#flashback of our european vacay last year where one year ago today we were hanging out in the south of France and on the beaches of Nice.

pixelazy … that #bookstore on #whyteavenue

8r4d #icecream and #bookstore on a #summer friday evening in the #whyteavenue

gamerdad Having flown four previous legs across the Canadian prairies bound for who knows where, my fifth wasn’t really shaping up to be much more exciting. In fact, the sooner that I can get somewhere a bit more interesting (geography wise at least) than a big expanse of prairie farmland as far as the eye can see, the better this #flightsimulator adventure is likely to be. I picked up from my evening flight yesterday where I landed in Saskatoon and in search of cleverly named airports, headed on down to Moose Jaw, where it was, as predicted, flat and sunny out.

gamerdad What can I say but is been a long hot day and I spent a chunk of it in the basement playing #flightsimulator more than ever. Just one more leg, right? And my timing couldn’t have been better. The other side of this little adventure, a rule I made up to make my trips more interesting when I did my trip (part way) around the world, was that I flew in real time, real conditions. The game simulates weather and clouds and .. sunsets. As it turns out flying from Biggar to Saskatoon at 930 mountain time was just about right to hit a perfect sunset flight across the Saskatchewan prairies. I took off to a gloriously low lens flare of the sun low on the horizon and then landed with just enough of a sliver of the sun still peaking over the western skyline for it not to count as a night landing. Hmm… Almost makes me want to get up early enough to try for a sunrise flight outta dodge. Sadly, I think that might be around 4am, so on second thought…

8r4d We’ve been living thru a week-long #heatwave and a brief reprieve came this evening in the form of a #thunderstorm that passed by. I ran around the house opening all the doors and windows hoping to get some air flow going on so that we could bring the temperature of the indoors down to something tolerable. The Kid slept in the basement last night because while we have a little portable air conditioner for our bedroom, she was sleeping in a sauna in her regular bed. I say this now, but I’ll take freezing cold over too hot any day of the week.

gamerdad I couldn’t help myself. I usually play the most games when the weather is either too cold or too hot to be outside. For mid-July the weather service ordered up a week of 30+ days, so… too hot to be outside. Instead, I continued my adventure eastward and fled Alberta in my still shiny new orange plane. I spent about 45 minutes flying deep into Saskatchewan and landed at the tiny little town of Biggar whose motto, if I recall correctly via a guy I knew back in University who had grew up there, is “New York might be big, but we’re Biggar.” I have been flying with the landing approach assist on, something I didn’t do in my original attempt to fly around the globe. It doesn’t do anything to control the plane but instead projects an idealized series of gates through which a good landing attempt can be made. To be fair I only crashed the plane while landing once back in those early days, but also to be be fair I had turned on that feature at least a year ago when I temporarily got interested in the #flightsimulator life again and now I just haven’t bothered to turn it off. I’m not so proud.

gamerdad After flying from Edmonton to a little hodunk town to the East called Tofield last night, apparently my imaginary self bought a new and faster and oranger plane on facebook marketplace while visiting because I hopped into that new plane this afternoon and picked up off and onward. It may be worth asking if this spells the start of another #flightsimulator adventure, if in fact I’m planning on setting out and seeing where one little virtual aircraft might take me. And while it is not NOT the case, I haven’t made any specific plans to do anything but maybe try to work my way across the country or down into the states and earn some of those lovely out the window views rather than just clicking on the old depart from airport X button and doing a few boring flybys. Y’know, like it’s hard to explain the difference, but there really is something to flying a plane across a scale model of the planet to earn those sightseeing flights. I mean, that’s kinda the whole point of those missions and such, for people who don’t have the imagination to plot an adventure on their own, and here’s me with a whole imagination going on and this simulated planet at my disposal. What a time to be alive, huh? Don’t expect much of anything but a quickie log tho, like me telling you that this afternoon’s flight took me from Tofield to Lloydminster on the border of the province where I made a slick landing in partially cloudy sunshine. East it is then.

gamerdad When the not-so-new-anymore MS Flight Simulator came out in late 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, I bought it on day one and decided to justify my expense by becoming a youtube creator: that is, I recorded about thirty #letsplay videos of myself setting out on a round-the-world adventure in a Cessna. It was fun, but at some point two things happened. One, an update made it trickier to record video due to something on my configuration probably, and so I lost a bunch of footage and lost a bunch of momentum on my trip. And two, people started to get really engaged with my trip, offering advice and feedback and, well, it stopped being fun. I’ve dabbled in #flightsimulator a bit since, but nothing like that 150 hour stretch of flying up the west coast, over through Alaska to Russia and ending up in Japan.. in a prop plane. I took a short trip from Edmonton to rural Tofield this afternoon to see how much I missed it, and I kinda do, but I don’t think I’ll be reprising the youtuber effort anytime soon.

castironguy Our neighbourhood, as I’ve discovered over the last year, is severely lacking in #lunch #pizza slice joints. So you might imagine my excitement when I learned there is a brand new almost pizza-by-the-slice place a four minute drive from my house. I write almost because their slice is not a slice but a pizza shaped like a slice. Their smaller of their big slices is like four slices but cooked to order. So. For minute drive plus a ten minute wait to cook it is much better than the twenty minute drive to the next closest slice joint. Hey, this ain’t New York City folks. I thought I would be adventurous today and spent fourteen minutes (and less $ than a burrito just down the street!) procuring a Big Mama slice. Some day we’ll need an excuse to order their 54 inch’er but this trip was worth it for now.

8r4d To beat the +30C #heat or morning #walk was earlier than usual today.

8r4d I have spent a good chunk of my day writing #code here. You may or may not realize this, but the code running this little website upon which you are reading these words (at least at the time of posting them) is a little applet I created from scratch to organize and share pictures, words and other media bits in a way that was intended to be similar to some other #socialmedia platforms you may be familiar with already. [read more...]