Today begins the annual trek northwards for the insanity that is Baconfest. The weekend which anchors the entire rest of my year. Yes, I am immature and nitrate-addicted. What's your point?
In Yet Another Drama Of The Car, my vehicle has been nyah-nyahing at me from the depths of the service garage for, now, roughly three *weeks*. I have the dubious pleasure of knowing that this is because he has managed to stump an entire shop full of professional Eurocar-debugger-tweaker-racers. They are sheepishly reporting their bafflement with his braking/traction control system, and the Holy Trinity (on an E39 BMW, the DSC light, ABS light and brake warning light) remain stubbornly lit. 75% of the time. Nobody knows why. They have replaced speed sensors, the ABS computer, the wheel bearing which contains the grooving which the speed sensor reads, all of that except the wiring harness. But the wiring harness reports unbroken connectivity.
Yet the signal from the right rear wheel sensor is...intermittent. Darth's computer does not like intermittent. INTERMITTENT IS NOT GERMAN.
So.
On the plus side, on the way up to Baconfest in my rented Altima shitbox I managed to convince a long-time friend (and once very brief noder) to be my first passenger in an airplane. We went for a 1.5 hour flight, mostly just getting him used to the notion of riding in an airplane which I was responsible for controlling. He and I have a tentative plan to fly across (or around) Australia in 2014 (tentative not because we're unsure but because we haven't completed the logistics and planning) and we plan on flying together a bunch more so we get used to it. Maybe flying across the USA in late 2013, I'm not sure yet.
But in any case, because this was his first flight with me, I spared him stalls and steep turns and emergency procedures and all the other fun stuff, and just flew to another airport some 20 NM away, landed, and on the way back went to the practice area and let him fly the plane around for ten minutes.
First time I'd flown since my flight check.
And it was awesome.