Coming back home from work, saw the beautiful cloud colors. Photos taken from the crest of Permanente Creek Bridge.
A Pacific storm has just passed, and clouds parted for the last rays of sunset. Need more of such beautiful displays.
After waiting for over a year, I finally got a hangar at San Jose International Airport (KSJC). Moved my airplane there on return from the Grand Canyon trip.
San Jose is much closer from my homethan San Martin (12 km vs. 60 km) so the commute time to the airplane should be much less. GA West, as it is called, is actually closer to Mountain View, than the “secure” airline terminal side (which is on the east side of the airport).
Since it is a “big” international airport, the challenge is to obtain all kinds of authorizations and badges to get in and out of the field. I have just completed a security awareness course (and test!). The airport also requires a background check. No fingerprinting, although I half expected I would need to provide all kinds of biometric data to get proper access. The test was quite ridiculous, questions asked were of “how do you recognize a terrorist?” or “what is tailgating?” nature.
I should have a badge next week. Actually looking forward to populating the hangar a bit with tools so that I could start tinkering with the plane. So many things to do, so little time.
My favorite tomato soup of all time. It combines the light flavor of Polish tomato soup with American roasted chicken flavor. Simply delicious.
Seriously. You just bought a full size Costco roasted chicken. Have at it. Preserve all the bones, just discard the rubber cord the chicken is held together with. When you are done eating meat, separate the rest of the meat from bones and store for later. This is necessary because if you boil the meat, it will become flavorless mass. It is better to separate it now and add it back later.
Peel and chop onions. No need to chop onions finely. Just do a coarse chop, the onion layers will separate in the water. Also, do not forget to rinse your plastic Costco box that housed the roasted chicken. There is a lot of flavor left in there, use that water as a base for the broth.
These are the only prep steps needed before boiling the broth!
Cover your ingredients with filtered water. Don’t forget to add the water you rinsed your plastic Costco chicken box with! Bring to boil and boil for about an hour or 75 minutes on a small power setting. Add pepper and salt about mid way through this time, it will help with flavor. When the broth is done, remove all bones from the pot. You need a patience for this step — there is a lot of free floating bones in the broth. Due to all the fat and meat pieces, you won’t see the bones so you need to go fishing for them.
When you are reasonably sure there are no more bones left in the broth, it is time to add tomatoes. Open the tomato paste and crushed/cubed tomatoes and just add them in, stirring. Chop the remaining meat to preferred size and add it in as well. Continue stirring until tomato paste dissolves.
Congratulations, you are done!
The soup goes well with egg pasta, boiled white rice or with no carbohydrate filler. Add a splash of whipping cream to improve the color. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Enjoy!
Chop the onions, combine with bones and carrots in a large pot.
Separate the meat out before boiling.
Don't forget to rinse the container for the remaining roasted chicken flavor.
All the broth ingredients in a pot, boiling.
Ever since I learned how to fly, I wanted to fly my own airplane over the Grand Canyon. It only took me 16 years to actually realize this dream but it was magnificent. You can see for yourself.
Grand Canyon airspace is a SFRA. SFRA means Special Flight Rules Area, so normal flight rules are augmented by several additional ones. For example, there are no-fly zones, where you cannot fly under 14,500 feet (like Toroweap / Shinumo Flight Free Zone or Bright Angel Flight Free Zone which is pictured above on the chart excerpt). The area is divided into several corridors that criss-cross the Grand Canyon. No, you cannot overfly the length of the canyon below 14,500 feet. You are also required to keep specific altitudes in the allowed corridors.
I planned to take off from Sedona, fly north to intercept the Dragon Corridor entrance and fly it northbound at 11,500 feet. Then turn around, descend to 10,500 and fly the Fossil Canyon Corridor. Then overfly Diamond Creek sector and depart the area to the west direct towards Apple Valley airport where I planned a fuel stop.
There were no modifications to the plan. I flew what I planned. See the overflight videos below.
I took some more pictures while flying. Amazing, majestic views, I strongly encourage you to fly there yourself, you won’t regret it, no chance.
After the adventure with the alternator pulley the previous day, I was ready for a Grand Canyon tour. Got up early, took off at sunrise and was greeted with this spectacular view. See for yourself in the attached video.
The airport in Sedona is situated on a mesa above the city. On takeoff, don’t abort too close to the end of the runway because you will fall off the cliff (literally). Know your performance numbers and define your abort-takeoff point before you start your takeoff roll.
Approaching Sedona on a nice Wednesday afternoon, winds calm, approach a bit bumpy, but nothing excessive. On short final, just before the touchdown I noticed the alternator warning light flashing. This meant that the battery was draining and alternator has failed. I have recently went through a costly alternator repair (where the alternator was fine but the field wire to the alternator started exhibiting high resistance) so I thought that maybe this was connected to that repair.
Taxied to the transient parking, shut down, got out and saw that the alternator belt pulley failed causing the belt to completely slip in the tracks.
For a video that is completely out of focus, see below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpSlpxwovIw
There were no mechanics available on the field, just fuel, but I got a phone number to a guy local FBO were using. Bob Luna arrived an hour later and said it was a good thing the belt did not fail because we would have to remove the propeller to fix that issue.
We took off the cowling and immediately noticed the solution. Bob removed the identical pulley from the other side which was powering the air conditioning compressor and replaced the failed alternator pulley. That meant I lost air conditioning but the airplane was charging its battery again 🙂
Need to purchase a replacement and put it back on the air conditioning compressor. It is not obvious from the picture, but the pulley has a rubber insert that houses the ball bearings. The rubber insert and the ball bearings were nowhere to be found. Gravity ate them probably.
We fired the plane off, charging was fine, air conditioner belt was spinning a little bit but not too much. Bob was convinced it would not catch in anything around the engine and it was safe to continue the flight. We replaced the cowling, I paid Bob $60 and something extra on top of that and went in to find a room for the night, as it was getting pretty late.
Found a room at the Sky Ranch Lodge, very expensive, but see the views below for yourself.
After spending the night in San Diego, I arrived at the airport around 10 AM, paid $5 overnight parking fee and ordered the tanks to be topped off. The photo above is actually from the evening of the day before.
After a brief delay of about 30 minutes, I took off San Diego’s Montgomery Field for a trip to Sedona, Arizona. I followed the border with Mexico, keeping a proper distance of about 6 miles (10 km). I did not want any mishaps with unauthorized border crossing!
Initially, San Diego controllers refused my request for flight following, indeed they were very busy with several practice approaches and a string of arrivals into San Diego International. I listened to the approach frequency but picked up my flight following only around Yuma, AZ.
Passing Yuma, I bent towards the north-east, following the restricted area boundaries towards Prescott, Arizona. At Prescott, I went direct Sedona.
USS Kittiwake was a submarine support and rescue ship, in service from 1946 through 1994. In 1986, it recovered the black box from shuttle Challenger disaster. It was decommissioned in 1994. In 2009, US Navy sold USS Kittiwake to Cayman Islands for $1. The group of dive shops then chimed in and arranged to strip the ship of all items that could be dangerous to the Cayman Reef system. USS Kittiwake was finally sunk off Seven Mile Beach, Grand Cayman on 5 January 2011.
Kittiwake is a wreck dive although it was sunk on purpose, not accidentally. The deepest point, near the propelling screws is at 20 meters, the top of the bow is at 6 meters. All in all, it is a pretty deep dive, especially for young divers like Anna. It was her deepest dive to date!
I stumbled upon Ted Dziuba’s blog today and found this gem: “Independent object cycles where one of the objects has a __del__ method don’t get garbage collected.” I didn’t know that.
I didn’t know Gunnery Sergeant Hartman knew Python either… Live and learn 🙂
This is how I learned to write decorators:
class Decorator:
def __init__(self, func):
self.func = func
def __call__(self, *args):
# do stuff
return self.func(*args)
But today I was reminded of the classic way of writing decorators:
def mydecorator(func):
def mydecorator_guts(*args, **kwargs):
# do stuff
return func(*args, **kwargs)
return mydecorator_guts
Simpler and more to the point. And NO CLASSES. This ain’t Java 🙂
