A day *completely* off the hook...

Ok, I haven't had too many days in my life as interesting and amazing as today has been so I feel compelled to write about it and hopefully not bore you. So I'm up all last night working on the L-39's fuselage, placing rivets, and lemme tell you there are a LOT of them haha. So I wrap that up sometime in the wee hours and figure, well, I'm up, I may as well stay up and watch the dawn, as has been my pattern lately.

I start checking my various emails and I have one from a fan in Sweden who says that I'm in a magazine... umm... what? Turns out PC Gamer Magazine UK/Europe had an article this month on flight simulation and my films and I got a specific mention in it, how cool is that?! Unfortunately it's damned near impossible to find the UK edition here in Canada, we only get the American one, so if anyone has access to a copy please let me know, I'd like to buy one from you. :)

So that's how the day started... and then it got really neat. I left a comment on a youtube L-39 vid several weeks ago when I was first looking for good reference on the plane. It was a video of a guy and his wife flying an L-39 in formation with another, set to a great soundtrack by one of my favourite artists. I don't leave comments on vids very often, but I felt compelled to for some reason and basically said that life didn't get much better than flying an L-39, with a pretty lady in the back seat, and wicked tunes on the sound system.

Three weeks later, today, he emails me out of the blue saying that he'd been feeling a little bit flat lately, and my comment made him realize he had a lot of great stuff going on in his life, and thanked me for it. I messaged him back saying that the reason I'd watched it in the first place was that I was making an L-39 for FSX and was having a rough time finding a real life example to photograph for cockpit reference, and sent him some shots of the plane's progress to date.

So, it turns out he's an FSX fan as well, and he replied that I'd be more than welcome to photograph his plane, but that I couldn't possibly make a realistic handling L-39 without firsthand experience flying one, and so I should visit him and take a ride with him in it.

Ummm.... lemme think about that for a s... OK!

So thanks to this amazingly generous and cool guy I will be heading to California in July, right after I get back from Iceland, for what will likely be the most utterly fantastic single aviation moment of my life. He's also arranging for me to get cockpit photos of two other Albatroses owned by some friends of his, in order to get a really good cross section of the various cockpits these planes have. Man, I can't wait!

And just to top that off I had my second lucid dream ever this afternoon whilst napping. The last one I had was five years ago, on my first of ten nights spent in Israel. Quite fitting really considering the spiritual power of the place. Anyway, if you've never had one, they're the kind of dream where you actually realize you're dreaming. You essentially wake up still in the dreamworld, and can control your environment. Very very trippy, and very very cool. :)

So thanks Karma, for one truly interesting and wonderful day!

As an addendum my computer is being a sulky twit and may have blown two ram sticks, again... and you know what? I couldn't possibly care less. :)

-lotus out.