366 Days and 1 Second . . .

. . . Of one of the best, and also one of the worst, and definitely (tied for) the longest year of my life.

I'll start with the bad. There are certainly people worse off for it than myself, and many who it didn't phase at all, but this whole "worst financial crisis since the Great Depression" has certainly affected us. Due to the housing market, we were never able to sell or rent our condo in Fort Lauderdale, and due to the baby, we were not able to keep paying for it, so it was foreclosed on in November. We're still living with Abee's parents, though we're more used to it now, and definitely thankful to have such great family members to help us out.

The other bad thing, due to what happened in the oil market, the airline industry pretty much crashed this year. Growth at my company came to a screeching halt, and then slid back some. I would have made captain this year, finally making some decent income in this industry, but I'm still a first officer. Again, I'm thankful that I do have a job, and not at square one again like I was in 2002.

However, to all you speculators who made a killing exploiting South Florida residents and oil consumers by driving the prices up, I hope you weren't able to save a dime.

So yeah, from an economic standpoint, this was a terrible year. Other than that, I have to say it was pretty great. I started off with a New Year's party with my friends Ken and Pat in San Francisco. They had a place on Treasure Island, and at midnight we could see the fireworks over the San Francisco skyline across the bay.

Another nice thing is that, when the growth stopped at my company, I ended up being stuck as a fairly senior first officer. This means that while I still don't make much money, I pretty much have my pick as far as schedules go. I managed to get off nine days in a row in July so I could go to Wisconsin with my family for the first summer in many years. In November I was able to string together vacation, ground school, and normal days off to get 18 days at home in a row. Then for the holidays I was able to string together a bunch of days off at the end of December and the beginning of January, so I basically have my own Christmas vacation this year.

And then of course there was Adelaide. Despite all the crap that happened this year (and I left a bunch of it out; didn't want to sound too whiny), having Adelaide overshadowed it all and will always make 2008 be a great year in my memory.

Then there's the "longest" part. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has added a "leap second" to this year, due to the fact that the planet does not always keep perfect time with atomic clocks. There is an interesting Wikipedia article on it here. There have been many other leap seconds, but the only other time in my life this happened on a leap year as well was 1990, way back when "Ice Ice Baby" was the #1 song and I, being all of 11 years old, decided for sure that I was going to grow up to be a pilot. That was a pretty good year in my memory as well.

Now that I think of it, since I started this year on Pacific Time and will be ending it on Eastern Time, I am actually losing three hours of 2008, so 1990 was definitely the longest, but this was the second longest year.

Well, it looks like I'm babbling again, so I guess it's time to go.

Happy New Year!!

My Christmas Girls

Aren't they cute in their matching candy-striped pajamas?

Adelaide being cute

I don't post too much about Adelaide on here, especially with regards to pictures and such, so here's one of my favorite videos of her, taken about a week ago. She's always in the best of moods right after a bath, so Abee decided to record it one night.

Getting out of Montreal

Well it turns out I was wrong when I said "hopefully we'll have no problems getting out." As I went to bed that night in Montreal, I looked out the window and saw that the snow had already turned to rain, and figured that would melt a great deal of the snow before morning. When I woke up it was still raining, and I saw what looked a frozen water stream dripping down the outside of my window, which was not good. Instead of rain, the snow had turned to freezing rain. The temperature on the ground never got above freezing like it was supposed to.

When we got to the plane, it was coated in ice. As our captain said, "this thing is a giant Popsicle." The ground was covered in frozen slush that was very slippery to walk on, but I got some really good pictures of what I'm talking about.

As we taxied over to the deicing pad on the snow and frozen slush, it probably took about three times as much power to go about one quarter the speed that we usually taxi, and after the deicing crew had been spraying their hot glycol on our plane for over a half hour, we realized that we would not have enough fuel to get to Cleveland by the time we took off, so we returned to the gate, an hour and a half after we left.

After we refueled (and took on as much extra gas as we could carry), there ended up being a huge line for the deicing pad. We waited at the gate for about 45 minutes to be able to push back again, and then once we got out we waited about another 45 minutes in what was basically a line to get into the actual deicing line. Once we got into the real deicing line, it was probably another hour for that line and the deicing process itself.

We finally got to the snowy, slushy runway, applied full takeoff power, and after the plane slid just a foot or two forward I released the brakes and we finally got out of Montreal, about 4 1/2 hours later than we were supposed to.

Enjoy the pictures.

It just keeps snowing!

I'm sitting here in my room at the Hilton by the Montreal Airport. It's been snowing ever since we got here at 9:30 this morning. Earlier it was snowing so hard that I could barely see the runway lights out my window. The temperature is rising though, and it's supposed to turn to rain before morning, so hopefully we will have no problems getting out for our 6:00 a.m. flight.

In other news, there's a team of people that have been working on a remake of one of my favorite games, Half-Life from 1998. They released a trailer, and it is posted here for you to enjoy. I can't wait until it comes out!