Hello everyone from Cedar Rapids. I have been flying with Captain Peterson from Sweden. I am suprised to be flying with him, as he is a "check-airman" and he should be busy with training people. But, here I am. It has been a good trip. We start late every day. Around 4PM every day. Tonight I will be in Wichita. It has been nice flying again after a couple weeks off.

Timo, Clay, Cameron, and I went flying last week in a Cessna 172. It was very strange landing that little airplane. It was pretty fun though. Talk to everyone later.

-KJH
posted by Keith at 2:36 PM

 
The test was easy. Tomorrow is the Oral examintation and the Practical Test in the Simulator. Shouldn't be too bad, but we'll see...

-KJH
posted by Keith at 4:24 PM

 
Tomorrow is the big written test. There will be 100 questions. It should not be hard.

It has been nice to have this refresher, but it will be much nicer to fly again.

-KJH

posted by Keith at 7:26 PM

 
Hi all. I am in St. Louis doing recurrent ground school for the Jet. Every year First Officers need to be retaught and rechecked. Captains do it every six months. It is only three days of class.

I got 16 days off for next month. That is nice. I have the last 10 days of October off, and I am planning on trying for the first 10 days of November off. I will probably pick up a 20 hour trip on some of my days of and get Time and a half for it. That would be really nice. I also plan on doing some serious carpet jobs on my time off. We shall see.

-Keith
posted by Keith at 4:39 PM

 
Hello everyone From London. I read this book Lee had about Bob Hope, and he would start all is shows with a statement like, "Hello, this is Bob, Galavanting with the boys in London, Hope." I guess with as much as he was travelling around he had to announce where he was. I feel the same way.

London has been fun. We are going to Les Miserables tonight. It is only $22 or so. That is £14. Tomorrow we are going to Windsor Castle and probably going to drive to Bath. That will be cool. Mom and I got to cruise around in the car for a short time this morning looking for a laundromat. We ended up washing in the sink. Mostly we have been using public transportation which has been very good.

Talk to everyone later.

-KJH
posted by Keith at 8:03 AM

 
The neighbor of a guy I work with picked 110kg of tattis over one weekend and he sold them to a wholesaler for 4€ a kilo. I heard they ship most of the tattis picked in Finland to Italy since Finns are more interested in Chanterelles. In Italy, however, they are considered the best of all mushrooms.
posted by Lee at 12:57 AM

 
That sounds great. I would love 5 lbs of mushrooms.
-KJH
posted by Keith at 9:40 AM

 
We picked at least 5 pounds of mushrooms yesterday, all of them tatti (bolete, porcini is one of these mushrooms). We have frozen some and are drying others. I hope they last until after we return from France. I want more. Maybe I won't have to buy mushrooms the whole winter. But even if the tatti don't last (if it gets too cold they'll stop coming), the time for suppilo vahvero (trumpet chanterelle) is coming and it lasts until snow is on the ground. I picked a few Isohapero (Tall Russula) which are good to eat, but some confusion between Melina and myself made me throw them out. We thought they might be tulipunahapero (The Sickener). But later, looking through the fieldbook I think they were ok and anyway according to the guidebook the bad ones only taste bad, despite their English name and I could have tested them. The link I put there says to put a little piece under your tongue to tell if your picking the bad ones. They taste like spicy acid. Yum. Punakärpäsieni (Fly Agaric), the red mushroom with white spots) were everywhere. I wished it was the old days when the Siberian shamans used them for their religious trances and one dried mushroom would get you a whole reindeer. Talk about an expensive mushroom.

Anyway, enough about mushrooms. I've just been excited about harvesting them. Hope everyone is doing well.
posted by Lee at 12:01 AM

 
This trip has been a lot of fun. I flew into New York City the other day and got a great view of the Statue of Liberty, and all of Manhattan. We flew over the Hudson River at 3,000 feet. It was really cool.

Yesterday I did my first flight to Minneapolis-St Paul. It was such a clear beautiful day. You could see forever. We were up at 37,000 and the world is usually covered in haze, but not yesterday. We got a great view of Lake Michigan (the whole lake), and Lake Erie. We flew right over Milwaukee and I saw Osh Kosh off to the right. It was a great day for flying. It was so nice I even hand flew our flight to Binghampton, NY without my flight director on. The old fashion way. It was great. I actually had to scan instruments and make corrections. Usually even when the auto pilot is off we have a big triangle thing that is called the flight director and you just keep a mark aligned with it (that is all the Auto-pilot does) and it makes it so you don't really need to scan your Altitude, heading, etc... Anyway, it was fun.

-KJH


posted by Keith at 3:28 PM

 
I've spoken to both recently. Mom is in Brugge and I am in Helsinki. Tomorrow we are going to Sipoo to find more mushrooms. This year they are all over.
posted by Lee at 1:55 PM

 
No word. I have sent an email to Mom, but...

posted by Keith at 10:50 PM

 
Good luck on the Surgery Tiina!
-KJH
posted by Keith at 6:42 AM

 
Mom made her first flight out to Paris. The weekend was fun in New York. We spent most of our time in South Hampton with Mom. We went to a fish place for Dinner out on the Eastern tip of Long Island, and ate on a deck over the water. It was nice.

I came home to Utah Sunday night after Mom left. I tried to Jumpseat to Paris with her, but it was American, so of course they wouldn't let me Jumpseat international. So I took JetBlue home. While I was at the airport I was not feeling to good so I was spending a little quality time in the restroom. In the stall next to me I noticed a strong Tobaco smell. The moron was smoking there. Well I saw who it was and as luck would have it he was sitting on the row in front of me. And he smelled so bad of Tobacco and Alchohol that it was really upsetting my stomach. The moron made a few trips to the restroom and finally got busted by the flight attendants for smoking on the flight. The one really chewed him out, and he was met by a police officer upon arrival. That was great. Ha ha. I just wish we would've had to divert to Denver or anywhere because of a smoke warning in the Lav. Then they would have dragged him off in chains.

-KJH
posted by Keith at 9:11 PM