotel and we were back in the hotel room around 5am. Now that was a night of partying.

The next day was much more relaxing. We checked out some more sights and the other pilot and I split up for a while. I took this opportunity to go and check out some poker! You knew it was coming at some point. How could I go to Vegas and not play poker!? I sat in on the Excalibur's 2/4 limit hold em game. My very first 2 hands each time I had pocket 8's and won both pots. I then played rather tight over the next 40mins of play but every hand I went in on, I won! In less than an hour I had made $110! That filtered down to $76 when my table split up and I then had to wait 20 mins for a spot on the other table to open up. I played for another hour and was down to a profit of $30 at one point, but eventually made it back up to $80 and called it done. It was great fun. The play was easy and I'm sure I could make good money if I lived in Vegas and just went and prayed on all the inexperienced players that sit down while they're there.

While waiting for Shaun to meet up afterwards I went and played some slots, I was down about $20 bucks when I hit a mini jackpot and made a cool $40 bucks in one pull of the machine. So I cashed out. Not too shabby! I met up with Shaun and we headed back to the Barbary Coast for more Blackjack. But it was incredibly busy, so it took a while to find a seat. We both sat down and Shaun ended up loosing some cash while I just broke even after a good 2.5hrs of play. We were both pretty hungry at this point and tried to get another steak dinner but it was too busy to even try. So we walked down the strip and eventually went to the famous "Fatburger" for a great burger at 1am. That place was packed, it took 20mins to just get our food. Afterwards it was back to the hotel for our last nights sleep in Sin City.

The next day was really mellow as we had lunch and pretty much just got ready to head back home at 3pm. We arrived early at the airport and it was sooooooooo busy. All the private jets and turboprops coming in for Superbowl Sunday. Holy cow it was madness. We got the heck out of there, flew right over the strip on our way out and made it back into Alberta late last night.

Now I'm back at home going through Vegas withdrawl. Not a shabby way to spend 3 days!

Final results:

Money in pocket going to Vegas: $360 USD

Blackjack Profits: $ 50 USD
Poker Profits: $ 80 USD
Slot Profits: $ 40 USD

Money in pocket upon return: $385 USD

Money saved on free drinks/comps: PRICELESS!!!

Haha, it was a good trip. Not to mention I also get my food allowance from work, so it was definatly a money making trip. Can't wait for the next one!

Viva Las Vegas!

Well, it was bound to happen again. Today I was in some recurrent company training classes and got an email from another pilot.

It simply read "VEGAS!"

Right then and there I knew that I had a trip to Vegas with him in the very near future. Little did I know it would be tomorrow! So yup, off to Vegas for a 3 night layover beginning Tuesday night and I'll be back in Calgary late Friday night. Woo hoo.

Time to party it up in Sin City. Hopefully we don't get called back for other trips 'cause it's looking to be a very nice few days with temps in the low 20's during the day! Current weather right now in Calgary.. snowing like a banshee! So I'll be happy to get out of the white stuff and into some nice desert heat (although it does cool off quite quickly in the evenings to around 5 degrees).

So yeah, c'ya later!

Pucker factor 10

And of course by puker factor 10 I'm referring to a scenario in which my ass is puckered to a very high degree. Stop trying to visualize.

Ok, so a couple of days ago while I'm in Portland OR I get my trip information for a flight on the 27th, and the only info on the airport I had at that point was it was to the CYXT airport. I mistook this initially for the Medicine Hat AB airport which has the identifier CYXH. CYXT is Terrace BC.

What's so special about Terrace? Well it's located in a tight box canyon valley on the west coast of BC. And it is easily one of the most difficult and unforgiving instrument approaches in Canada. Remember me talking about that approach I did around New Years into Kenora? Well that was a tricky approach because the weather was so bad. But it wasn't nearly as challenging as this one. Sure Kenora is difficult, but you just have to be on the ball. With Terrace, you have to make sure everything is set up properly or quite simply - you die.

Yes, you read correctly. Death. The appraoch into Terrace has claimed many aircraft and many lives. Some of you might recall a recent accident in Terrace where an MU-2 cargo aircraft operated by Navair crashed there shortly after take off last month. So what makes this airport so difficult? Well I already mentioned the unforgiving terrain in the area, and that combined with unforgiving weather and forces of nature make this approach a 10 on the pucker factor.

Click on this picture to see the full instrument approach procedure into Terrace. This is what we use to set up the aircraft's instruments properly to follow the approach in safely. You'll notice contour lines of all the peaks in the area and altitudes listed for "safe operations" within the area. I'll just say this, they're extremely high because of all the high terrain. The weather was bad with the cloud ceilings around 1000' above sea level, with icing conditions in the clouds and it was getting dark. Also, because the temperature was so close to zero we have to add extra altitude to the published information to allow for cold temperature corrections to our altitude sensing equipment in the plane. That by itself is a killing factor with many aircraft crashing into terrain because they did not adequtely adjust their altitdues to account for the cold temperature factors.



We approached from the east and intercepted the approach at 12,000 feet over the waypoint "DAVED", then flew down a glideslope and localizer right down to the airport. It is quite nerve racking when you're flying into the valley, without seeing anything around you but snow and precipitation being lit up by the aircraft's landing lights. Also knowing that terrain is all around you!

We land safely and offload our passengers. I then proceeded to "borrow" Air Canada's baggage cart to take all the luggage into the main terminal for our passengers. When doing this unfortunately we slightly "broke" said baggage cart when we accidently rammed it into a giant stuffed polar bear in the main lobby! It wasn't all my fault, it was a tight fit throught the terminal doors and my spotter on one side wasn't quite paying enough attention (read: drunk off his ass) and neglected to see the huge polar bear incased in a glass case infront of us. Well, we only slightly moved the polar bear display, but the top part of the baggage cart broke off... it appeared however it wasn't the first time it had happened by some duct tape remenants on it. So I didn't feel too bad. :)

Now we had to get the heck out of this valley and back up to a nice safe altitdue to get home. So the departure procedure is quite complicated but is essentially the reverse of how we landed. This time it was dark and snowing quite heavily. So the second we took off we no longer had any reference to the outside world and back to relying 100% on our instruments. I climbed that machine as fast as it was go up without stalling out of the sky so we could gain the required altitude as quickly as possible. Pucker factor 10 was finally reduced as we climbed through 12,000 feet and I knew we were clear of all the peaks. The flight home was uneventful and we took advantage of some very nice tailwinds at our cruising altitude of 27,000 feet and made it back in record time.

So if there are any questions on that instrument approach procedure just let me know, I'd be happy to answer any questions and maybe help shed some light on the whole subject for anyone that would like to understand it more.

Poker.. uggh...

If you've been keeping track of my "Poker Tracker" on the right side of the screen you might have noticed it has frozen at $314.00 for a couple of days. This is because I've hit a wall it seems.

I can't break it. I can't make any more than a couple of dollars, or nothing at all. I've been down and up and it's become quite painful and taking way too long to attempt to reach my goal of $15 USD per day. This was no problem for the first half of the month, things were going swimmingly. So I might have to re-evaluate. It will be too much work to continue to try this. I will keep going until I have a full months worth of results. Then I'll see how much effort was required to make that $$$.

It was a great idea, that likely will work for the most part. But these past couple of days have not been great. I have to walk away from the tables today as I've gotten too frustated with bad beats and stupid players. Bah!

Flames

As most of you know I'm still an avid Canucks fan, so don't get the wrong impression that I'm starting a blog with the title of "Flames".

I was waiting to go on a flight a couple of days ago and standing in the passenger lounge of our executive terminal when all of these guys in suits and some with toques and hats on kept walking through. I looked outside and saw a chartered Air Canada airbus parked outside and they were all walking up and boarding. It took a little while but we finally figured out that it was the entire Calgary Flames team getting ready to head up to Edmonton for the game they played there last night.

I only recognized one player and he was the last to board - Jerome Iginla. Pretty recognizable. Other people in the lobby where talking to them as they walked past, "good luck guys" and one guy shouted out "hey Jerome!" to which he did say "hey" back.

Too bad it wasn't the 'nucks!

24 - Jack Bauer is back!

So after watching the season opener for the Fox show "24" I must say... "WOW".

I have been a fan of the show in the past and tried to keep up with the storylines as much as possible. That will be no different for the now 5th season of 24. It started with a bang and keeps on going.

I've always referred to this show series as mirco movies, they've got it all in each episode. This season looks to be the best as they've really hit it off with a punch.

I prefer to download the episodes after they've aired. That way I can either watch them on my laptop in widescreen HD or on my roomates tv, which has all the inputs and a nice bose sound system that really brings out the best in the show... something that my standard cable and TV just can't quite do. Although it took me a long time to download these first few episodes that they've just aired. Sounds like Shaw is filtering out bit torrents more aggressively here in Calgary now. Grrrrrr...

So, any other 24 watchers out there?

Poker Tracker

Well, it's been a while since I've posted on anything poker related. Mainly because I have not been playing much and therefore there hasn't been much to report on. I have not been playing at the higher stakes like I was last year as I found the fluctuations were beginning to be too extreme. So I took my profits and ran! Well, not quite.

I withdrew most of the money out of my poker account into a US account for travel into the states and also for some US investing. I left some in my online poker account though because I wanted to keep the poker going, but at much smaller limits. I haven't found this to be anything profitable, but definatly entertaining.

Earlier this month I decided to start out on a theory after playing a few heads up winner take all tourneys. For a very small risk of $5.25 per player where $5 goes into the prize pot and the $.25 goes to the house. So if you win, you take home $10 or after you factor in the $.25 and your buy in, it's a $4.75 profit. I found that I would win far more than I would lose. With this information I decided to try a little experiment. Worst case the system would fail and I'd be out a couple of dollars, best case scenario is that I'd have a constant stream of income (albeit quite small, but free money nonetheless).

My theory is this, I play enough of these $5.25 games (each game can take anywhere from a couple minutes to as long as 15 or 20 in extreme cases - I'd say 5 mins on average) to take in at least $15 per day. Simply play everyday (if possible) and it should equal roughly $100US per week, $400US per month and $4,800 per year. Little bits add up! After a little while I can quite simply also increase the limits to the $10.50 games and then take all those numbers and double 'em.

So I'm right on track now after 9 days of making on average of $15/day. You can keep track of how my poker system works or fails just above the destination tracker to the right. =============>>>>>>

The hardest thing to do is stop after making the $15, but for my experiment I can't get greedy... need to stay consistant! I recommend this system to anyone and everyone! I call it little risk with nearly guaranteed results.. well.. in my case at least.. "your results may vary!" ...had to throw in the disclaimer there. ;)

Frequent Flyer Miles

If only I could get some sort of Frequent Flyer Miles while working. Unfortunately that is not the case. But the other day I was updating my flying hours and statistics. Since working for AirSprint I have accumulated approx 241,000kms while flying all over North America - from the Arctic Circle Down to Los Cabos, over to Florida and up to Ottawa.

Turns out that stastically speaking, I've flown around the world an equivilant of 6 times exactly! Cool eh?

Everying in the career of a pilot is based off of their flight experience. So the amount of hours in the airplane is what will determine your progression in the industry. And more importantly it's the type of flying accumulated in different aircraft, different types of flying and different locations.

Here are some rough figures to give you an idea of various stages of hour accumulation and what they're good for.

Private Pilot's License - 55 hrs
Commercial Pilot's License - 200 hrs
Airline Transport Pilot's License - 1500 hrs

Those are just the main milestones, each requiring more specific requirements and various other additional ratings.

I'm currently floating around 1300 hrs, 500 of which has been accumulated here at AirSprint. The most a pilot can legally fly in one year is 1200 hrs, but within my company pilots tend to fly around 500-700hrs a year. A career pilot can expect to end their careers with around 20-25,000hrs. So.. I'm on my way!

I'm in trouble

No I haven't gotten some girl knocked up... err.. hope not at least! ;)

I took the WRX in for the 42,000km scheduled maintenance and I wanted to check out the new 2006 models because they've done quite a bit of changes to it, the most noticeably being the new improved 2.5L engine as opposed to the 2.0L engine in my WRX. This helps to get rid of the horrible turbo lag that my car has (takes time for the turbo to spool up leaving a dead band of power when you first start out).

Well.. it took all of 2 mins on a test drive for me to realize how smooth and great this new engine is. So I say again - I'm in trouble!

I even went as far as to see how much my WRX would get for a trade-in and it essentially would be 2 years more of car payments and that would take care of the difference and I'd have a brand new car. My current car payments are getting close to being finished.. So I like the idea of having no more car payments... but I also like the idea of having a brand new WRX that has the whole turbo lag thing licked.

Woe is me.

SNL - "Lazy Sunday" skit

I laughed and laughed and laughed. Check out this "digital short" video that Saturday Night Live did a couple of weeks ago. This has got to be some of the funniest stuff that has been on SNL in the past decade!

SNL - "Lazy Sunday" Click me

Blog format updated

I wanted to change the format of the blog a bit. What do you guys think?

Happy New Year!

Holy cow, it's been a while since I last posted. Quite a few events have transpired since my last post and I figure I'd better get to it and place the updates into word format below!

The holidays were great. At 4:30am on December 23rd I awoke and got dressed in half zombie like fashion. I banged on the door of my roommate who the day before had agreed to take me to the airport prior to finding out what time my flight was.. sucker! So I arrive at the airport just before 5am for my 6am flight to Vancouver. The luggage check in went smoothly, but then I turned the corner to go through security. It was right then and there that I realized how much private travel can reduce one's stress in life. A lineup like nothing I'd seen before. It must have had a couple hundred people waiting and I ran to the end to start the process.

After a few minutes I realized that I was likely screwed and not going to make my flight. And then it happened, a holiday time miracle, gate agents came racing down the line asking if anyone was on a 6am flight. I immediately breathed a sigh of relief and started following the woman as she was going to wisk me and the other poor unfortunates to the front of the line to cut infront of all the other individuals who had shown up VERY early for their 7, 8 and even 9am flights! Yeesh!

So I get through security (us pilots use our security passes to help speed along the process.. when emptying pockets we just convieniently put them in our trays making sure the security people notice, that gives us a lot more credibility going through that line and less likely to be mistaken for the next Osama)

I walk swiftly all the way through the terminal and just barely make it on board the aircraft. I was crammed in the middle seat and the guy next to me had a baby, so it was a not so pleasant experience... the whole while I was once again thinking to myself how nice private travel is.

In Vancouver finally and I get picked up by my dad in the SMART car. Yup, in case some of you didn't know, my folks have a SMART car. Crazy eh?

I get home and quickly have a nap. Ahhh.. relaxing. My time at home is spent visiting friends and family. We had our big X-mas dinner on the night of the 24th because my sister had to work X-mas night. That was good, just like old times. I had a great time. I also managed to score another X-mas miracle through work by requesting an extra day off (Boxing Day) in order to fly home on one of our Jets that just happened to be heading back to Calgary from Vancouver empty that day! And success I was able to hop aboard! 2 other employees had the exact same idea and so we were all on board the plane with some family of one of the other pilots. Wow... now that is the way to travel! That jet is one smooth machine. We were back in Calgary in no time.

The next few days were spent flying to various places like Grande Prairie and Winnipeg. I was supposed to spend New Years in Ontario again like last year, but the flights all got switched around. I managed to avoid that gong show this year thankfully. For those of you keeping count that's 3 holiday miracles! :)

New Years was spent modestly at home with some beer and my roommate and one of his friends. Nothing too big. Nice and quiet, with copious amounts of booze consumed.

Yesterday I was in Ontario briefly. I did the pick-up for those folks that spent New Years in Kenora, ON just like last year. But this year the weather was looking to be something horrible!! All out in that area was forecasted crap and the weather we received for the Kenora airport as we approached was no good at all. The weather was calling for 300' cloud bases with remarks of "ragged" which means that it could be 200' in some areas and 400' in others. The best instrument approach we could conduct to get into the Kenora airport gets us down to 308' above the ground. You do the math, it's not looking good.

Well I'll tell you, that was some of the most challenging flying I've had to do in my entire career. Because the weather was so bad, our company procedures call for us to conduct a "Pilot Monitored Approach - PMA". This calls for the first officer (me) to fly the entire approach while the captain's only responsibility is to be looking outside of the aircraft towards where the runway should be and if he receives enough visual cues to safely land the airplane he then takes control of the aircraft and finishes the landing. This is because it would take too long for me to readjust my sights outside of the airplane instead of inside looking at all the instruments and that split second of adjustment could mean we would miss the runway and have to abort the landing.

So at exactly 0.5 miles from the airport and skimming the tree tops at 308' we found the runway and safely landed. Now that's flying! We certainly made our money on that leg. We then flew to Winnipeg to pick up one more person and the weather was just as bad there, but Winnipeg has a better instrument approach there and it's not as complicated as the "non-precision approach" we had just flown into Kenora. We then flew all the way home to Calgary after that where the weather was much nicer. It was quite a turbulent flight however due to the fact we were flying right next to the jet stream and the difference in the wind strength and direction when so close to it causes a lot of turbulence.

As for today, pretty laid back and relaxed. I went out in search of some specific synthetic oil for the WRX today but everywhere was either sold out or no longer caring it!? I was pretty shocked. The car goes in for service on Thursday so I've got one more day to try and track down some good oil for it.

And there you have it. A bit of updating if you were able to read through it all!