Thankful

I have no idea what city  my laptop charger is in.  Detroit, probably.  I suppose its like blogging by candlelight. Happy Thanksgiving,  y’all.

Flat Russ comes to visit!

Dear Russ,

I bet you’ve been wondering what Flat Russ has been up to since you stuffed him in an envelope and sent him across the country to start his big trip!

His first few days in Georgia with Amy and me were not very exciting. The first day, he felt bad because of the time change and he’d been cooped up in the envelope for a while. California is a long way from Atlanta. We let him rest. The next few days, he helped around the yard and garden. We have three chickens and five garden boxes of vegetables growing in the yard. Flat Russ helped to feed the chickens and he pulled some of the weeds in the carrot patch.

Then, I had to go to work, and I brought Flat Russ along for the trip. He wasn’t happy when I woke him at 5:20 in the morning. That’s 2:20 in your time zone! We started in Atlanta, and once we got to the airplane, I let Flat Russ out of his envelope. WOW, did his eyes get big when he saw where he was.

Here is Flat Russ, checking out the CRJ-200 that we’re about to fly for the next few days. While passengers often gripe about its small size, he says it’s much roomier than his envelope.

Did I mention that I’m an airline pilot? Flat Russ sat up front with me, and we flew from Atlanta to Columbus, Georgia, where the Army Rangers train. Several of the soldiers were on our plane, and Flat Russ liked their camouflage.  He says he would like to be a soldier if the Army ever starts letting flat people join.

On the flight back to Atlanta, I sat Flat Russ up on top of the instrument panel, right by the front windows. The view there is the best! We nearly hit a string of four Canadian Geese who flew out in front of us on takeoff. We dodged each other just in time though. Being flat sure makes it hard for Flat Russ to yell, but he pointed the birds out as soon as he saw them.

We passed through Atlanta, and then flew out to Columbus, Mississippi on the next flight. This Columbus is where the Air Force trains a lot of their fighter pilots. In fact, one of their training jets had blown up its engine, and the mechanics were fixing it not far from where we parked. Flat Russ and I stayed out of their way and let them work. Then, we flew back to Atlanta.

Our last flight of the day was to Lafayette, Louisiana.  Lafayette is in Bayou country and I had a hard time understanding what the nice people at the hotel tried to tell us. Flat Russ is a good listener, and even he didn’t know what they said. We checked into our rooms, and then we went to dinner. On the way, we crossed the Vermillion Bayou. Flat Russ wanted to pet an alligator, but we couldn’t find one.

Flat Russ wanted a hamburger, so we went to Whataburger. Whataburger is kind of like In-and-Out Burger, and Russ stole a bite of my onion rings when I wasn’t looking. He must have been hungry!

The next morning, we fired up the jet and went back to Atlanta, then on to Newport News, Virginia, and Tallahassee, Florida. Over the next few days, we also flew to Monroe, Louisiana, which is where Delta Air Lines began, and also to Asheville, North Carolina, Chattanooga, Tennessee and Shreveport, Louisiana. Everywhere we went, people complimented Flat Russ on his great behavior, sharp listening skills and his politeness. He said this part of the country is beautiful and that he likes the way people talk here.

When he gets home in May, he will teach you how to cook grits and to say “Y’all,” in its proper context.

Thank you for sending Flat Russ to visit. We had a fun time together and he is welcome back any time.

Sincerely,

Pasturepilot (and Amy1N)

Atlanta, Georgia.

See Flat Russ slaving away in the garden? No, I don’t either. I think he went inside with Amy for some lunch. He did good work, though.

Flat Russ quickly learned that the airlines don’t run so much on Jet Fuel as they do caffeine, cheap food and powerful coffee. I had to help him read the flight plan, but he helped me program the navigation computers.

In Columbus, Mississippi, we got to watch mechanics change the engine in this jet that fighter pilots use for training.

Flat Russ got the Flintstones’ reference in this approach plate for Atlanta. YABBA DABBA DOOOOOH!

In Lafayette, Louisiana, we got to check out the Bayou Vermillion.

Here’s another view of Lafayette’s Bayou Vermillion. We tried to find an alligator to wrestle, but the stars from “Swamp People” had already cleaned the place up.

Rather than eat at the hotel, we took a little walk on one of the overnights. Here, we waited patiently for hamburgers at Whataburger. They were tasty, but Flat Russ said they’re not as good as In-And-Out burger.

 

Flat Russ did, however, enjoy the onion rings.

On the left is Lake Ponchatrain, the squiggle is the Mississippi River and the lights are the city of New Orleans on an early Sunday morning.

We tried five flavors of frozen yogurt. The white chocolate chip macadamia nut was our favorite!

Engaged

Last week, Amy and I took a little trip to Charlottesville, VA for a few days of food, history and culture. We came home with a sparkly ring on her finger. She decided to keep me around!

In case you haven’t heard a good romance story lately, here you go.
In 1996, my high school band hosted a marching band contest. I was a band guide for Cleburne County High School. I spent the day hanging with their band, and several of their girls exchanged contact information with me. We stayed in touch, the old fashioned way. We wrote letters. You see, in rural West Georgia and East Alabama, technology was slow to descend on us. This was pre-internet. There was no social media. Dial-up access to America Online was just beyond the horizon for us, and long distance phone calls were still pricey for a family like mine.

To rattle off a few names, there was Amy and Pamela, both with red hair and freckles (still the most dangerous combination EVER), Ashley, Evette, Lisa and Paula. I exchanged sweet thoughts with a few of them; Amy and I actually went out on a few dates. Then, college graduation came along, and we scattered to the wind. Ashley ended up at the same university as me, we saw each other from time to time there.
Fast forward a decade. Social media pervades, and it seems like each week the “people you may know” window has another face from your past gazing your way. Amy found me on Facebook. Such-and-Such commented on Jeremy’s picture.

People have recently started copying and pasting a thing on Facebook, asking folks to hide their likes and comments from view. Don’t! That’s exactly how I got a second try with a high school sweetheart.

You see, Amy lived less than 10 minutes down the road from the apartment I was in. We got together for barbecue one night. She was coming out of a failing marriage; and it had really rattled her. I invited her to my Pampered Chef party that was coming up soon… she needed an excuse to smile.

She smiles pretty often, now.

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Don’t get me wrong, this has been a lot of work. There was a lot of emotional scarring she had to deal with from the failed marriage, and we started slow. But, there was just so much in common. We’d escaped the vacuum of our hometowns. We chased ambitions, saw the world, and settled in civilization. Our hearts and values, though, were still very much from the hometown. That’s something that’s just hard to find when you’re sitting in a bar hoping some great girl will just fall into your lap.

She helped me become the person I wanted to be, as well. When we re-united, I was at least 250 pounds. Probably 265. I drank too much. Most anything I cooked was heavily processed, bacon-wrapped, or cheese-stuffed. My roommate, Eric, was a pretty big guy, as well. We kept the thermostat on 62, or lower. Skinny guests wore sweaters. I sweated. There were massive problems in my future, if something didn’t change.

Things did change.

Amy volunteers with Crop Mob-Atlanta, and she eats all organic vegetables that are washed in hippie tears. She taught me how to eat. Last July, I started running. Then, I started logging my food consumption on a fitness app. Now, I’m not obese anymore. I’m not overweight anymore, either. I’m down to 180 pounds, about what someone my size should weigh. I haven’t been this size since middle school.

We decided to waste no time with a long engagement, either. December 1 – just a tad over two months from kneeling in dew-soaked grass with a ring, to married. We’re gonna have fun.

 

Overnighting In “The Show Me State.”

My grandaddy told me to always dress nicely, use manners and say please and thank you. “You never know when you’ll be rubbing elbows with the Governor or somebody,” he said. Here I sit on the couch in the Governor’s office in the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – We landed in Columbia, Mo. airport about 9:30 in the morning, and our work day was done. “Hey, we’re here in time to hit the free breakfast at the hotel,” I quipped. Now, Columbia isn’t the hot spot of great overnights that would spring to my mind if you asked me some of my favorites, but bear with me a minute. “Hey, I’ll call the kitchen and tell them to keep breakfast going for you, if you’re hungry,” the van driver said. “You get a coupon for free breakfast, but you leave tomorrow before the kitchen opens up.”

And so that’s how I ended up with this view for breakfast today.

National Aviation Day

I celebrated with an hour ramp delay, gate return to deplane an angry passenger, another hour of delay and then vectors around a ton of weather. Two and a half hours’ block time to fly from Huntsville to Atlanta.  We could have drove that route more quickly if you include the hour we wasted at the gate.

Enjoyed a nice sunset while we waited though.

More Sad Stories in the Airlines

“Did you hear the news, what happened to _____.” Fill in the blank. The list of “bless their heart” airlines is long. Independence Air/ACA. Midwest. Go!, Skybus, ATA, Maxjet, just to rattle a couple off the list. Carriers come and go, especially in the regional lift world, where contracts come up for renewal, and are most often won by companies without the longstanding seniority (i.e. higher pay) enjoyed by the incumbent carriers. Just this month, Delta announced that Comair, their wholly-owned regional carrier, will cease operations soon.

In 2001 whilst embattled in contract negotiations, Comair struck and crippled Delta’s lift in New York. Since then, Delta made it a point to restructure their regional lift so that no one regional carrier could effectively dominate one of their hub cities. Effectively, it made any strike by another carrier pointless, when they could just call the other carriers in to pick up a few extra flights to even out the difference. Since 2001, Delta has wheedled Comair down to a ghost of its former self; the closure was a long time coming.
Two weeks ago, we were in Memphis and about to head to Oklahoma City. “We’ll probably have a Fed on board,” the captain said, and sure enough, he was right. A maintenance inspector assigned to Pinnacle Airlines was riding with us, and he came down ahead of the passengers to get his paperwork out of the way, but mainly he just wanted to talk shop.

“Y’all ain’t gonna believe this,” he said. “Delta is dealing with a company called G2, and they’re about to underbid Regional Elite for ground handling at most of the stations.” If you’re not in the business, this is going to take a little bit of explaining, but bear with me. I’ll try to keep it moving.
In the beginning, there was Delta, and it was good. For a couple of decades, people paid good money for tickets, and they got treated good. Stewardesses were friendly, beautiful, and the passengers smiled as they sipped their cocktails and their kids enjoyed ice cream sundaes while flying coast-to-coast. The Widget gods smiled, and it was good. Cries for cheaper tickets came out, and new companies wanted a piece of the pie. In the dawn of the 1980s, a new storm, deregulation swept the industry. Old government-controlled route structures fell to the wayside, and new names appeared on the game board.

“Cost-Competitive” became a buzzword in the business, and it went from a thought, to a good idea, to an obsession. Free meals? Gone. Any frill slowly went away, and in the 1990s a new invention stormed the scene: Enter the Regional Jet.

Now, airlines contracting with commuters was nothing new. Companies like Comair and ASA actually had hauled passengers for the big dogs for years; but when the economics of the 90s made it feasible to make a little-bitty jet, things changed. The pilots at the big carriers allowed that they didn’t want anything to do with flying planes that small, and carriers like Delta to outsourced the smaller jet flying to other carriers.

All of a sudden, the “regional” carriers were really just outsourced “contract” carriers. Instead of doing 200 mile hops from Atlanta to Augusta, Columbus and Macon, the term “region” had expanded to fill the better part of a hemisphere. By 2010, you could buy a Delta ticket and get on a regional jet in Atlanta, and fly to Mexico, the Caribbean or into Canada, without ever actually flying with a Delta crew on a Delta plane.

All of this brings us back to the ground handling thing. For years, the regional carriers had handled their own ground operations at the outstations, the quiet, sleepy little airports they served away from the big mainline hubs. Emerging from bankruptcy, though, Delta strove to trim any fat from the bone. They stripped the ground handling portion of the contract from the regional carriers and put the outstation handling up for grabs to anyone who underbid the rest.

Pinnacle won a lot of the first round bids. My company lost all of them. Stations that had been a part of the company since day one with our company, they all went away. I saw tears in the eyes of people who’d made a career of helping the flights to Atlanta, and I hugged a ramper on one of his last days at one of our legacy stations.

“It’s a shame,” I said, and gave him a bear hug as I did my preflight inspection. He’d been offered his old job with the new contractor, at a 40 percent hourly cut, and no benefits to speak of. I think he took a job at the Kia dealership or something.

We went through a few more rounds of these bids. A new company, Regional Elite, came from out of nowhere, and underbid nearly everyone. This new company, you see, was owned by Delta. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a sneak peak at the bids, and then submitted a bid a dollar cheaper.

So, all of a sudden, stations were our Achilles heel. You’d show up one morning in Tulsa, and there would be two people running the show. One at the ticket counter, and one loading the checked bags. You go through security, get to your duty-in location at the gate, and there is nobody to let you through the door to the plane, or to print out your flight plan. That girl down on the ramp throwing bags would finish, come up to the gate, and apologize. Someone called in sick, and she’s doing three jobs. The ticket counter closed 30 minutes before departure, and 25 minutes before departure, the ticket counter kid is helping board passengers and loading more bags. Those two station agents hooked up the towbar, the one drove the tug and the other pushed us back.

I came from a family where we got by on bare bones for a long time. This felt like an interesting juxtaposition of minimalism from my past co-mingled with my present. We were trying to save pennies to operate a multimillion dollar jet. I’d have laughed, but I damn near cried instead.

Now, the whole time, folks at Delta are sitting back and laughing all the way to the bank. Why? Well, these folks are often working part-time with no benefits. Cheap. By cheaping out on their labor here, the regional carriers serving these stations suffer significant performance penalties. On-time departures taper off, delays mount and cancellations pile up as inexperienced ramp crews damage airplanes left and right. The regional carriers all had performance bonuses built into their contracts; but just like the passengers’ baggage fees, the money earmarked for performance bonuses goes straight into Delta’s wallet.

So, this month, a news story quietly comes out announcing that Delta is going to close down their ground handling unit, Regional Elite. All of a sudden that story from the Pinnacle inspector about G2 strikes home.
Here we go again.  What was stink-o had tapered off to just smelly, once the regional elite crews had finally figured out how to do their jobs. Now it’s going to get leaner.

Or as I heard someone say, “The Lord giveth, and Delta taketh away.”

Did you hear the news about Regional Elite? Yeah, that one’s a shame….
It’s not just Delta, or the airline industry. It’s the new American Way.

Helping a friend help himself

“I just went for a full physical and the results were pretty bad. Can you or Amy send us some tasty recipes?”

I spent 10 months as a mechanic when 0bama’s economy, $100/barrel crude oil and some poor management decisions put me out of a flying job. One of the mechanics on my crew, whom we’ll just call Chip for sake of argument, became a great friend. None of us were particularly picky about how we treated our bodies – working on the backside of the clock makes it really easy to abuse one’s self like that. I drank too much and ate a lot of bacon-wrapped goodies; Chip smoked like a stovepipe and we all lived on a diet of fast food. His text message was a jolt – but I’m glad to see the change. Within a week of some pretty drastic changes, Chip and his wife were losing weight and feeling better.

Now, before I start sharing recipes, let me share a little back story and show you the tools I’m using.
Just over a year ago, I woke up to early signs that my body was in distress. I picked up the Eat This, Not That book, and began making swaps in my fast food choices. Wendy’s Baconator took a back seat to chili and a single with cheese. Sweet tea became a precious memory as I learned to drink Diet Coke, then weaned off that in favor of unsweet tea. The first 15 pounds trickled off and then I flew with a captain who used the MyFitnessPal app on his phone. It’s a pretty straightforward program: Set in your weight, your target weight, how quickly you want to lose weight, how much you want to work out, and it spits out a daily target. You log everything you eat – most restaurant menu items are in there, as well as recipes on most of the major food sites. As time goes by, you get good at interpolating the stuff that isn’t listed, and you can enter in your own foods. My list of recipes includes three kinds of biscuits I make, two kinds of chili, some peanut butter cookies, crusty bread, pizza… I lost count of them all a long time ago. Above all else, though, keep an eye on your portion sizes. We eat most of our meals from salad and dessert plates – the big plates gather dust in the cabinets. We still eat plenty of unhealthy foods, just not a lot of them.

 

Anyway, recipes.

 

Sweet potatoes. Wonderful food. Packing a metric crap-ton of Vitamin A, they actually add nutritional value to a meal – and that’s one of my goals. They’re versatile – bake ‘em at 350 degrees for an hour or so – just make sure that they’re wrapped in foil, or the pan is lined with foil. They make a mess that’s tough to clean. No butter or sugar needed with them!  Amy and I dice them into 1/4″ or smaller cubes, hit ‘em up with salt, pepper and chili powder, then drizzle a little extra virgin olive oil on ‘em. Spread evenly on a cookie sheet and put them into a 425-degree oven. I use the convection roast setting, your equipment may vary. We’ve eaten this side with breakfast, lunch and dinner. A spoon of honey or a bath of ketchup works equally well; one place in Charleston, S.C. served their sweet potato fries with apple butter. It paired EXTREMELY well. Beware sweet potato fries, though, especially in fast food joints. What seems healthy is often soaked in fats and cheap oil. The calories and fat in olive oil, though, is the very best kind…

Speaking of apple butter, we make a lot of that in the winter. Here’s a recipe. We use brown sugar, and I have started using half-and-half sugar and Splenda in many such recipes. This stuff is great on biscuits, Martin’s Whole Wheat Potato Toast, or most anything else. Roasted sweet potatoes included. I often lose interest in peeling that many apples, and just core and quarter them. The peels work loose after an hour or two in the crockpot and I fish them out with a fork.

We love sweets. This Lemon Buttermilk Sorbet is pretty tasty, and as long as you don’t eat the whole batch in a sitting, it’s pretty reasonable on calories. We’ve added fruits and stuff to it, and have yet to come up with a bad combination.

I’ll say salads are great, and leave it at that. Amy makes great combinations for salads. Left to my own devices, they become leaves of lettuce swimming in dressing and avoiding icebergs of croutons.

There are more, and I’ll post ‘em up. I just kept putting this off and had to get something down to get started!