I put in twelve years of Catholic school… I was released on my own recognizance but served parole under the watchful eyes of a Baptist college. You could say I was “institutionalized” and feared life on the outside. Twelve years of a regulated wardrobe can have a lasting effect if they occur between five and […]
The boy is almost nine months old, and since I’ve been back to work after paternity leave, I’ve been flying weekends. Although airport Chick-fil-A is closed on Sunday, it is nice to work weekends and steal the Sunday NY Times from sleepers in the airport. I play a game of whack-a-mole where I rotate newspapers.
A friend once told me that every day he wakes up in a hotel, it feels like waking up with a hangover. “I’m not sure where I am or how I got here, but at least I have my pants on.” Add in the fact that we stay in a variety of hotels with countless
I returned to work yesterday from a three-week vacation with the family. While at work and living on the road, I have lots of downtime that I fill with ‘entertainment’ that I would never make time for at home: bad movies on cable, aimless walks around Wal-Mart, and celebrity gossip magazines. US, Star, People, and
When the baby falls asleep in my arms, I recreate this old scene in reverse as I do my best to place him in the crib and extract my arms without him waking up. I learned from Indiana Jones… one swift movement. His eyes are closed, and his body is limp in my arms. I
In the cockpit, when an alarm sounds, the first response is to “Identify and Cancel” the warning. This means acknowledging the source of the alarm, silencing the warning, and then determining a course of action. If there are several warnings, you prioritize them—often based on the color of the alarm. Yes, our planes are color-coded.
My job as a pilot is made much easier by checklists and routines. I do the same thing – the same way – every time. Checklists are written in a way that is intended to flow logically as we set up the cockpit for each phase of flight. It’s the times when something upsets that
I despise the phrase “Knock on wood.” It was only ever tolerable when sung by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. If you’re among those in the cockpit who’ve said, “I’ve never had an engine fire or a hydraulic leak. Wait, let me knock on…” and then scoured the cockpit for wood, you may remember the courtesy
For years, I’ve used Pink Floyd’s 1968 studio album “A Saucerful of Secrets” as my secret weapon for an instant nap when I wasn’t sure if my brain was up for a break or there was too much going on around me to ensure a solid sleep.
I started using Google Voice months back on my G1 Android phone to transcribe my voicemails. When you leave me a message, I get an email containing the text version of that message. While I can still listen to the voicemail, most of the time the email is enough to give me the gist of
After college, or maybe it was during, I had a job for about a year as an overnight DJ at an adult contemporary AM radio station in Southern Virginia. Actually, it wasn’t just an AM station. It was, and still is, AM stereo, which, at the time, had been struggling to gain a foothold ever
I was driving home today and saw a dog running around the neighborhood a few blocks from my house. Being the good neighbor and dog owner that I am, I figured it best to try and find the little fella’s owner before his nose got too cold, he got lost, or had a run-in with
