Kao's Beach trip adventure, (aka Early early weekend thread)Follow

Well, I went to the beach today, it was great! The drive wasn't too bad, a bit of rain on the way up. I pulled into Astoria just before noon, and it was raining like crazy so I stopped in at the Astoria Martime museum. Never been in it before, very cool place inside if you like nautical stuff at all. Much bigger than it looks from the outside too. i'd say its about the size of the boeing Air Museum up near Seattle. Got to see relics from famous west coast shipwrecks, including some wreckage that is allegedly from an undiscovered 500 year old spanish galleon carrying beeswax and porcelin that may have wrecked near Nehalem, oregon. Having now seen the beeswax with my own eyes, I'm convinced that it's authentic. Supposed to be a nice chunk of change on the wreck too. One of these days i'll perfect a shipwreck diving robot and go find out!

Anyways, so eventually I got to the beach. I took the stunt kite stack out for it's maiden flight. Went pretty well, except for the whole kite standoff punching a 2 inch hole in the sail fiasco. I now have a large yellow patch on one of my mostly grey kites. Oh well, i'll fix it later.

The wind was a good 15 knots, so the stack pretty much was tearing my arms off the entire time. 3 hours of that, and I had enough so I went to go eat dinner at the legendary doogers clam chowder restaraunt. I considered staying the night, but the audabon society was in in town and everythign was booked, and the weather is supposed to be crappy tomorrow anyways, so I just came home instead.

Rest of the week and weekend? who knows?

So what's everyone else up to?

Geez DF, that blows.

This weekend is more of the same, really. I'm having a few drinks over at DSD's tonight. Tomorrow the kids have their flu shots and then maybe we'll go swimming in the afternoon. Sunday, maybe the state fair. Depends on the weather.

Home from work again today. I had planned to go in, but the boss called me yesterday and said everything's cool at work and I should just go ahead and take one more day off to make sure I'm really getting over this cold. I've had this damn thing for 2 weeks now.

So I'm gonna hang out here today. Then tomorrow the kiddo has football (play off game, his team was undefeated, yay!) After that, I'll need to clean. It's amazing how messy the house gets when you've not been feeling well.

I have a job interview for a job I'm not sure I'm even thrilled about on Monday, so I'm going back down to Mass for the weekend. We'll see. Out of the blue yesterday the CIO for the entire system stopped by to offer to write me a letter of recommendation, so that was nice.

If it's nice, Smash and I will probably take Hannah around to some parks tomorrow and Sunday. There are a ton of them in his area, with nice playgrounds. It's supposed to be sunny.

Nexa

Tonight: Tidying up the house and time with the family. Maybe watch Iron Man again on DVD.

Tomorrow: Finish up organizing and re-arranging the master bedroom and garage. Tearing out the trees/shrubs in the front yard and backyard. Start doing the lawn. Charmaine has an audition that night as well so keep your fingers crossed for her! It's for another movie.

Sunday: Church and a birthday party for one of my nephews. Ray and I also may meet up with a friend for drinks.

Is this, perhaps, what the Bird and Baby Inn in MD was named after?

I knew it! You're H. G. Wells.

How the hell did he manage that?

Kaolian, you must have strong arms to cope with a kite for 3 hours!



Nobby, is that really authentic? High class graffiti :)

I spent my weekend working while also mentally working out how to spend some gift vouchers a delightful person gave me. The problem with vouchers (if you are like me) is that you always up spending double the value of the vouchers you were given in the first place ...

Did anyone else start gaining Christmas adverts in the post? I would be annoyed so early in the year but this time I'll let them off, they had something nice I'll buy my BF.

Years of parctice and flying kites in stupidly strong wind conditions helps! whatever else they say about me, I don't lose at arm wrestling!

That kite is about half the size of the ones I usually fly, and is rigged for freestyle trick flying. Nice for light winds. I tend to like the bigger ones since they go alot faster. That guy definitly has some skill though. Freestyle tricks are tough and couterintuitive to learn. That could also be a quad line kite too, I can't really tell from the video. Quad lines are much easier to backflip, but you can't loop them nearly as much because the lines stop respoding.

The stack I fly would be 2 of those kites, oneon top of the other, like a sandwich. you cannot flip a stack or BAD THINGS occur. and you cease having kites because the second kite shreads the first one.

The bridle on a freestyle kite allws better backflips and tricks like that, but it's not as fun to fly pattern stuff with. Plus you have the counterweights on the nose to make those roll up tricks more interesting. Like on this one http://www.prismkites.com/k_qp.html

Here are some samples of more the flying types that I do. My brother and i can fly dual patterns pretty well too
(turn the sound off on the first one, the soundtrack gets annoying real quick)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BzGeKmgKUA

With pattern flying, curves and loops are easy. The really tricky stuff is flying straight lines paralell to the ground, or making angular geometric shapes. If you can fly a perfict square or a perfect triangle with a stunt kite you are a very good pilot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-0POD8N5Hw

And this video is no the best quality in the world, but it shows Prism kites in action. Prism Kites being what I feel is the best kite manufacturer. Period.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R0oHy4xr1Q

If the weather holds up this weekend and it isn't snowing. I might take the whole fleet out and get some pictures. Currently I have:
4 homebuilts of my own design (including 1 "trainer" kite that deliberatly flys slow to teach people how to fly. it's made of reallly heavy duty spars too so when they slam it into the ground it survives. most of the time. My sister killed it pretty good once regardless.)
1 Prism kite
2 german stunt kites that I have in the stack

I need to get a nice Parafoil and maybe a quad line kite one of these days.