Saturday Morning Report

I'm sitting outside on a glorious Saturday morning.  I'm sitting on an airy patio at Whole Foods, waiting for members of my book club.  It's shockingly beautiful outside - just some cirrus in the sky, temperate now but will reach the 80s this afternoon.  There's a farmer's market 50 feet from me.  I have a coffee and a pretzel roll, and I'm listening to a guy-with-a-guitar.  When I saw him drop off his equipment, I immediately figured he was going to drive me inside quickly.  But then he starts playing U2's All I Want Is You, which is one of my favorite songs.  I tell him this, so he aims to go 2 for 2.  Next on his list is The Beatles' In My Life.  Check.

At this point, I don't care if anyone shows up for book club, this is such a delightful way to spend a morning!  Some fresh fruit and chocolate-hazelnut gelato from the market might gild the lily.

On Aviation Incidents

Rest in peace, all souls from CJC3407.

Commuter aircraft get a bad rap for a wide variety of reasons.  I've long disliked prop planes, and I'm sure I can trace this back to the Roselawn ATR accident.  I know they're as inherently safe as any other tube of metal hurtling through the air, but they sure are noisy and cramped, and to be honest, I generally prefer to divorce myself from the operation of my aircraft as much as possible.  Contrast a shaky takeoff in winter in a turboprop with an impossibly smooth climb out of a tropical airport in a 767.  (It's nice to have a home airport at which I have more choices than commuter planes.)

Still, I know that air travel is really safe.  Really safe.  I have lived and used to work for years right next to airports where hundreds of planes operate without incident each day.  I can rationally examine the statistics - and my brain acknowledges it readily, as I sit here on the sofa.  Surprisingly, despite all my frequent-flier miles, I can be a bit of a panicky flier if I'm not otherwise distracted.  Even a clear-sky approach into Orlando with rising thermals and wake turbulence from other inbound aircraft makes me hold on to my seatbelt a little tighter and start praying.  Again, even though I KNOW (far more than the average flier) the reasons for the turbulence we encounter at the top of the boundary layer, I often have to consciously unclench.  It's irrational fear and I know it.  It smacks of a larger issue I've been wrestling with lately - that of trust between me and God.  I guess it's easier to trust when your feet are on solid earth, but we have no more control here on the ground than in the air.   I ROUTINELY put myself in exponentially greater danger during my 1.5-h daily commute by car.  And yet, some days, it takes a boarding pass to get me to pray?  

I was on a commuter plane a couple summers ago from EWR-DCA.  It was a smooth summer-evening flight; midway through the final turn to line up with the runway, the gear came down and it felt like all hell broke loose on this plane.  Okay, maybe not all - we felt under control after what was likely just a few seconds and most likely always under control.  The NTSB today released FDR information from 3407's final moments, which made me think of that flight.  The gear dropped and the flaps lowered and, apparently, all hell broke loose.  Popular speculation is that a combination of icing and interrupted airflow from the lowered flaps caused a tail stall.  What's interesting is that procedures for recovering from a wing stall are exactly opposite to those for recovering from a tail stall.  So in an instant, a pilot has to determine what's gone wrong and correct it, with the wrong choice ending in disaster.  I make a ton of mistakes in the course of my career, so I have a lot of respect for pilots (consummate problem-solvers), who, bearing out the statistics, get it right almost all the time.

In reference to a passenger whose flight from MSY-EWR was delayed, keeping him off the crashed plane, a contributor on an aviation forum said an experience like that would change your life forever.

I missed a flight from London this summer, with 27 students on a tour.  Surrounded by a lot of panic and upset, I was relatively calm.  Part of it was my comfort with commercial aviation procedures.  Maybe it's because I'm on the ground, but I don't usually sweat delays or missed flights, though, and I attach a lot of baggage (pun intended.  would "gravity" have been any more acceptable?) to the deliberation when opting to switch flights or stand by for another.   To know why, rewind to 25 May 1979.  

Right before my third birthday, my parents and I flew to Los Angeles for my aunt's wedding.  We were going to take United ORD-DEN-LAX, but United pilots were talking about going on strike, so my parents booked American ORD-LAX instead.  We were originally ticketed on AA191 on the day before it became the deadliest crash on US soil (prior to 2001), but then my parents decided we would fly the next day.  They figured that if we were going a day later, we should take an earlier flight.  That was to put us in the air on the flight right before 191 crashed on takeoff.  That morning, we all overslept, had a 90-minute drive to Chicago, and had to return a rental car.  By the time we got to O'Hare, we had to run through the terminal in a flat-out sprint (my parents carrying me) the whole length of the concourse to make the flight.  Otherwise, we'd have been on 191, which was our back-up reservation.  Our tickets had 191 printed on it, but crossed out and our flight number written under it - I think my parents still have it.  

He's right.  It does change your life forever.

Believe what you will about your gods.  Mine kept me off that plane.

Look, I know I'm just one in a sea of people whose planes don't crash on any given day.  But I can trust a God who orchestrates infinite events, of which I'm not even aware, to put me where I need to be.  And I don't.  I've been bought at a price and have purpose.  And I let a little fluid dynamics freak me out?

I have a wrestling match to get back to...

Valentines Cake

Here's a cake I made for a Valentine's Day dinner at church.  I didn't actually get to go because we had relatives in town!  Anyhow, it was red velvet on the inside with almond buttercream.  I know the purists in the audience will recoil - no cream cheese frosting with red velvet? sacrilege! - but I really like the flavor of the almond better.  There are few cakes that truly benefit from cream cheese, and I just don't think an artificially-red chocolate cake is one of them.  Sorry.

That said, here's a picture!

Complete Nerdvana

I just got back from the BEST weekend EVER!

Mr. Jenspin and I attended an event for Continental most frequent fliers.  It was totally free, put on by employee volunteers who seem to have as much fun as we do.  We just had to buy plane tickets to Houston.  We went to one a couple years ago, and had the best geeky fun time.  We had face time with the President and CEO and a lot of the top brass - VPs from every department.  They did Q&A sessions, and a lot of the suggestions we made were put in place later.  I mean, an airline that listens to what its most frequent, loyal customers have to say?  And indulge us in nerdy fun like behind-the-sc

enes tours of all sorts of things - baggage claim, the corporate headquarters, flight simulators, the executive tasting kitchen for catering.  So when I learned there was another one this year, I didn't want to pass up the opportunity.

And what an opportunity it was!  I haven't stopped smiling.  We arrived on Friday night and went to the airport hotel, where they had a dinner buffet for us and a Deal-or-No-Deal game called Miles or No Miles where we competed for frequent flier miles.  We didn't get picked, but it was fun to watch, nonetheless.  We all got a gift as we left - sets of four surplus cups-and-saucers from an older first-class service.  I mean, an airline that does an event like this and then gives me dishes?  What's not to love?? 

Anyhow, when we registered and got our name tags, we also got our tickets for the next morning's tour.  We ended up on the Mystery Tour, and I was so happy.  I don't know why, but I was hoping we would get put on the Mystery Tour.  We'd already toured headquarters.  The simulators don't really thrill me, and catering certainly would have been fun - so would inflight training (they got to slide down evacuation slides) - but I really wanted the surprise.  And I can't believe they kept it a secret until we got on the bus that morning.  Especially with everything that was involved in this tour!  So we board the bus, and not even the employee guiding us knew anything until he opened the envelope.  We'd all been speculating about what it was, and we were making all kinds of airplane jokes about the bus.  So when the announcement was made that the Mystery Tour was going to be known as Continental Flight 9920, my initial reaction was, oh, that's cute.  But then he kept reading.  We were going to the airport to board a 757, which would give us a tour of downtown Houston, a buzz of the tower at Houston Hobby airport, a loop over Galveston, then over towards Austin and back to the airport.  It slowly dawned on me that we were going on a joyride around Texas.  In a commercial 757.  Who DOES this?  Well, we do, apparently.  Ha ha ha!

We finally got through the fence of the airport and drive over to our plane, outside one of the hangars.  We went through a security screening and milled about the plane, took pictures of the landing gear, peered into the engines.  Then the VP of Inflight came down the air stairs and talked to us (~100 of us) about some of the things we'll see on the aircraft, like the on-demand entertainment system in every seat.  We'll have champagne and a snack, and our crew are the flight attendants from the safety video!  Okay, that might not mean much to the average reader, but it's just... perfect.  We fly a LOT.  We have seen this video hundreds of times.  So we "know" the flight attendants featured in it like you'd "know" a character on a tv show.  There couldn't have been a BETTER choice of crew for this group.  That's how well this thing was put together.  So we boarded and took seats in row 9, on the A-C side, which turned out to be a most fortuitous choice for sightseeing.  The execs made a few announcements, refreshingly dispensing with the usual airlinese.  Then they announced that after we make our pass over the other airport, once we get back up to a cruising altitude, the flight deck will be open for us to come up and meet the pilot and sit in the cockpit.

WHAT.

In the cockpit.  Of a commercial aircraft.  Post-9/11. 

Words cannot convey how cool this was.  We took off, 

staying pretty low.  We sure lucked out with weather.  Perfectly clear air.  We flew past downtown at 3000ft, then descended to 1000ft with full flaps and flew over the terminals.  What Houstonians must have thought!  

(presuming any noticed)  The pilot pulled back on the throttle, taking us back on up, where we did a 270-degree loop-de-do around Galveston, conveniently dipping the wings on my side of the plane.   The line for the flight deck was pretty long, so we just stayed in the cabin and chatted with the flight attendants 

and by the time we got up to the cockpit, we didn't have much more time than to put the pilot's cap on, take a couple pictures, gawk out the windscreen, and let someone else have their turn.  We landed, gathered up our swag (new business

 class amenity kits, pillows, blankets, and headsets - with this and our china, I'm surprised staff on Sunday didn't think we were stealing the entire cabin of our last flight), took some more pictures milling around

the bottom of the plane, then boarded the bus to return to the hotel.

So.  We took a commercial airliner on a joyride for an hour with celebrity flight attendants and an open cockpit door.  I'm going to need a grin-ectomy.

The afternoon was Q&A sessions with executives, including one by the CEO and President.  Then the evening's hangar party, where there were more fun and games (a Continental trivia match, hosted by the CEO; a Price-is-Right style competition; and a Let's Make A Deal game in which someone picked the gold curtain and won a galley bar cart, and someone else opted for the box, under which was a pot of cheese soup), a 737 to climb all around, a band, and a buffet.  

They really outdid themselves with this.  I thought the last one we attended was pretty great, even if I took a fair amount of ribbing by my colleagues for spending a weekend at an airport.  But I don't know how they'd ever top this weekend.

Oranges

Citrus aren't my favorite fruits, but since I live in Florida and like to eat seasonally, citrus is about the only thing available right now.  Well, that's not entirely true - Plant City strawberries are beginning to make their debut.  Anyhow, there is a roadside stand, just a table and a tent, on the road to school.  A year ago, I stopped and bought a bag of tangeloes.  I brought them home and planned to eat them out of hand, but when I cut into one, they were so juicy they just begged me to make juice.  And so I did.   And proceeded to make the most fantastic juice I've ever tasted.  Like, sublime.  I'd never been satisfied with freshly-squeezed juice before, because it was always thin and weak and uninspiring.  Suddenly, I knew why advertising copy waxes poetic about freshly-squeezed juice.  The stuff had body and flavor for days.  

Before Christmas this year, the stand offered up some grapefruit and some red navels.  I gave the red navels a go, but they just didn't compare to those tangeloes.  What delight, then, when I discovered the stand has tangeloes out!  A couple weeks ago, I stopped for a bag of them (and a sack of grapefruit).  The juice was just as wonderful as I remembered.  In a very garde-manger moment, I used more of the fruit (than I otherwise would have) and made candied orange peels, even saving the syrup for cocktails later (orange mojitos, orange cosmopolitans, there might have been some orange in the margaritas).  The peels taste just like the jelly orange slices sold next to gumdrops.

Yesterday, I came home with what will likely be the last tangeloes of the season.  They're a bit more acidic than the last collection.  Maybe a result of recent freezes and frosts and the pickers' desire to get them off the trees before our chilly temperatures this morning.   They also had ponderosa lemons, so since all I had was a big bill for the honesty box, I took one of those with my tangeloes.  Haven't decided what to do with it just yet.  It feels like there's a lot of rind, which makes sense, given its citron heritage.