I'm too handsome to do paperwork

The "Stage Two" portion of flight training should, in my opinion, be called "Stage Oh-you-thought-stage-1-was-difficult?" My instructor told me the second half would be easier, which I was looking forward to, especially since we decided to more than double the pace of my training. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be easier. I was in a plane for 2.9 hours (2 hours and 54 minutes) on Saturday and during that time I was smothered by a barrage of tasks that left me maybe 90 seconds of time to think. In a three hour flight.

On the bright side, I did get to fly through SeaTac's airspace last week. Like almost everything we do with the airplane these days, it was scary and I had no interest in doing it. SeaTac is what I think of as a real airport. The kind my friends fly in on. Its not just a runway with buildings. It is one of the busiest airports in the world, with an enormous complex containing numerous terminals and hangers and shops and escalators and security theatres. The air traffic controllers at SeaTac talk about twice as fast as the air traffic controllers I usually deal with (which, for reference, is like twice as fast as a teenage girl). However, once I had made our radio call and gotten permission to fly over SeaTac (after making the radio controller think I was a total idiot) we flew over the runways--while a jet was landing. We flew over a jet, a commercial jet, the kind that carries people. And I could see the tower (this should not be surprising, as they damn sure wanted to keep an eye on me). For some reason that got me super psyched for being a pilot: knowing that people I know could be flying to Seattle on some big jet, and here I could be flying over them as they landed.

Then Saturday we did a cross country flight. This involves spending more time doing paperwork than actually flying the airplane. Such paperwork includes drawing pencil lines on maps and reading twenty pages of "CIG BLW 010/VIS BLW 3SM BR. CONS CONT THRU 09Z." In theory, I can read that. You fill out this navigation log that you take with you and are supposed to write on while your flying the airplane. I did boost my confidence to land at two airports I'd never been too, but filling out that stupid nav log sucked all the joy out of flying.

Then I came home, and was to tired to go out, and needed to go to bed early so I could get up early and make up some of the work I've missed because of flying lessons, so I stayed at home and started watching tv, but apparently everyone else who likes the shows that I like was out having fun, because there was nothing on tv. I watched a little comedy central, but then a Girls Gone Wild commercial came on to remind me that I was another loser sitting at home watching tv on a saturday night. It was so depressing I actually muted the commercial and surfed through the tv guide. And then--I don't know if you know this--I learned that those stupid commercials last like five minutes. Videos of girls that you pay money for. That's not a difficult concept to grasp.

Despite how much I complain about being busy, I still have 1-2 hours of free time before going to bed. I should spend it studying flight stuff, but usually sick of it by then. I used to spend that time on craiglist and okcupid, but that only convinced me that there are no girls on the internet. For a week or two I started playing this medieval game called Evony, which I discovered because I clicked on a banner ad with a half naked girl with a provocative facial expression. The game was ok, and I was quite happy while playing it. You build these cities, and then attack people. And then my cities got attacked by someone with a lot more time on their hands, and so I quit. This means I am back to having an hour or two of free time. I think I might buy a windows computer just so I can play computer games again.

Speaking of windows, I've discovered a wonderful new "feature" of Ubuntu. I use quotes around "feature" because it is clearly a bug or design flaw that was introduced intentionally by someone who will live a long and healthy life if they never meet me. Before I describe this feature, I would just like to say that one of the things that impressed me with Linux was its ability to actually work. Like, it does what you tell it to. Tell it to take down a network interface, and the interface goes down. Send a HUP (or whatever) to the graphical system, and it reloads. Tell it to shutdown now, and the system literally shuts down now. It doesnt run around asking programs if they feel like stopping, it just gives them a chance to clean up and halts the system. Well, unless you run Ubuntu. When I tell Ubuntu to shut down, I come back to my computer 8 hours later surprised to find it still running, with a message that "Unknown Program" failed to shut down. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I take it that this means shutting down linux is becoming like shutting down windows: the operating system runs around asking all the programs if they fell like stopping, and if one doesn't, for example a poorly written Nokia 2600 driver, or the print spooler, or, I don't know, a virus that shouldn't be there anyway, then the operating system doesn't shut down. One more aspect of Windows that I absolutely hate has been ported over.

Someday...I am just going to take an entire day and fix my computer situation. Of course I also need to fix my clothing situation, and my furnitue situation, and my empty walls situation. People were making fun of my coffee table, which was still a cardboard box, so I moved the box to the side of the futon in my living room and made it into an end table. I really like boxes for that reason...with a little imagination, they can become any piece of furniture you want. So...I need to go to Ikea soon. I also need a shelf for my desk at work; I have 4 monitors at work (counting my laptop) and I'd like to up that to about 6 or 7, but there is no more room on my desk so I'm going vertical, and for that I need a monitor shelf that can hold 3 or 4 20" monitors. I can't seem to find any for some reason. I am hoping Ikea has some kind of do-it-yourself modular shelving unit that will work for me.