Sunday, February 15th, 2004

Time	Event
2:31a	my car is no snowmobile The Insight would not be a wise choice of primary vehicle in any place where winter weather is a regular occurrence. Here in south-central Texas, one need not worry about actual winter weather more than once every few years. But shortly after midnight on saturday morning, it started to snow significantly. I was over at paradox0220's place watching movies until after midnight, knowing full well that snow was in the forecast. By the time we left, ther was already almost an inch of snow on the cars and road. We brushed the snow off our cars and set out on the trek home. Now, it was dark and snowing pretty heavily, yet it took me a while to realize that the main reason I couldn't see very far ahead was that my headlights were covered in snow and just accumulating more. I had to stop and brush them off a couple of times. The Insight did not do well in those conditions for a couple of reasons. One is that the tires are made of a hard compound (for better fuel efficiency) and are quite narrow, leaving little opportunity for traction. The other is that an electric motor offers full torque even at the lowest engine speeds. So no matter how gently I pushed on the accelerator, I was always getting too much torque. Torque, of course, is what breaks tires loose and I sure was doing a lot of that. Fortunately, I was able to get enough traction after stopping at lights to continue on my way home. The most difficult part of the trip was climbing the last hill into my neighborhood. I got about a quarter the way up the hill when I lost forward momentum. Whenever I tried to go forward, I would instead slide closer to the edge of the road. Fortunately however, when one wheel dropped into the gutter, I noticed I had some traction again. I guess the rough road edge, combined with a limited slip transaxle, worked together to allow me to make it up the hill. I'm sure that wasn't good for the transaxle, but I just wanted to get home. I realized later that it wouldn't have been a big deal just to park the car in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill and walk the rest of the way home, but oh well. Now, I'm sure all you non-Texans are laughing at all this excitement, but I just have to remind you that I grew up in Canada and snow is nothing unusual to me, but it's been about 12 years since I've had to deal with it much. Rain makes me smile. Snow makes me positively giddy! (2 Comments | Comment on this)
9:51p	jumping out of fully functional aircraft decibel45 has been bugging me for months to go skydiving. I hadn't made any plans to go, but yesterday morning after going out to play in the snow I realized that it would be great weather for skydiving. The sun was out, there was some snow left on the ground, and I didn't have anything else planned for the day. I left at about 11:30 and by that time the snow was almost all gone. The snow lasted less than 12 hours from first fall to last melt! I picked up snaxxx on the way and we headed down to Skydive San Marcos. I got paired up with Erik who would be my tandem master, so he would be securely strapped to my back for the entire jump. I had never jumped out of a plane before, and the closest thing I had to compare it to was a bungee jump about ten years ago. I remember feeling apprehensive about stepping off the platform for the bungee jump, and I figured I would have similar feelings when jumping out of the plane. However, I was completely relaxed and felt no hesitation at all on my way out. This surprised me. On the way out of the plane we tumbled once so I caught a glimpse of the plane quickly getting smaller above us. That's about the only way you can tell that you are in fact falling, as soon as you settle into a belly-down freefall position it feels like you're just hanging there, a mile above the clouds. Except for the wind of course, which was cold up there (the weather report said it was −8°C at 12000 feet, not considering wind chill). There was still some cloud cover, so we ended up falling through a thin cloud. The coolest part about that was seeing the reflection of the sun. The sun was behind me on my right, so in front of me on my left was the reflection of the sun in the cloud. This looked like a bright spot surrounded by a halo, caused by a similar mechanism to that of a rainbow (internal reflections from water droplets or ice crystals). There were no visible colors like a rainbow though, it all blended together for a white reflection. Less than a minute after leaving the plane Erik pulled the chute, which was a lot less violent than I had imagined. He had me grab the control lines for the chute and do some turns, and one steep turn that essentially amounted to a spiral dive. I was looking around trying to estimate how high we were, and before I knew it we were approaching the landing site. We had a very smooth landing right on target. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Would I jump again? Probably; I'd like to try a solo jump sometime. But to get to that point is fairly costly, I can take six or seven glider flights for the price of one tandem jump. (4 Comments | Comment on this)

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