Labor Day Weekend
This past Labor Day weekend was pretty memorable, on several different levels. Friday after grabbing the car, Dori and I visited her grandpa Victor who is still in the hospital (c. 4 weeks now), though thankfully off the ventilator. He’s much easier to communicate with since he can write legibly again, though sitting in the hospital doesn’t generally give one much to talk about except illness, so I did most of the talking. We discussed the weekend plans, and our upcoming trip to San Francisco. Victor suggested we visit Hearst Castle in San Simian. Pretty amazing, that guy.
After the visit, we were off to a business meeting at my mother-in-law Pat’s house. Details must remain private, but suffice to say that some people were a little testy about some relatively minor points. Fortunately I raided the liquor cabinet during the break and Mr. Godiva and I had a fine time for the remainder of the evening. Back to the city …
Saturday morning Dori had a long run with her group, something like 15 or 16 miles. I had a slew of work to do for GeekISP which took me a bit of the morning, and before I knew it, it was like 1pm and she was still out! Clearly, a long run.
Saturday evening, we visited my parents and stayed over at the house, since we were going to be on Long Island anyway on Sunday. Dori and I had some Roma for dinner (my favorite pizza in the world) and spent the evening with my folks looking at old photo albums. My mom had out 3 books by my cousin Ben, all on NY, and they were really fun to look through. Lovely old photographs of the city and the people from c. 1870-1940. Also fun to see a book dedicated to people you know.
Sunday was decidedly the highest point of the weekend for me, not to mention the day where I fulfilled a dream I’ve had for some time. For our wedding, Dori’s gift to me was a flight lesson out at Republic airport in Farmingdale, and at 8:30am we got started. After parking the car at the lot near Nassau Flyers, we strolled past the American Airpower Museum, where they were fueling up a B-17! I asked my instructor, Linda, if they were actually going up in that thing. Apparently they were doing some sort of mock-mission, where you go up for a ride and pretend you’re on a bombing run. We also watched them take up a B-25 Mitchell and a C-47 Skytrain (not sure if you were allowed to actually jump out of the airplane, but I imagine their insurance wouldn’t go for that), not to mention a fighter that looked like a Mustang and a torpedo bomber of some sort. A nice treat.
So, believe it or not, I really got to fly the plane! Linda gave me the whole preflight check briefing, which was sorta funny considering she noticed the engine was about 1-2 quarts low on oil (this is apparently why they have this as standard procedure). Pretty soon, we were taxiing down the runway, and I was steering! That alone was fairly awkward, since you steer with the rudder pedals. The plane also kept wanting to turn to the right, so I was almost constantly jamming on the left pedal to keep it going straight. This got more complicated during takeoff (I’m still driving), because as you throttle up, whatever tendency to go to the right gets grossly exaggerated as you pick up speed. I probably ended up taking off around 10-20 degrees pointed away from the center of the runway, but Linda didn’t freak out (nor did Dori, who was sitting in the back seat the whole time). I was so focused on going straight that I hardly noticed when we lifted off the ground.
I had half-expected the plane to sorta coast along with the nosewheel in the air for a little bit before actually lifting off, but these little Piper cubs have an amazing amount of lift. I think we were off the ground at about 60 knots, which you could probably do on a mean hill with a bike. We climbed slowly up to about 1600 feet, banked right until we could see the south short of Long Island, and fly on out to the Captree monument. The view along the way was wonderful, made perfect by the absence of any clouds. Dori was able to even make out the city skyline in the distance. After the left bank around the monument, we flew westbound, parallel to the island to line ourselves up with the runway. For most of the rest of the way back I concentrated on flying straight and on retaining my breakfast, as the jitters of a small plane were beginning to get to me. There was some traffic near the airport, so Linda took over, steering us clear of the private jet ahead of us in line to land.
It was such a mixture of exhilaration, anxiety (mainly to keep going straight, I wasn’t worried about crashing), and pure joy that it made it an extremely exhausting morning. I was ready for a nap by the time we got to my sister’s house in Port Jefferson. In fact not long after we ate breakfast and started to relax in the yard I saw to that. We spent the rest of the day there chatting, playing with Lily and Jacob (the Gressins arrived later towards 5pm), and I helped Alan with some of the statistical analysis for his thesis. Good times were had by all.
On Monday we slept in, and milled around the apartment in preparation for the evening’s festivities at the US Open. Around 3 we went down to Tiffany & Craig’s fantastic apartment for snacks and some tennis on tv (in HD - its awesome). Push met us there also, and by 5 or so we headed over to Flushing. First match of our evening was the Women’s 4th Round between Justine Henin-Hardin and Mary Pierce. Pierce won in 3, and it was a fun match to watch. The late match was Ginepry v. Gasquet, which was a battle; they both played very well, there were many long points, but neither player had a likable enough personality for me to really get behind them. I suppose Ginepry’s only advantage in my heart was citizenship.
Towards the end of the 4th set, we moved down to some empty seats below us. Once we arrived, Dori noticed her phone had been vibrating, so she checked her voicemail. Apparently we had missed several calls from her mother’s friends telling us that Pat had been checked into St. Francis Hospital with chest pains and shortness of breath. We rushed out of the tennis center and waited for the LIRR to take us to Port Washington. Between waiting for the train, the ride to PW, and the cab ride to the hospital, it was about 2:00am before we could see Pat. She had been resting in the ER, waiting for catscan results to come back. Dori was pretty amazing that night, talking to the nurses, getting booties for her mom to wear (she was sleeping in her shoes when we arrived), and being supportive to her mother. She clearly knows her way around a hospital.
When we left to go back to Bayside, Pat was feeling a little better, but still generally uncomfortable and having difficulty breathing normally. We checked in on the cats, then made our way back to the apartment. Eventually we got to bed somewhere in the 4-4:30am range.
I can’t remember a weekend in the past year that had been more jam-packed with activities and with such a wide range of emotions.
PS - first post.