Historical Notes
Started: 2006-11-19 19:20:33
Submitted: 2006-11-19 19:49:16
Visibility: World-readable
Yesterday morning I dug around in the basement until I found a box containing my old, hardcopy journals, written in notebooks long before the word "blog" had been invented (and even longer before I began to grudgingly accept the word as a potentially valid description of my webpage, which predates the term). My primary mission was to find Volume 1, which documents my family's trip to Washington, DC and New York in May 1990. This trip involved pulling me out of school for three weeks, so my teacher required me to keep a journal of the things we saw. My objective was to fill in the missing information at the beginning of All Flights, which (until yesterday morning) didn't include the stopover city on my trans-continental flights from San Francisco to Baltimore. My journal revealed that my outgoing flight stopped in Kansas City and my return flight stopped in Phoenix. I even found my USAir boarding pass for flight 34 on 11 May 1990, leaving at 1100 PDT, seat 8A. (As a nine-year-old, I used the right time zones to record my arrival and departure times from San Francisco, Kansas City, and Baltimore. However, I omitted my bout with airsickness.)
I also located Volume ... 14, I think, which records my first trip to Europe in July 1997. I still remember the pertinent details from the flight; the Internet helped me identify the plane we flew on, N780UA, The Spirit of Adalyn. United's first 777 was (appropriately enough) N777UA, so I presume Adalyn was United's fourth 777. The FAA tells me its airworthiness certificate was issued on 6 August 1996.
(My hardcopy journal does reveal the flight numbers: DEN-ORD 240; ORD-FRA 944. We flew the same aircraft on both flights. Willy's page has a bit more information about the trip.)
As of yesterday, Kiesa and I have been >= dating for six years. Willy is now (almost) as old as I was when we started dating. But don't read anything into that.
As of September, I have been in the work force for a decade -- several days after my sixteenth birthday I got a job at Healthy Habits, a restaurant a few blocks from my house. My working life has had its ups and downs (post-graduation unemployment was pretty significantly down), but seems to be doing pretty good at the moment.
In more recent news, I followed through my threat to hike Green Mountain today. I took a 6.5 mile loop hike from Chautauqua up Gregory Canyon and back down Saddle Rock -- one trail segment I haven't actually hiked on before -- in just under three hours. My iPod battery died when I was approaching the end, despite charging all night. *sigh* As I expected, there was ice on the trail in the shadows at 8000 feet: For fifty meters before the four-way junction two-tenths of a mile west of the summit, and for two hundred meters on the trail descending the north side of the peak. My new traction devices helped me out but scared a few people I encountered on the way down, who were heading up and weren't sure what they would do when they reached the ice.
