With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

You only live twice, Mr. Bond

2005 March 04 20:50

I'm very priviledged in that, like Erst Stavro Blofelt the James Bond film villian, I can actually sit in my lair, scratch a baleful looking white cat's head, and contemplate the havoc that I'm going to wreak on the unsuspecting world.

I should qualify this just a little bit, however. My "lair" is my papasan chair in my basement. I am stroking (from time to time) the head of a white (and calico spotted) cat. The havoc that's going to be wreaked on the world is the re-modeling of the upstairs bathroom, which has a problem with the floor, and that's actually going to be done by my wife through the agency of a plumbing contractor. :-) When I'm not ministering to the cat, I'm typing this on my iBook (which runs Debian, of course).

So I suppose I'm rambling on here mostly because this is my first time in a very long time really writing anything that someone is might someday read. Hmm...what shoud I write about? What is the purpose of this blog, anyway? (In my mind's eye, I hear the children's special where Charlie Brown is saying "What am I doing here? What happened to the real watch dog? What is the purpose of liiiiiife?").

This is a web journal, a snapshot of my life, I suppose. I wouldn't do it if I didn't think I wasn't doing something slightly different and might interest the occasional person. The thread that's going to hang the thread of this journal together is flying and airplanes. I've been kind of an airplane nut for longer than I can remember. Probably somewhat prompted by my Uncle, who flew B-52s (and EC-47s and I expect other aircraft too) in the Air Force. When in middle school and high school particulary, I was very much interested in being a fighter pilot, and I applied to the Air Force Academy when the time came. I didn't get in, and so I ended up going to Gustavus Adolphus College instead, and in 2001 became a physicist. I then jumped out of academia, and now I'm a computer programmer...more or less.

Alert readers are asking: what about the flying then? Well...some friends gave me a gift certificate to a book store a couple of years back as a birthday present . I picked up a guide book to becoming a pilot again, which I hadn't really thought about in years (graduate school tends to repress expensive hobbies).

However, I got to thinking. My wife and I live in Champaign, Illinois. Her parents live 5 hours drive away. My mom and dad live 9.5 and 8 hours drive away respectively. We can visit her parents for a weekend (even without taking off work time on Friday), but it's a short weekend. However, it's really not worth it to visit either of my parents for a weekend. You have to spend Sunday driving back, and drive up Friday night and Saturday morning. You end up with Saturday afternoon. The upshot is you have two days driving for half a day there. It's never worth it to drive up for a weekend, which means that I have to take days off. That means that really, the best way to do it is to go for an entire week, take two weekends, and visit everybody. However, that means that the vacations we tend to take are big long road trips, which get tiring.

So...being able to cut down the travel time would be very valuable. Being able to Yankton, SD (where my Mom lives) in 4 hours rather than 9 would all of a sudden make it a palatable vacation. Fly up on Friday afternoon/evening. Be there all day Saturday and most of Sunday, and fly back Sunday afternoon. Visit Mom, and the grandparents, and when we get back it won't feel like we've been beat with a stick.

So...ever since then, I've been gearing up to get a private pilot's license. I've bought books (a lot of books). I took ground school at the local community college. Next week I am going to join a flying club, which will give me cheap rental access to airplanes. My plan is that sometime during this calendar year, I will begin (and hopfully finish) flight lessons and have a pilot's certificate.

That's what this blog is about; me getting a pilot's license. Well, probably not totally. The hope is that part will be done less than a year from now. There'll always be flying to write about, but I don't know that it will be enthralling enough to keep something like this going for an audience. I'll continue to write, and hopefully, eventually, I'll write about building an airplane. :-)

(I'm also kind of...ok very much...a computer weenie. There will be computer stuff here too.)

more to come...