It's coming...

I'll drive back to Claremont tomorrow for the start on Tuesday of a fresh semester of good ol' college. Only a year and a half left, and then I'll be out into real life. It's amazing.

I'll post my class schedule tomorrow.

It's official

No multi-engine rating for me before school starts up again. This is the fourth flight to be canceled because the Duchess is succeeding in an ongoing attempt to disintegrate into Duchess parts. I guess I'll be working on this on weekends and maybe, just maybe, I'll get it during the semester.

This next semester will be fun, I think.

Setbacks

It's been nearly five months and I am no closer to getting this multi-engine commercial rating. Having a semester off from it certainly did not help for memory, so that has meant re-studying for things that I knew in August. And now, my past three flights have been canceled thanks to the airplane's continued endeavor to self-destruct (a bad magneto, twice, on the right engine, and today the over-center locking brace on the right main gear snapping in half). They say that plane is in better shape than most Duchesses in service. God help all us multi-engine students.

So my hope is for a checkride two weeks from yesterday (since earlier doesn't look like a possibility). Trying to earn a multi-engine commercial rating is starting to get depressing.

Happy 2007!

It's a new year again! But since it's so cliché to talk about "new year's resolutions" and "fresh starts," I'll make a statement of goals for this year.

• Love God with all my heart, demonstrating that love with prayer and with compassion for my friends and neighbors
• Love Elle and honor her with my words and actions
• Love my family, honoring the investments that they have made in me and (of course) calling more often
• Finally earn my multi-engine commercial rating (which should be within the next two weeks) and fly the Aztec enough with an instructor to qualify for insurance so that I can fly it myself. Additionally, I have promised to take Alex, Autumn, and Ben Margolis (I think?) flying.
• Find a good summer internship either in Washington or in SoCal. The surest bet would seem to be Green Hills Software right now, since I've actually interviewed and will visit in two Fridays. The work they do isn't the exact field I'm looking for, since I'd like to end up doing programming for entertainment media such as games or movies, but the work does sound exciting. I have also sent resumes to some other companies, including Microsoft.
  
• Bring up my GPA (i.e. no more C's! -- at least my C+ this semester was amid 3 A's and 2 A-'s)
• Finish my Sudoku project
• Program a computer player for the XNA game studio "Space War" example game (i.e. single-player mode)
• Keep a weekly (at least) journal/blog here. (There are long stretches of school for which I don't really have any account, and that makes me sad. 'Cause I definitely forgot a lot of core math that I've discovered I need.)
  

and of course

• World peace (what list of goals is complete without it? Maybe I need "Cure cancer," too...)
  

I'll try to keep track of these goals this coming year.