The birds are gone. We saw them leave Thursday. Diane commented that it is remarkable to have seen the whole process, from nest construction to little eggs to tiny chicks to larger chicks and frenzied mother to adolescent birds, trying their wings for the first time. We walked outside and there they were, huddled on top of the flower basket, as if waiting for some impetus to fly. They saw us, cheeped and fluttered down to the floor of the patio. Their wings weren’t totally capable of supporting them and they hopped into a corner, afraid of the monstrous humans clearly trespassing on their territory. They eventually worked themselves into a corner, and their mother returned and guided them off the porch to a nearby bush for protection. Oddly enough, we’re actually experiencing some empty nest syndrome after having witnessed their entire lives…<\/p>\n
Trite as it sounds, I’ve gone from famine to feast with job offers. Almost simultaneously Thursday afternoon, I received job offers from ImageWorks (my current employer) and<\/i> Davis Furniture. The pay rates for both are good and the benefit packages are great as well. It’s a big answer to prayer. I want to stay at my current job but made them aware of the (higher) offer from Davis in hopes that they will up the ante a little bit. I find out tomorrow. But either way, we will be insured and in a more permanent place than we were. Praise God.<\/p>\n
I’ve been listening to an aviation-related podcast lately called “Airspeed<\/a>,” hosted by a pilot up in Michigan named Steve Tupper. He has his private license, same as me, and is busily working on his instrument rating. He posts about a wide variety of general aviation-related topics. Some particularly noteworthy ones are his play-by-play description of an instrument approach and some thoughts on a budding pilot’s first solo. I’ve enjoyed them, and they really have helped whet my appetite (as if it needed it) for getting back up in the sky. I visited the Winston-Salem airport over lunch a couple of Fridays ago, chatted with one of the instructors there and just gawked at the business planes for a little bit. I called Jethro, a pilot friend of mine I’ve done a good bit of flying with, and hopefully we’ll go up this week sometime. He’s working on his flight instructor rating and regularly flies a Piper Arrow<\/a>, something with a bit more power than the little 172 I trained on, so in his words I might get some “retrac time” (retrac = retractable landing gear aircraft). And now that the job situation is settling (my self-imposed restriction), a visit to the local Civil Air Patrol squadron may be in order. Exciting stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The birds are gone. We saw them leave Thursday. Diane commented that it is remarkable to have seen the whole process, from nest construction to little eggs to tiny chicks to larger chicks and frenzied mother to adolescent birds, trying their wings for the first time. We walked outside and there they were, huddled on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}