Me, Backwards

By next Thursday I will have made three round trips to Southern California in just over a week.  Our trip to Elsinore has been planned for a while (Sean’s going for the entire week for the wingsuit bigway event, I’m popping down just for the weekend).  The work trips to Burbank (two days this week, four next week) came up afterward.  I thought briefly about combining the trips, but since the flight is so short and I don’t have a car in Burbank, the idea of not dragging all of my skydiving gear along on the business trips is more appealing. (more…)

Below is a link to an ad that I did for Performance Designs, which makes my new canopy, the Pulse. It appeared in the October issue of Parachutist magazine, which is sent to all USPA members.  ‘Twas a lot of fun to do and it’ll be interesting to see if it pops up in other issues or publications.

PD Pulse ad
(fair warning it is a 2+ MB PDF file in case you’re on a slow connection).

I realize I haven’t blogged in a while, and I think today I diagnosed something of the malaise I’ve been feeling - I feel like right now my life is a little out of balance. Some of it is good, some bad, some just neutral, but things aren’t humming along like they had been and I’ve been feeling it for the last month or so.  At any rate, lots to update, so fair warning this’ll be a long post. (more…)

Well, here we are and I’ve gone over a week without blogging.  That week includes two days at the dropzone (Labor Day Monday, and the following Saturday) several days of work (yawn) and one day of being pretty darn lazy (Sunday).  Last Saturday’s weather was nutty; with forecast blue skies but what turned out to be quite a weird front moving through bringing with it clouds, rain, and crazy winds for about the first half of the day.  Still got in three jumps, and did my first coach jump work, when I briefed and supervised a student doing her first hop & pop.  I put her out at 5,500 feet and continued to full altitude to jump with my group. Labor Day was especially fun as we were getting extra altitude (15K) all day; took advantage of that for five fun jumps of varying size. (more…)

I suppose it is still officially summer, as we’ve not yet hit the autumnal equinox, but with it being Labor Day weekend, it feels like this is the end.  The light is fading earlier in the day, and we’ve had some chilly mornings of late making me think that fall might be in the air. (more…)

This year’s All of the Above Boogie at Skydive Oregon was not blessed with the perfect weather that previous incarnations had; it wasn’t quite as bad as Leap for Lupus, but we still had a number of weather holds throughout the weekend.  Still it was fun to be up there and catch up with the locals, hang out, and enjoy the dropzone.  We got up there on Friday evening in time to set up our tent before darkness fell, and were up ready to jump on Saturday morning … but didn’t have the weather.  I took advantage of my tendency to wake up early and hit a local gym both mornings; with the sun slow to come out I was back at the DZ in plenty of time … to sit around and wait for the clouds to burn off.  Feels good to keep up a workout routine, and I think after being sore sleeping awkwardly in a tent, getting up and moving is really beneficial.

The above is what the JetBlue pilot called Beantown as we were getting ready to leave last night.  It certainly felt tropical with temps in the high 80s and high humidity to boot!  We were a bit north of Boston in Pepperell, MA, near the border with New Hampshire (we even stayed in Nashua, NH).

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Was so overwhelmed by coming home to a dead kitty that I didn’t reflect much on the rest of the weekend.  It really wasn’t my weekend.  Bad weather, witnessing an incident on the DZ, and breaking my computer. Fun, huh? (more…)

• Days at Lost Prairie: 4 - Wednesday afternoon through Sunday morning
• Jumps: 10
• Travel time to Lost Prairie: <12 hours… left home in Oakland around 5 a.m., arrived DZ by 4 p.m. Montana time.
• Travel time home from Lost Prairie: much >12 hours… left DZ just before noon Montana time on Sunday, arrived home at 10:30 a.m. on Monday … thanks to a delayed flight out of Kalispell which caused us to miss our connection in Seattle and spend the night at a hotel (paid for by Horizon Airlines, of course). (more…)

Today I fulfilled a goal I set for myself when I started skydiving.  Knowing how much I struggled with my own learning, I always said I’d pay it forward someday and become an instructor myself.  I figure the worst students make the best instructors, right?

I’ve been thinking about going for the coach rating for a while (the first level of USPA instructional ratings, that allows one to work with advanced students) but I hadn’t had enough confidence in the consistency of my own abilities to go for it.  I finally did this weekend, and I’m glad I did.  I think the course is more about teaching people how to teach and to evaluate others than it is about strict and harsh evaluation; but it still helped to go into it feeling as confident as I have lately about my own abilities.  I hold myself to high standards, and I feel like I met those as well this weekend and I feel ready to work with real students (instead of instructors pretending to be students).