Oh. (more) Canada.

Well, I'm in Montreal again, for the third time this winter. I have yet to see the actual ground here. For all I know it could all be painted white, or maybe purple or red. While the ground is covered with a few feet of snow, for once the sun is shining, so I know it does indeed come out here in Montreal. I have at least four more overnights here this winter, so I still have a chance of seeing the ground. One thing that's kind of neat, though, is that I can watch the inauguration on CTV, BBC, or CNN, and there's some French station that has it too. There's also hockey if I don't want to watch the inauguration. That's just about all that's on.

I'm here pretty much all day, and I don't plan on leaving the hotel room. Everything's all cold and French out there, and I'd rather not deal with it. I got two 200 gigabyte hard drives for my laptop for Christmas, and my goal is to put just about every game I've ever played on it, especially the older ones that are by now very nostalgic and don't take up much space. I'm almost done. I have a flight sim from just about every era of aviation installed (most of them I have yet to learn), and today I'm going to put on all my old Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games.

Back at home, we got a webcam for Abee's laptop, which is great, because now I can video conference much more frequently with Adelaide. Abee just puts the laptop on the floor and I watch Adelaide play with her toys and try to crawl. Adelaide can see me and seems to understand a little of what's going on, at least that it's me she's seeing.

Well, that's about it for now, everything else is pretty much "back to the grind," so I may not have much to write about for a while--

Oh! That reminds me. You may have heard of US Airways flight 1549, the flight that ditched in the Hudson River, with all 155 aboard surviving. I all but saw that happen right in front of me. We were first in line to land at LaGuardia, when ATC told us to break off from our approach so that another flight could return to the field after a problem on takeoff. Of course they never made it. As air traffic control directed us to turn south over the Hudson, they asked the aircraft behind us to look for an aircraft very low over the Hudson "less than 200 feet." That's extremely low, so we knew something bad was happening. The next aircraft in line said they spotted 1549 floating in the Hudson. Probably about five minutes after they went down, ATC turned us back to the north for another holding pattern, and we caught a glimpse of the Airbus, with two ferries already alongside, and at least two more steaming full speed towards them. We did not expect there to be many survivors, simply because the water was so cold, and historically airliner ditchings do not go very well. It wasn't until after we landed at LaGuardia and found a TV inside that we learned that all aboard escaped alive. When the news reported that birds were the most likely cause, I had a hard time believing that the flight could be both so unlucky as to have birds take out both engines, and then so lucky as to have all aboard survive, but it looks like that's what happened. The crew certainly did a great job. Thank God that this went the way it did.

Well, that's all for now. I'm going to install some more games, and then see if I can maybe get a little farther in Doom 3.