Short Circuited

The day started early as I had to take Kaylee to a store before school and get a pumpkin pie. Today was her class party and she had signed me up to bring the pie, and I ran out of time last night. So we ran into a bakery and got a nice, large pumpkin pie with a little whipped cream, and it worked out great. She had a fun day, a good party, ate lots of junk food (and some grapes and carrots, mom), and is now officially out on Fall Break until Monday. :)

We lost power three times this morning at the house, which was different. The power was only out for 10 seconds or so each time, but I quit resetting the clocks after the second time. I now have four blinking clocks in my house even as I type this.

After I left the store and dropped Kaylee off at school, I picked up a package at the post office and, well, ran several other errands. I was supposed to fly at 9 a.m., but by the time 9 a.m. rolled around, there was still a heavy fog out there. In fact, the fog was so thick you could see it on the ground, hanging in the trees, everywhere. Kaylee was amazed and "a little creeped out" by it on the way to school. I was impressed. You couldn't even see a stoplight from half a block away in some areas, and out in the country it was like you were alone in the world. It brought to mind the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and the farmers who would get lost and killed in a blizzard if they didn't tie a rope from their house to their barn when they went to care for the animals. Obviously flying was out of the question. Kaylee asked what it was like to fly in the fog, and I told her it was just flying in the clouds. The only difference is that fog is basically clouds on the ground, and the problem would be that I couldn't see the runway to come in and land, and I'd be stuck up there for awhile or have to go somewhere else. She paused and then said "Well, eventually you would run out of fuel, wouldn't you?" I do like how she can reason through things pretty quickly...

One of the (many) places I went today was to the BMV to renew the plates on two of our vehicles. I didn't even have the renewal paperwork, just my registration and insurance card, and I was fairly sure there would be a problem of some kind. I was there for five whole minutes. I walked in, she looked at my driver's license, I paid them money, and I walked out with my newly renewed plate stickers. It was scary easy...

After lunch (and a few more errands) I drove to Sheridan for a flight in the 180 with one of Steve's students while he was off on a checkride with another student. (Who passed with flying colors, of course.) :) On my drive out, the song "Dreams" came on in the car, and it made me laugh, because I flashed back to listening to that song on my way to the airport when I was learning to fly, and here I am on my way to the airport years later to teach, listening to the same song. I started daydreaming, until I looked around and realized I had no idea how far down the back roads I'd come and wasn't sure if I'd passed the airport or not. There aren't exactly many visual references out there in the corn fields until I came to a road I recognized and knew I hadn't gotten there yet after all. Doh. I had a nice no-wind day and calm skies (the fog was gone by then) with which to work with the student on those last five seconds of the landing, which is the trickiest part, and it was a productive flight for sure.

I was on my way home from the flight, thinking about the things I needed to do tonight, and Kaylee's Awanas popped into my head, followed shortly by the thought "She's supposed to dress up like someone from a different country tonight." SHOOT. I had meant to work on that earlier and I forgot. A quick glance at the clock showed me that I would have about an hour to figure out a costume for her once I got home. I looked up various countries on the internet along with what the women wore, and had nothing around the house that would work at all. I tried taking a long lavender silk thing and wrapping it up like she was from India, but there wasn't enough material and it looked cheesy. With 10 minutes to go, I found a black and red outfit that looked like it could pass as Spanish or Japanese with some final touches. A red thick ribbon tied around her waist, her hair up in a bun with a red holder, a pair of chop sticks stuck through it and a hand fan later, she was Japanese Girl, and she actually looked good. When we got to Awanas, I saw a girl walking in who was just wearing the green T&T t-shirt and no costume. So I walked in with Kaylee to make sure that 1) this was the right night to dress up and 2) she wouldn't be the only one dressed up, because that would be really embarrassing. Sure enough, several other kids were dressed, and she got a lot of compliments walking down the hall. When I went to pick her back up I was pleased to note that she had the most realistic looking costume. I had been bothered at the thought of her going with just a sheet wrapped around her or something, only to find the majority of other kids came just wrapped in a sheet. So I am marking a brief period of creativity and the successful completion of a costume I didn't have to borrow or buy in its entirety from someone else. And that uses up all my skills for the next year. ;)

We cuddled and talked for awhile afterwards, then I surprised Kaylee with a copy of Tinkerbelle's new movie to watch over her Fall Break. She jumped up and down and hugged on me for quite a bit. It's a nice thing to be able to do for $1 from Redbox. :)

On the not-so-nice end of things, somebody hacked into my SMA Support guestbook. They left a series of pop-up messages that said they were a "Grey Hat Hacker" and that they were only doing this to show me the error of my ways of having bad code that could be hacked, that they weren't doing it because they liked to make my life miserable, although that was fun sometimes too, and that I could have my site back and the instructions for fixing it were in the script. Unfortunately I don't know how to un-hack websites, but fortunately I know people who do. It was being worked on as of a few minutes ago. *sigh*