Daily Archives: December 26, 2013
Happy Boxing Day, Again . . .
We started out this post-Christmas morning with a 3/4 mile walk around the park. Over the next week or so, we’ll work our way up to 2 miles every other day. The Runkeeper app on my phone makes it real easy to keep track of our walks. In fact, if you set a schedule of walking every other day and then you miss a day it nags you with a message that you missed your walk.
Before we left for our walk we let Mister outside on his lease, and he immediately found a nice spot in the sun and zoned out. Getting back, we joined Mister outside and had our coffee and muffins while we watched Mister and the birds at the feeder ignore each other.
About 1pm I drove down to the office to settle up on the next month’s rent, but found that they don’t open for the afternoon until 3:30 Wednesday through Friday, so I get to keep my money for a few hours longer.
Yesterday at Brandi’s, after all the presents were opened, and the wrapping paper cleaned up, I had a chance to play with a couple of my helicopters. First up was my new Invert X model. According to the box it will fly inverted.
What you don’t find out until you open the box is that unlike other, usually more expensive models, it will not go from normal flight to inverted flight and back to normal. Instead, when you want to fly inverted, you must remove all four blades and swap them around. And then back again to return to normal flight.
A real pain in the rear.
Even worse, it means that flying inverted, you cannot land it normally, but instead you have to grab it out of mid-air unless you want to try to land it on the spinning blades. Bummer.
But I decided to give it a try in normal flight mode. And it wouldn’t.
Fly, that is.
It would set there and the rotors would spin like crazy, but it would not lift off. So I put it aside and got out my Globe Helicopter and had some fun with it. And as it turned out, Miss Piper is pretty good pilot.
After a few minutes of practice she had no problem steering it around the room. The 16 foot ceilings in Brand’s living room makes for a real nice flight area. You just have remember to turn off the ceiling fan.
I have a 3rd one that I didn’t bring with me to Brandi’s. It’s a very nice quad copter, but with 4 exposed blades it’s probably not a good idea to fly it around a lot of people.
So back at the rig today, I got the Invert X back out to take a look at it and see if I could figure out why it wouldn’t fly. I had an idea and it turned out to right.
I can only assume that my helicopter had been bought by someone else and then return to Fry’s because it wouldn’t fly. And as I thought, the reason it wouldn’t fly is that someone had misconfigured the blades. The blades had been set so that they cancelled each other out, so it was generating no lift whatsoever. It would just sit there, whirling away.
Getting the blades set right revealed a very nicely flying machine, if only right side up. And I doubt I’ll ever fool with trying it inverted because there’s really no challenge if you can’t switch back and forth in flight.
About 4pm Jan and I headed out up to Webster to meet some friends for dinner. On the way, I stopped off at the office to settle up for our next month here. The park manager, Lauralee, said the 90 new sites should be up and running this coming March or April, depending on the weather. Should make it easy next year to get another good site here.
Before meeting our friends, we stopped off at Sam’s Club for a few things. And I got new toy. If you can call a coffee maker, a toy.
This is the Hamilton Beach FlexBrew 2 Way. It is both a standard 12 coffee maker. and a K-Cup single cup brewer.
And it was only $79.
And even better, it not only handles the K-Cup coffee cartridges, but comes with an adapter so you can use your own ground coffee in the single cup brewer.
Neat!
We met our friends at 5:30 at Barcenas Mexican Restaurant, one of our favorite local Mexican places. We used to eat here all the time because it was right outside our subdivision when we lived in our Sticks and Bricks before we started RV’ing. We had a great time catching up with Bob and Beth, and a great meal to boot.
On the way back to the rig, we made a stop at Wal-Mart for a few things, and I picked up a box of Folger’s Hazelnut K-Cup packs to give our new coffee maker a try when we got home.
Jan didn’t want any, but I fixed a cup of coffee and it was really good. As good as a full pot from our old Mr. Coffee.
I think we’re going to like this.
Thought for the Day:
Remember, a wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf.
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