Up to the Highest Height

What a wonderful week! I have delayed my stay in NC until this Tuesday evening to get some extra hours in and soak in the last days with my grandparents. New Providence is inviting right now... I miss my parents and my world up there, but the thought of leaving is really quite sad. I will have a week at home before Elise and I leave for the Long Trail. Time is seeming short, and I have been very focused on the world of aviation. After a second try, I passed my written exam with a 92, the sequel to a disastrous test the first week I was here. I really had no idea what I was doing... :0). All flying with George has consisted of late is landing, landing, landing. Around and around the traffic pattern at Southeast and Cosi Airports we go, up and down, flaps up, flaps down, power in, power out. It never ceases to be wildly exciting though - I mean, you're going to come down somehow, but (nevermind our LIVES) so much cash is at stake in the 150, so much danger is present. Every landing you walk out of is a great landing, Gramps says. They are becoming smooth and organized and programmed into my body.

Last night, Amanda Brooks and I rented "The Notebook" and watched it with smoothies from Coldstone Creamery. What a movie. It really never ceases to fill me with all sorts of ridiculous visions of my own love life's future. The story comes as a, perhaps extreme, relief in the context of overly-scandalous or neglected relationships thrust in front of me all too regularly.

Elise and I are leaving for Vermont a week from tomorrow! She arrives on Saturday and we plan/pack/prepare for the weekend. I am thrilled, although my energies have been very focused on flying. I feel in great shape, and all is well minus a faulty knee I am getting checked out on Wendesday in Summit by some orthopedist.

NC is such an unusual state. The spread of personalities is hugely wide - from city to country and a million dialects in between.

I have finished reading Diana Norman's "A Catch of Consequence." Wow. Wow. Wow. A story of a 24-year-old tavern owner, Makepeace Burke, in colonial America, who gets swept into the patriotism of the early hints of Bostonian Revolution. She falls in love with an Englishman and sails to England in the 1750's. The characters are designed beautifully, and etched into my memory with detail and intensity. There was the right amount of everything... romance, intrigue, drama, death, journey, and history. It was probably erring on the side of Chick Lit, but hell. It did it for me. Makepeace's lovers and enemies, her dry wit, and inevitable humanity, all dance within this fluid commentary of an impassioned female who loves and lives with dynamism. She dances between the spiritual lines of desire and her ingrained sense of Puritanism. I really related to her battle with the earthly and divine, her sense of loyalty and the ways the world can warp that integrity into a monster of sin and consequences negatively unsuited to the victim's intentions. Highly recommended.

-----------

The big news is that I SOLO'ed!! No time to write, but more later. Miss you, G & G!