I See What You're Doing There

I soloed last Saturday. That means my flight instructor started acting all shady, and then he got out of the airplane, and I took off by myself. Alone. I tried not to think about the fact that I was alone. In fact, I normally have to constantly tell my instructor what I'm doing (otherwise he doesn't know whether to scold me for forgetting to do something or just not doing it fast enough) and I continued this stream of updates...telling the empty chair beside me that there was no traffic on final, announcing to it my takeoff roll checklist, telling it when I was beginning my descent, etc.

Something you might find interesting about landing an airplane (besides the fact that it is ironically the most difficult maneuver) is that at the first sign of trouble the pilot adds full power, climbs back up into the sky, and flies all the way around the runway to try again. This is like if you were trying to park a car in your driveway and your neighboors dog got too close and you pulled back out and drove around the block again.

I had to do three landings, and in between I only had to do two go arounds. I also forgot that I was in a plane and not a car, literally, and tried to turn off the runway and onto a taxi way at like 20 knots, which made the plane skid across the tarmac a bit. Apparently planes were not made for cornering on the ground. Who knew?


In other news, I'm learning a lot about car insurance. Apparently the way this works is when you get into an accident, you don't just send the insurance company a receipt for the repair bill. No, some guy who is not a mechanic comes and looks at the car in your dimly lit garage, and then estimates how much the insurance company officially thinks it will cost to fix it. This estimate is based on crappy repair shops that use crappy parts but like getting business from the insurance companies. Then you take your car to a real repair shop, show them a picture of the duck boat that mauled your car, and they give you the real estimate which is larger than the insurance company's by a factor of 5.

The important part of the story is that I don't have a car for three weeks. I'm using zipcars to get to Boeing Field, which, by the way, was the reason I bought Jessica to begin with. So I wouldn't have to rent zipcars to get to the airport. But, again, I'm not in the hospital.

That reminds me though. I'd like to share an experience I've had while driving in the city of Seattle, so I spent about 20 minutes drawing this diagram:


Do you notice anything completely nonsensical about this intersection? Like maybe the force right turn where there are no one-way streets involved? Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a real intersection in Seattle. In fact, I dealt with this and two other similar intersections last night on my way back to drop off the zip car. There is no reason for this. It wasn't a big intersection, just two two-lane roads...intersecting. I was in the lucky lane that was forced to turn right when I actually needed to turn left. There was a cop there, so I turned right and drove a block out of my way and made my third u-turn for the night. Its as if the people designing the roads knew where I needed to go, and put all their unecessary limitations on that path of travel.

When I got here I was a bit starry-eyed and thought everyone here was pretty cool and smart. They're not. Nothing about this city appears to be well designed. In fact, the next time you see me remind me to bring my sectional so I can complain about the airspace here. But I digress.

I have a theory. It has little to no basis on facts, and is built on ignorance and assumptions, however, if a bunch of gay bloggers can make up ridiculous conspiracy theories about Amazon, I'm pretty confident I can say whatever I want about this city's governance. You see, we don't like cars here. We, as in the stupid hippies that "run things." Because we don't like cars, we try to do a bunch of things to make it really inconvenient to have one. For example, we design every parking garage in the city to have spaces sized for a small motorcycle, so that when a bunch of pretentious SUVs get parked there, everyone basically has to kind of open their door an inch and slide in and out of their car without choking on their own window. Then make all these bus lanes and bus-only bridges and intersections where only the busses go straight. Or we take roads like say...2nd and 3rd avenue, and make them one way (one way for cars only, not busses) but only during certain times of the day, like 6am to 9:30am and 5pm to 6:30pm, and all the roads on either size degrade into ridiculous mazes, so every unsuspecting driver who gets caught there will turn off and get caught in all kinds of ridiculous traffic during the unwanted detour.

However, we don't really offer anything to replace the cars with. Apparently, packing yourself onto a gas guzzling bus with a bunch of sketchy people is morally superior to driving a gas guzzling car. But we don't want people to have trains or anything. At least, not ones that go anywhere.

There is a monorail here. It goes roughly half a mile. According to some friends in a bar, the city spent 90 million on it, and then some dick living on the west side kept collecting signatures to vote on canceling the project, and it went to vote 9 times before the monorail project got canned. We have a bunch of bridges here with way to much traffic, and the highways in general rival Phillys 76 (which I didn't think was possible), but we can't get trains in and out because for some strange reason people keep voting them down. I don't really know what they vote for around here. I kind of want to register to vote here just so I go and vote no for everything.

We do have a light rail. Based on personal obervation, light rail means "small an inefficient train." The trains go through the bus tunnels, which I guess are actually just a subway now that real trains are going through. Well, except that the busses also go through the tunnels still. And someone, somewhere, made this rule that busses and trains cannot both be in the terminal at the same time, so both the busses and trains often have to wait at the threshold of a station while the other type departs. This means that you'll be on the train and you'll here "now arriving at westlake" and the trains stops and you stand up and look out through the windows at the walls of the tunnel.

The trains themselves are shiny, way shorter than a Philly subway train, and have a pathetic capacity. Imagine if someone sat down with you, handed you a piece of paper, and told you to design a train that held as few people as possible. That's how I think these trains got designed. You would think that if you got on a train, you would see maybe rows of chairs to sit on. Seattle's light rail trains instead actaully contain a number of walls, with a few seats tucked in here or there just so no one gets confused and thinks they're in a hallway. They go slightly faster than a bus.

Also, I am clearly in the minority of people who are bothered by this. The other people who live here seem to think that Seattle is awesome. In fact, some people that I've talked to actually moved here first, and then tried to find a job. They weren't just lured here by money. As in, they came here because they somehow thought Seattle was cool before they moved here. I'm not sure what's so great...annd...I probably shouldn't share this journal with any of them. I think our difference of opinion be a result of a difference in our definitions of awesome. When I think of "awesome" I usually think of me being the only male player on an all-female volleyball team. When other people think of "awesome" they seem to think of beer that isn't quite good enough to be sold more than 25 miles away from where its made. To each his own, I guess.