"Cessna 63634, you're still transmitting on the tower frequency"

I made a landing today. It was my first landing, and exciting, yes, but the downside is now my instructor is going to make me do more of them. They are not easy. In fact, immediately after landing I forgot to change my radio frequency before getting my taxi clearance. It wasn't a big deal (this time) but I still felt like a dumbass.

My instructor says I am about 1/3 of the way to going solo. Going solo is 1/3 of the way to getting your license. So I'm a ninth of the way towards getting my license. More importantly, I don't have much time before they expect me to get in the airplane by myself and go fly it around. I've considered it in the abstract, yes. I've imagined me in a plane, flying, sort of from a third person view. I never really thought much about me actually flying alone, about all the sensations of sitting in the left seat and dealing with the controls and the tower and the fifty million things I have to remember all at once...alone. Thats going to be interesting. I've heard that In Real Life when you screw up you can't just hit a button and restart back at the beginning of the runway.

Tomorrow, starting at 9:30am, I will be the primary on call for my team at work. What that means is suddenly I will be responsible for troubleshooting and fixing a complex software system that I don't even know how to turn on. Between flying and being on call for a while, I'm going to have my hands full for a few weeks. Hopefully, though, I'll have some time after that for meeting new people.

Fortunately, for now I do have my friends that come over every week and play Settlers. I bought an expansion for it called "Traders and Barbarians." Amazon sells it for $35. I paid $50 for it at some stupid toy store that only had one wall for Legos, all because I didn't want to wait a day or two for shipping. The add on sounded promising because it lets you play with two people (cause, you know, a romantic evening of wine and dancing, then home to get comfortable and play a board game. Thats not weird at all) and there were a bunch of other cool sounding variations, including the ability to play games that are all connected into a single campaign. I imagined it would be something like one of the Dawn of War games I played. We haven't played with it yet, as the normal rules for Settlers are enough for most people to keep straight at once. This game is so complicated it made me wonder: am I now traversing a slippery slope? Am I going to get bored with just Settlers and start buying all of the extension games? Am I going to become some kind of board game nerd? I can already feel the lure of deeper rules and more discrete game states. Gameplay complexity lures me like a siren's call. If I give into this, I'm going to end up with bookshelves full of complicated board games and about zero friends willing to sit still long enough to play them with me. I already know that something is wrong because of the slight twang of disappointment when I win: I feel a strong to desire to continue playing, just so I can continue placing little wood pieces on the game board to expand my kingdom. One of these days, I will be found in my apartment, sleep-deprived and unshaven, playing Settlers all by myself. But I digress.

Nevertheless, I have mostly positive feelings about this add on I bought. You can pick and choose, and even combine (oh boy!!!) the different variations. There is one that replaces the robber with some fish--I'm excited about that. There is also one that lets you get victory points for having the most harbors, in the same way that you points by having the most roads, or the most knights. So maybe I'll convince my friends to try those.

Or maybe I should move onto other games....