Living the Dream in West Chester...

If Twitter is supposed to be the answer to the question (that honestly, nobody asked), "What are you doing now?" Then a blog can be more about what did you do tonight, today, this month, on your summer vacation, this year, and use as many words as you like. So here's what I did today.

I have had another interesting week transitioning into my new gig at work. Well honestly it wasn't that bad, but I'm the kind of guy who likes to jump in and figure out how to swim along the way, as opposed to over study something and then somehow be an expert swimmer the moment my toes hit the water. Learn by doing, on the job training, that's the kind of retention skills I have, as opposed to theoretical, abstract learning. I guess that's why Geometry and Statistics were such fun classes for me than the other types of mathematics classes I took in school, they seemed instantly applicable to real world scenarios. But I digress, I can assure you I did no math today. I mention all of this because after a week like this, plus with the GF visiting again, and a day that was forecast to have no sunshine in it, I was looking forward to about 24 hours of sleep, but alas, none was to be had because much had to be done.
What I did do, is rent a U-Haul van, so that I might transport my little Yamaha C3 Scooter to Martin Motorsports for it's 700 mile tune up and get a part recall taken care of, just in time for the spring riding season. I'm obviously going to jump into riding it early now and ride later into the year as to recoup any advantage that comes from the 117 MILES PER GALLON (that's right, 117 MPG) that the scooter gets, before it becomes too cold and therefore too impractical to ride a scooter 11 miles through the back roads of West Chester, East and West Goshen, Malvern and Paoli to get to work. Not to mention the idea of riding around in the darkness a scooter that can barely keep up with 35 mph traffic.

I got my scooter from the garage of a friend of mine who was so gracious as to store it there for the winter with the only requirement that he get to ride it around every once in a while, and then I made the trek up to Boyertown, Pennsylvania where I bought the scooter originally from Martin Motorsports. It's a great place, as they sell Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki, and Triumph. Oh man, and check this out, you know me I'm all about an aesthetic, about a vibe, over any sort of practicality, although often times the two overlap. When I went the showroom to look around at the new motorcycles that I can't afford and probably from a skill perspective have no business trying to ride, (even though I did pass the Harley Davidson Learn to Ride Course....barely), I saw this little beauty, the 2009 Suzuki TU-250X. (I'm pretty sure the TU is not from the Tupolev Design Bureau that designs such fine aircraft as the TU-95 NATO Code Name "Bear" and the TU-144 "Concordski".

Seriously though, isn't this bike cool? With it's 1970's retro look, yet 21st century reliability? I hope they keep this in production long enough for me to put some scratch together, I think it might be the way to go as badly as I would love to get my hands on Royal Enfield Military, I'm afraid I'm not quite the mechanic it would take to own an R.E., but hey one of the things I get to look forward to as I get older is becoming more reclusive and crotchety as I spend hours away from family and friends in a garage, (or maybe please God a hanger) working on inanimate objects in my own greasy jumpsuit like some sort of fat and dirty Doctor Thaddeus Venture. That would be the life.

So after the bike thing, I drove my empty van back towards the U-Haul place but not before consulting with my new iPhone to see how far out of my way would it be to check out Pottstown Municipal Airport. As it turned out of course, not far!

I love small town airports, as every time you walk into the shack where the staff works it's like walking into someones living room who's obsessed (like I am) about airplanes. Model Airplanes hang from the ceiling, pictures of airplanes line the walls, old men with baseball caps that have airplanes on them argue with each other over various aspects of aviation regulations and flying techniques, younger to middle age guys living the dream of flight show up to meet their often much younger flight instructor for their 1 hour session of turning 100 dollar bills into smoke.

Good times, good times.

The best part of a hometown airport, is the security system. In this post 9/11 world, with the monster of a bureaucracy that the Transportation Security Administration is becoming, the TSA should back off worrying about these small town airports as a potential threat to national security, especially if they all employ the guard cats that they do at Pottstown Municipal. Because as we all know, the thing that terrorists fear above anything else, is a little pussy.

The fine folks at TNT Air at Pottstown Municipal asked me to pass along to anyone who might be interested, they want the world to know they have two prides of joy there, (and who knows how many cats, that might be an operational security secret, ok TSA?) one of them is N22904, a Cessna 172 SP with the Garmin G1000 "Glass Cockpit" and almost all LCD display cockpit with GPS navigation and engine management hardware built right into the displays. The word "cool", doesn't begin to cover it's innate coolness.

The other thing that they are proud of is their Full Motion Simulator, which can be programmed to be almost any type of aircraft, flying from anywhere in the world, under any weather conditions! Suffice to say, it's pretty neat-o. Tie a few of those things in on a network and make them Mustangs and Messerschmitts, (a whole mess of Messerschmits! as Buggs Bunny would say on mthose now banned to due to politically incorrect WWII stereotypes) and I might be there every weekend.

Of course a consequence of such a pursued lifestyle as mentioned above would be that I would soon forget the touch of a woman, and having had gaps in my life where that happened, I don't think I'm going to risk it, so like with everything else moderation is the key word here, but generally speaking I'm thinking my 40's will be a pretty fun decade to live through.