Been making pesto from my monster basil… ohhhh the yummyiness
Last weekend I made my 3000thJump a few days after my 10th Anniversary of my first skydive. Chrissi made her 300th on the same jump along with 11 of our friends.
I’ve been building an arcade machine. Really. More on this later.
I Finally made it out to California in August. It was swell.
Greetings from PR!!! I was hping to keep everyone updated and informed via pictures and videos and commentary, however i have no method to get stills to the internet (onnactounta no card reader.. and PIX messaging doesn’t work from PR (on verizon).
So, i apoligize to my 2 faithful readers who i’m confident i’ve already told all of these stories to, for putting you through this again:
I’m wriging this after some unkown number of rum&cokes, so please bear….. ah fuck it it if you can’t take a joke.
Thing i’ve learned in PR:
“Normal” temperature water in a shower means “as itomes from the tap.” Wither heated, nor cooled, but generally TO FUCKING COLD TO SHOWER.
Some hotels have time windows in which they turn on the water heaters… and often convienientl ‘forget’
Even dropzones have a vice-principal whose job it is to say ‘No’ to EVERYHTING
DZOs aiming to please will often overrule an evil vice-dzo
Rum is good (i knew this one, but being in the “Rum Capital of the World” just makes thr point ever more stronglier)
Road-side cart at 11pm is the best food on the island.. i dont care how drunk i was.
Skinnydipping in the ocean is fun
Skinnydipping at night is more funnerer
Red lights are optional after 11pm in PR
I CAN navgiate my way out of a paper bag… even if i can’t understand the road signs
i can get on the mike and be totally cool…. at least long enough to announce KEALANI’S 100TH Jump!!! woohoo!! (it was also a great distrction to let the pie brigate sneak up on her)
I love my friends.
Beach jumps rock (last time it twas so humid that sand stuck to evertything… this time is much better)
hmm. I seem to have fallen asleep after that last one, and am no longer drunk. So my my list must end. Anyway it’s been a blast.
There’s nothing like a baseball game; the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the smell of hotdogs, the wind whooshing by my ears as i prepare to touch-down on home plate…. wait, what?
There was this problem. The AllStar game was a 40 minute drive away, we had the opening-pitch-ball. and there was only 20 minutes till the start of the game. What were we to do? Air delivery, of course! Fortunately we just happened to have a pilot and plane at the ready so we put on our gear and climbed into the cessna.
We had some aerial shots of the stadium, a description of a good approach vector, and a 2000ft flyby before exit time. There just happened to be some people that we know on the ground, with a radio on the same frequency as our plane, letting us know it was OK to jump and that there was basically no ground wind. Great.
I was first out from 5k. About 10 seconds into my 17 second freefall i notices that my knee really hurt. I would come to find out later, from the pilot, that i whacked it on the step on my way out. Figures. After 800 cessna jumps I manage to forget all i know about exiting a 182 after a few short years as a turbine whore. Anyway, my knee hurts, but someone threw a large, fast moving planet at me, so i responded by throwing a pilot chute. WOOHOO! It worked! I was Up-wind, on the wind-line and in a great position to be the first down and make my approach.
Looking at the field, I noticed a bunch of people right in my approach lane. I had planned on doing some sort of — probably something on the milder side — HP approach in the stadium. I wanted to come in from the far corner behind the left-field foul lone and carve across the landing area, setting down in the infield near home plate. Well, the visiting team apparently didn’t care that the organizers had asked for the field to be cleared and were spread out all along the left field line still doing throwing warm-ups. Not so great. Time to alter my approach.
I came in between the stadium lights out in center field and surfed into the infield, first contact on the pitchers mound, ran it out and took a few extra steps to stop on home plate. I was a rockstar. Then came the 3 other rockstars behind me: KayWay, Bev and Janjan. Janjan, last down, had the ball. She landed like a princess and presented the First Pitch Ball to the…. guy who was supposed to get it and we all made our way off the field. Not before Heidi, who just happened to be at the game, came over and gave me (a bit too big of) a kiss, for which we were taunted and admonished by the mascots (and a few fans in the stands who had kids). Naughty Heidi.
We were treated to beers and burgers and an amazing Prime Rib. ‘Twas a good eve. Check the video. I’m the first one down, and the one taking the first-person view.
Update: I’ve been informed that the video is broken in IE. I haddn’t noticed, as i don’t usually partake in the pleasures of that POS. For anyone who does not get a happy-happy youtube video window below, you can check it out at this link.