Friday

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."

-Oscar Wilde

Sitting here trying to find the motivation to study for this final in Tax Procedure after lunch.

How about this? You paid $4,000.00 for this one unit course. Go study, you lunkhead!

In a minute.

Yesterday I once again slipped the surly bonds of earth to take the Mighty Columbia over to KBGM so Doug and Josiah could fix the door seal switch in time for my return flight to Florida this weekend.

As it happens, also this weekend they're hosting a big NASCAR race up at Watkins Glen, and my little FBO at KELM hosts a bunch of the race teams as they arrive.

I took this photo as I was walking to the plane, careful not to capture N223SM in the frame and jinx my flight. There are five jets in the photo, and a race car crew in matching outfits spilling out onto the tarmac as some poorly dressed young man with a Barbie doll woman hanging on his arm look on. I'm guessing he was the driver, or maybe the owner of the team. NASCAR strikes me as a vanity bauble for owners who have way too much money, but I guess that's true of all sports businesses these days.

Behold the Joe Gibbs Racing jet about to take the active, just ahead of me.

I was a little surprised that the tower cleared me onto the runway as soon as these guys broke ground. A jet like that creates huge wing tip vortices when it takes off and lands, and I'd be climbing right through those. A great way to find oneself upside down a hundred feet above the concrete. Being a wily old pilot, I noted the ten knots of crosswind that would push the vortices right to left, and as soon as I broke ground pointed the plane a little right of centerline to stay clear of them.

When I got back here all of the jets were gone--apparently they only hang around long enough to drop off their passengers in front of the huge field of assembled rental cars brought in for the race. A few minutes later I was back in my usual world, arguing with opposing counsel over whose fault it was a case had dragged on for years, then arguing with our realtor about who was responsible for the fact that the buyer at Tara wanted a $1,000.00 credit when she found out the water heater was rented. All water heaters here are rented because of the hard water, which tends to eat them from the inside. This young lady grew up in the area, from what I gather, so of course she would've been aware of this. My response was the usual, "Screw it. Just back it out of the settlement statement." Peg went ballistic.

Welcome to my world, where strife reigns supreme and everyone is trying to take advantage of everyone else. Nothing is much fun anymore. I'm not sure now this closing is even going to happen, and that nice memo I was going to write for the buyer, giving the history of the house and a few lagniappes about things like where to call to get firewood delivered, isn't going to happen now.

Time to study a little more ahead of a pretrial conference at 10:30. The exam's at two. Still trying to find that kernel of motivation.