This is an Epiphone ES 335 Dot in the cherry finish. Guess I’ll now have to learn Neil Diamond’s “Cherry Cherry” !

C-FWZZ

My site devoted to C-FWZZ, the Piper Aircraft Corporation PA-23-250-C “Aztec” that I was in care and control of for over 16 years, has just today been officially re-launched and is running on WordPress 3.2.1. Initially created in June of 2005 while I was in Quebec City, Quebec and in of all things, Microsoft FrontPage, it went through a few iterations over the years.

From the FrontPage version, I migrated it to a proper HTML/CSS site using Dreamweaver; then to Joomla!. And from Joomla! it went to Drupal and now it has found it’s home with WordPress. Check out my blog on GoodCheapFastWebSites.com for the lo down and rationale.

03 April 1972 – Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: First Solo Cross Country!

Piper Cherokee 140 – PA-28-140, CF-YTY: YXE – YQW – YPA – YXE; 3:05 WOW! Freedom!

First solo cross country flight! I remember following along the north shore of the North Saskatchewan river, on the first leg of the two full stop journey, en-route from Saskatoon to North Battleford, looking down at the patches of snow that were persisting in the fields and the ice yet on the river and thinking, man, what in the heck am I doing here! Flying and airplane! Alone! Not even 17 years old! Am I crazy?! But what a complete and total sense of freedom; and now, in three dimensions.

I don’t recall a lot about the rest of it; isn’t that something; mind you, it had been almost 40 years; yes, I had to go into the Ministry of Transport (now Transport Canada) Air Radio Station (now Flight Services) and get my logbook signed by the on-duty operator; but the details of the other two legs, North Battleford to Prince Albert and from there back to Saskatoon, elude me; can’t even recollect the landings; guess I was too busy taking it all in.

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Piper Cherokee PA-28-140, CF-YTZ, Ray’s Flying Service – Vern Forbes, instructor: 10 minutes; one circuit on runway 08 !

First solo! WOW!

I was not certain that this day was going to be “the day”; Vern had only previously mentioned that he thought I was ready; on final approach of the second of touch-and-go when I heard him tell the tower that we would be making a full stop, I knew this was “the day”! damn! sure enough, we pulled over to the side, he gave me a quick pep talk and said “see ya in a few minutes”; OK, here I go! thing is, I was not as uptight as I thought I may be; I had been training on a fairly regular basis and felt up for the task; I guess Vern thought so too; that 10 minutes was over way too soon; yes I did remember to stop and pick Vern up and he was very pleased with what he had seen from his vantage point; I was too, as the landing was one of my better ones; no cutting the shirt tales afterwards as they didn’t really get into that sort of thing at Ray’s Flying Service, but I didn’t mind; I had done it, and that is all that mattered.

Piper Cherokee PA-28-140, CF-YTZ, Ray’s Flying Service – Vern Forbes, instructor: 35 minutes!

My career in aviation officially begins at age 15 years, 3 months, 8 days with my first flying lesson; thanks Dad

The book by Arthur Hailey got me interested but seeing the movie at the old Capitol Theatre in Saskatoon, SK with my Mom and Dad sealed the deal; both were of course titled “Airport”; I’ve never been the “same” since As anyone will tell you that has been bitten, once the aviation “bug” bites, that’s it; you’re done; oh, you may try to leave; I have on a few occasions, but you always come back; I think it has a lot to do with the smells; avgas, jet fuel, PRC, interiors (they smell different than cars); then there is the flying itself; for those of you who have done so all by your lonesome, you know exactly what I am talking about.

Oh get your mind out of the gutter; I’m talking about the recent trend in laptop screen design; the glossy glass screen; and yes they do suck in the sun; I am outside right now at B3 and trying to work on a post or two; gorgeous day, just a slight breeze to keep the bugs away, but severe clear; the only thing that I can see well on the screen is my reflection; great if I want to pluck my eyebrows, but damn near impossible to see what I am tying, let alone the cursor; guess it’s time to invest in one of those anti-glare covers; or do what I have seen others do – put there jacket, hoody or t-shirt over their head and screen; crude but effective; they most definitely provide for an extremely readable display in low light or indoors, but outside in the sun, the title of this post holds true; later;

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One thing that has been bugging me about doing this thing online is whether or not to replicate the formatting that I use for my offline versions, be it paper or digital. The practice comes from back in the day when I was really into writing Object Pascal code, better known at the time as Borland’s Delphi. Paper or computer, I would end my statement with a semi colon; like that; like this; I don’t know why I started doing that, but it has carried forward all these years and now, when the time has come to actually put this up for public consumption, I debate if I should carry on with this method.

After giving this an extended review last night at my TH-FH session (yeah, look that up so you know what that means) I decided to go with the way I have been doing so; with the semi colons; why, you may ask; because, this is my blog, my “novel”, my “so called life” and what I say goes; how about that; sounds good to me; in the infamous words of a certain Star Trek character, “make it so”; later;

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Whether in my digital version or on paper, I always time and date stamp the header of the entry, along with the location of where it was made. I have no idea when or why I started doing this other than for my own sake when trying to find something at a later date. This is the format that I generally attempt to remain consistent with:

• City location and always the ICAO identifier if it has one. For example, Calgary, Alberta is YYC, Los Angeles, California is LAX
• Location within the city or town, such as a coffee shop, at home or elsewhere. These are further shortened to as few characters as possible as I tend to go to the same places often. JU would be for Java U cafe in YUL (Montreal), TH-FH is the Tim Horton’s across from Foothills Hospital in YYC (Calgary). B3 is where the subject of this entry is being made, and that stands for Bench By the Bow. B3. The Bow being the Bow River that flows through YYC and is just across the street from my other favourite hang out here, Extreme Bean Café. Or EB for short.
• Day and date in this format: SUN 25 JUL 2010
• Page number as such: 1., 2. etc.
• Local time in 24 hour format to the closest minute. 1955 is 7:55PM Mountain Standard Time (daylight savings)

Therefore a complete entry would be, for example this particular one, YYC – B3 – SUN 25 JUL 2010 – 1. – 2043. I will also make a note at the end of the entry or post with the time and word count (if it’s a digital post and the count is available). So there you have it. The start and end of all my notes. What comes in between is another matter and something that I hope you will find interesting or at least, mildly amusing.

By the way, this post was published to the site from B3. The signal from EB is that good.

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In the intervening 5 years or so, I have managed to amass somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.4 million words on the subject. Mostly in note form and the majority of which were created in the NoteTaker™ application on G4 iBook. Initially I had envisioned a traditional approach, you know, a book format. But the more I wrote, the more I realized that my style was not that. As evidenced here, it is more of a “notes” style as opposed to a narrative.  Then to was the matter of how to distribute the result. Various ideas came to mind. A complete “work” self-published via Lulu.com or the like, on a dedicated web site in “book” format, or some combination. It was my recent “conversion” to WordPress from Joomla! that sealed the deal. Once I saw what WordPress 3.0 could do and how easy it was to do it, the decision was made. Switch over the existing LyleChamney.com from Joomla! to WordPress 3.0 and do it in a blog format based upon dates.

As dates are how I functioned when creating my notes, this seemed to be the ideal way to make it available here. It also will allow me the flexibility to create the posts in a non-liner manner. They can be created for any date and as long as I set them to the correct category, they will be in chronological order.

So away I go. This is the first post and it will be in the Introduction category. Bookmark or subscribe to keep up with the latest skivvy.