Friday, August 17, 2007

Time for a fairly long update. Here goes...

At the end of last month, I visited LA for a week, which is always fun. I went to Jenny's sister's wedding reception, saw a lot of friends, got to ride my motorcycle a fair amount, and went to the newly reopened Griffith Observatory. I also went to the LA zoo... it's been a long time since I've been to a zoo.

Interesting thing, one morning in LA I was awakened by the sound of helicopters overhead. My Mom and I looked up online that a police chase had ended nearby. Very nearby -- that intersection is the nearest cross street to my Mom's house. We stepped out of the house and looked down the street, and we could see the police cars, and the street closed off with police tape. Crazy.

Interestingly, if you look at the picture or video in that article, you'll see that the driver was a woman. You don't see women involved in car chases very often.

Another thing that happened while I was in CA: I got a flat tire on my motorcycle. Luckily it didn't happen while I was going down the freeway. I was going to Jenny's house, and when I got there and parked the bike, I was like "what is that hissing noise??" I looked at the rear tire and there is this huge screw right in the middle. Anyway, luckily Jenny's neighbor had a pickup truck, a ramp, and tiedowns (he owns dirtbikes), so he could get my bike to a shop. Motorcycle tires being ridiculously expensive, the whole thing cost me like $250. For a single tire. Which is like, 20% of the overall worth of my bike.

Oh yeah, another thing was that no bike shops carried a stock-sized rear tire for my bike, probably because it's so old. Since this was the day before I was flying back to Detroit, I didn't exactly have time to wait several days for these shops to order a tire for me. So I ended up getting a non-stock-sized tire installed.

Then on my flight back to Detroit, I actually missed the plane. I got to LAX an hour early, and waited in line for the self-service check-in. When I got to the front, the kiosk told me that I could not check in and had to talk to an agent. So I flagged down the agent, and she finally got back to me after helping a bunch of other people with a bunch of bags to check (since they just have the one agent to serve like 10 self-check-in lines). Anyway finally she tells me she can't check me in, I have to go stand in the other line (the non-self-check-in line). By this time my flight leaves in 30 minutes so it's boarding RIGHT NOW. Anyway, they wouldn't let me (or either of the other 2 people in the same situation as me) cut in the second line, so we had to just stand there and of course missed our flights.

The upside was, since the next flight wasn't for another 5 hours, I had time to have dinner with some friends. We went to Orris, this Japanese-style tapas place that was really good.

Oh yeah, the story isn't over yet. So I came back to the airport to catch the next flight, went through security, and waited at the gate. Since I was standby, I had to wait until everyone else was on the plane before I knew whether or not I had a seat. Finally, the gate agent calls me and is about to issue my boarding pass, but then he notices that there is no security stamp on my standby pass! Apparently the TSA morons forgot to make that unintelligible scribble when I went through security. So the gate agent made me go back to security to get the stamp. Now, nothing is as easy as it sounds -- you can't just go to security and ask for a stamp. No. They have to search you. And your luggage. So they did all that -- one guy stared at my cell phone for a long time, for some reason -- and finally I got the stamp, got back to the gate, the plane was still there so I got the boarding pass, got on the plane, and made it back to Detroit. Fun.

Back in Ann Arbor, I resumed my flying lessons, and I took the knowledge exam last week and passed it. Yay. So what's left is a couple of more flights, including the check ride, and then I'll be a licensed pilot! Hopefully it'll get done in the next couple of weeks.

Last week, Mike came along on one of my flight lessons. He brought his camera and took some pictures.

Mike is graduating, so I took his desk at school. It's a corner desk with windows, so it's pretty awesome... and check out my rear-view mirror, haha:

It's that time of year, people are moving into and out of the apartment. Our new roommate moved in last week. He has a keyboard, which is cool... very occasionally, I get an urge to play piano, so now I don't have to go to the music school to do so.

I saw Superbad. It was funny. I also saw the Simpsons movie a little while ago; it was ok. Oh yeah, Bourne Ultimatum was pretty good.