Nothing much to say lately...

Don't give up, I'm still blogging - when I have something to say!

A combination of poor weather, illness, and general holiday busyness have kept me from soaring lately. I've only been to the field one weekend out of the last 6, and that day the weather was not worth investing in a tow fee. Today I considered going out... although there was a 50% chance of rain, I thought it might hold out until late afternoon. But the soaring forecast was the worst I've ever seen: 48! And as it turned out, the rain started where I live about noon. Maybe next weekend...

In the meantime, I've been studying. I recently acquired the FAA Aviation Instructor's Handbook and I'm about two-thirds of the way through it.

I also recently purchased a new soaring simulator named Condor. It seems fairly popular - I've seen mention of about 1,000 members on their virtual competition web site. So far I've only had one flight in it. It seemed to work OK. I need to find where the manual and help files etc. are located. I also need to figure out how to make the instruments bigger: they're too hard to read accurately. It does not seem to have the annoying problem I noticed with Sailors of the Sky, which made it hard to fly correctly. SOTS seemed to have an undesirable linkage between the ailerons and rudder on my joystick: using the ailerons always invoked the rudder as well. Condor seems more well-behaved. It does not come with any of the ships I fly, but maybe I can find them for download.

As for blogging: my blog has been receiving unsolicited, unrelated, and often inappropriate comments. In other words, some people have figured out how to post ads as blog comments. I'm not sure why, but I imagine it's a way to get their ads picked up by search engines for free. So I've had to turn on "comment moderation" on my blog. If you post a comment, it won't show up to the public until I approve it. Sorry, folks. I do appreciate the comments and advice people have contributed! But I refuse to have inappropriate ads posted, so this extra step has become necessary.