Winter Doth Approach

This year's World Series was actually pretty enjoyable for me. But still nowhere near the WS's of yore. I did really enjoy seeing a couple teams play small-ball and do the fundamentals in order to win. And every games except for 1 was right down to the wire. But I really just didn't care all that much about who won. I'm thrilled to see the title come back to the NL where it belongs, but I had no real connection to the Phillies. Good or bad. And nothing for the Rays except the knowledge that it's good for baseball to see a small market team full of kids make it to the show. Each of the last 5 years or so I've had either a team I liked, a team I hated, or some other great sub-plot to draw me in. Something at stake. This one? Not so much. So while I did enjoy watching the games, I felt no compulsion to stay up late to see who won each game and now I have kind of an empty feeling inside. Couple this with the fact that Purdue's football team is getting beat pretty much every week and not being able to watch hardly any Bears games, and I'm hitting a lull. The teams that are doing well I can't see; the teams that aren't I can. It's not fair.

In happier news, last weekend I finally used a 2-year old birthday gift from Hayley and went up for my "Discovery Flight" in a Cessna. It was really cool. I show up at the airport and spend a few minutes talking to the pilot about my background in regards to flying, what I want to do, and how the day will go. Then we stroll out to the plane and hop in. It was surprisingly cramped. Turns out a Cessna 172 doesn't have much room in the cockpit. Who knew?! I then got to taxi pretty much all the way from the hanger to the runway. It's actually a bit tricky to do. You can't use the steering wheel to do anything. It's all done by the foot pedals and a bit hard to get the hang of. Then pretty much as soon as we were off the ground he turned the controls over to me again. He guided me out to a safe area where we wouldn't interfere with planes coming and going and just tooled around a bit. I was much less aggressive than I thought I'd be. We had quite a bit of turbulence to deal with and the plane was quite responsive. So all the jostling and bouncing around took away a bit of my eagerness to really play around. He then let me bring it almost all the way in before taking control just long enough to touch it down. All in all, pretty awesome. And now I'm thinking seriously about getting my license. Trouble is it'd cost about $10k over the span of a couple months to get it. That's a tough pill to swallow right now. Even so, I've already thought about the possibilities of renting a plane to fly to Chicago for trips instead of relying on the major carriers. Or when we have to go to Long Island, that's just a 45-minute flight instead of a 4+ hour drive! Nice.
And with that, time to drift off to bed.
PEACE!!