A great weekend. Perfect weather, low 70’s and sunny.
Friday was a bit stressful. Since I got the letter from code enforcement I have until this coming Saturday to get my Buick either in my garage or off my property. 2 guys in the Tampa area were interested in it. The one I know, and has helped me out multiple times with Buick questions. The other guy knows this guy and lives a couple miles from him. This guy seemed to be a bit of a double talker and wanted to give me one dollar amount if the title comes back as salvage another price if it comes back as clean. The guy I already know didn’t care and offered the same money as the other guy’s non-salvage title price. So I am selling it to him. He is supposed to be down Friday to pick it up, right before the deadline. It will be nice to have it all behind me, I’ve had quite enough of looking at my car’s dead carcass everyday. 🙁
Saturday morning I went to fly my RC planes with Mike. Great flying weather, some 20 degrees warmer than the previous Saturday morning. We had good flights until Mike had a control issue and wound up crashing his 600 dollar RC helicopter upside down. It was a pretty nasty crash as the blades shattered and various parts were bent or sheared. It is repairable but will just take some TLC and a few parts.
On the way home I heard the radio news flash about the shuttle. I was in disbelief. I remember how I felt when Challenger exploded. I got home and flipped on CNN. The constant video loop was playing where you see the remains of the shuttle streaking through the sky like a comet. The pictures of debris on the ground were coming in. Surreal. I don’t think this had quite the impact of the Challenger explosion because first it has happened before and second we didn’t have such graphic documentation of the explosion happening as we did with the Challenger. Regardless it is a tragic event and it will be quite interesting to see how this impacts the Shuttle Program. I certainly hope it doesn’t turn out that the debris that hit the shuttle during launch was not a factor in this. Space travel is inherently dangerous and incidents like this are painful reminders of that constant chance of disaster.
Saturday night we watched Signs. Similar to UNBREAKABLE, the movie was quite good but then started to come loose around the edges at the end. Poor Mel is looking his age. A good acting performance by the entire cast.
Sunday was a laid back day except in the afternoon we decided to hit Home Depot to get the materials we need to get our rain barrels set up. We broke down and finally picked up a compound mitre saw while we were there. It is fantastic to work with, effortless, perfectly square cuts. So much better than trying to eye it up with a circular saw. A purchase well worth the price, it will see heavy use over the years. We got the hardware mounted on the barrels and I had the big stand almost completed before we ran out of daylight.
We made a vow to get to the beach next weekend if the weather is good. Hard to believe we live so close but I’ve not seen the beach in at least 2 months. Inexcuseable.