Monday, October 08, 2007

Dispatches from the Abyss - Monday, Oct. 8th

Thank God I survived another Monday! All things considered today was not too bad at the office, a bit boring, but not too bad. I had an extended conversation with the paralegal who from now on shall be known as the Old Bitch from Hell. I have probably bitched about her before however I am too lazy to go back and look it up. There are three problems with the OBfH:

1. She thinks she knows how to do my job and tries to tell me what to do. Usually I am able to overcome this by ignoring her and giving her what she actually wants rather than what she asks for.

2. She is just not a nice person.

3. She is not terribly organized. We will receive stuff back from the vendors and I will load it. She will then spend quite a bit of time working herself up into a tizzy over what the vendor did wrong only to find out it was something she had done wrong or not instructed the vendor to do in the first place. This is very frustrating since I am the point of contact with the vendors.

Oh well, she was a minor part of my day and I am moving on!

Before we put the subject of the air show to bed I wanted to share a few of my favorite pictures with you guys. The first is the first picture I took when I got to the air show:


This is Rayburn Thompson's Spitfire. I am not sure what model it is, however I have heard that it is a D-Day vet with either two or three confirmed kills. I love the shafts of light coming through the clouds in the back. When I was young I always thought shafts of light like that were epiphanies.

Here is a close-up of the Spit's nose with the sun just barely hidden by the prop spinner:


The next picture is of NASA's 377SGT-F Super Guppy aircraft:


This is a really cool transport aircraft which is based on the Boeing 377 fuselage. The interior diameter of the hold is 25 feet and the nose swings away so large components can be loaded into the bay. You can read more about this plane here. I love this plane because of its unique profile and the Wings Over Houston air show was the first time I had ever seen one. I have vague memories of my dad giving me a model kit of the Guppy as a gift one year.

The next two pictures I decided to get artsy and use the puddles on the tarmac to take pictures of the reflections of the planes rather than take pictures of the planes themselves. It strikes me as somewhat appropriate since some refer to these war birds as ghosts:


This picture is of the nose section of the P-51D Mustang "Gunfighter" which is operated by the Great Plains Wing of the CAF out of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Every time I type the name of the Great Plains Wing I have a TON of trouble not typing Planes.


This picture is a reflection of the bottom of the Lone Star Flight Museum's F6F-5N Hellcat. In an interesting coincidence the pilot of this plane lives in Midlothian, the same small town where my parents live.

This final picture is of the USAF Heritage Flight they performed this year:


The F-15E Strike Eagle is from the USAF Strike Eagle Demo Team. I have no idea who owns/operates the F-4 Phantom or even what model the plane is, however it is nice to see one in the air. I forget how mean they look in flight. The final plane is the Lone Star Flight Museum's P-47D Thunderbolt "Tarheel Hal."

Now I think I have bored you with enough talk of air shows for awhile so we will move on to other subjects!

First I want to thank T, otherwise known as the Egotistical Priest, for pointing all the traffic my way. Whenever she links to my blog she almost doubles my daily hit-counts! Now if only I could keep some of those people coming back. Speaking of people that keep coming back, I notice there are several of you who have me in your Google feed reader, which is an awesome tool, but would you cats do me a favor and give me a shout-out in the comments next time you're about? I noticed I got three hits from Google feed readers in the UK and I am trying to figure out who might be reading me across the pond. If it is Scott's mom or dad I want to know so I can start posting outrageous lies about him.

Speaking of Google I would just like to take a moment to announce that I am currently the first site Google returns when one searches for the mannsier. I am not certain whether I should be proud of this or not, but there it is. (Or rather here it is.)


Right now I am not too certain what I should talk about. I am listening to the Braveheart soundtrack and exchanging emails with my dad about attending the air show. Apparently he was thinking about going with me this year but did not realize it was this soon! Maybe we'll get to go together next year.

I just noticed the other day that I have not uploaded any pictures to my Webshots account since I put my pictures from Scotland up there. The one exception to this is the pictures from the Brent Mullins Jeep Parts Open House in March. That gallery usually gets me a bunch of hits (here is the gallery from 2006) although my Flipside galleries (2004, 2005 #1, and 2005 #2) tend to do pretty well, too. As of right now I have pictures from the Brian O'Neill's Kilt Night, the Houston Zoo, St. Paul's Methodist Cathedral, the LSFM Air Show, Fire Spinning at Heidi's, Anne's Wedding, Flipside, a party at Rob's house, the Parasol Project Civic Art House, and Hawaii that need to be posted. I think I am going to concentrate on getting the Wings Over Houston album cut down a bit before I load any new galleries.

I also need to work on a new slideshow for my MySpace page. I am thinking of making a Year in Review slideshow which covers everything from my trip to Scotland through the end of the year. One potential title is '07 with the CM.

Since I screwed up and started this MUCH later than I meant to due to a wonky clock on my laptop, I am going to go ahead and cut this short for the evening and get things posted to the Opiate. See you guys tomorrow!

SOUNDTRACK
Braveheart Soundtrack by James Horner

No comments: