John & Anne Wiley

2010/07/20

Patience

Filed under: Aviation,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,NxNW Adventure,SB Region — John @ 21:52

Back when I was training to be a pilot, I got to practice patience. I had earned the right to fly solo, but was restricted to 10 kt. winds or less. I was within an hour or two of practice before completing the process, so every chance to fly was important. One day the winds were blowing 11 kt., so I got everything ready and sat in the plane watching the winds, other planes easily landing and taking off, and listening to weather information. I thought about having easily flown in winds twice that strong with an instructor along, and knew it would be easy. I knew it unlikely anyone would ever know if I just took off and completed the practice. Instead I sat in the plane until my available time was gone, then heard the wind report drop to 9 kt., but calmly put everything away and left for my other activities of the day.

Driving away, I thought about a hawk sitting on a post. Calm, attentive, and ready to take off instantly. That’s how I had felt the whole time. I thought again of that day when I spotted this red tail sitting atop the SBA firehouse antenna.

8003 Hawk on a Post

8003 Hawk on a Post

So today as the timing grows ever tighter for us to have any chance of leaving on our N by NW adventure, it was helpful to recall that calm. Hopefully I can keep returning to that, efficiently taking care of the zillion details while retaining an inner calm.

2010/07/03

Big Red Tide

Filed under: Aviation,by Anne,Flying,Has Photos,Nature,Random — Anne @ 08:38

I was amazed at the amount of red tide we saw today.  We have seen red tide from the air before, but never near this amount. ~ Anne

1204-Big Red Tide

1204-Big Red Tide

Note: this is the eastern shore of El Capitan State Beach.

Joy Day

Filed under: Aviation,Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Nature,Random,Relationships,SB Region — John @ 03:26

Today we celebrated the joy of our first “official” flight alone together (the day I earned my license 7/2/06), by flying our friend Joy to celebrate her birthday. As the date portended, it was a joyful flight! Shorter than we planned, due to minor delays getting aloft and major winds once we reached Gaviota Pass. So rather than climb above the turbulence and fly too far above earth to most richly enjoy it, we stayed low along the coast in the lee of the mountains for a leisurely return to SBA.

7566 Oil Seeps

7566 Oil Seeps

There were some oil seeps close to shore, and later we saw an intense “red tide” as reported in my post about the flight on Edhat.com (see the right column link here for more of my posts there).

7581 Pass Pad

7581 Pass Pad

Just to the west of Gaviota Pass is a concrete pad and three green tanks, as if someone is planning to build a home or perhaps park a modular home there. We had planned to fly out and look for whales at Point Conception (barely visible in the distance), but we’ll try again another day.

7577 Dolphin Phun

7577 Dolphin Phun

We had a lot of “phun” watching several different dolphin feeding activites. In this one you can see that some of them swim on their backs, and how closely involved the pelicans get. I’ve posted a few more pix from the flight on my Photo Page, so click on the link in the column at the right to see those.

2010/06/24

Right Seat

Filed under: Aviation,by Anne,Flying,Has Photos,Nature,People,SB Region — Anne @ 00:20

I have some photos today.  This one of the point at UCSB was taken on 6-20 as we flew – John’s Father’s Day choice 🙂 – up the coast.  The context for the first two was “UCSB without Molly” – the campus looks different with her in Paris.  I appreciate how much more connected I feel to the campus from her having been here, and even more so with the graduation activities. Got a closer sense of the warm community life in IV as well.  So here is the Campus Point with students enjoying the beach:

0997 UCSB Campus Pt. beach

0997 UCSB Campus Pt. beach

This is a few seconds later.

0998 UCSB & SBA from Coast

0998 UCSB & SBA from Coast

Then this from the same flight, on the return.  I loved the clouds along the edge of the coast, and especially this view with the sliver of mountain top peeking through.  This looks toward Vandenburg from the valley between Lompoc and Buellton.

1017 Clouds peeking

1017 Clouds peeking

John’s encouraged me to post – thank you John!

2010/06/18

A Walk

Filed under: by Anne,Happiness,Has Photos,Nature,Random,SB Region — John @ 00:27

I’m hoping Anne will start making more posts to our blog, but meanwhile I wanted to share some pix she took yesterday. While I was at our dentist on Coast Village, she walked to the Biltmore and along some of Butterfly Beach. It’s always fun for me to see how other people see, and her perspective in particular is of course fascinating to me. For example, I like how she snapped just one wing and the shadow of a bird (heron?) in this beach view.

0981 Beach Shadow

0981 Beach Shadow

I cropped this from her larger frame that included a few diaphanous clouds, in order to accent the bird. Such a beautiful town to live in with such a beautiful person, eh?

She also snapped several studies of this floral collection, and this one isn’t cropped though I did compensate somewhat for her compact camera.

0984 Floral Display

0984 Floral Display

I like how she features the yellow, yet includes the tiny white and blue flowers once you’re drawn in. As you may have noticed, pix from her camera are at a different numbering sequence (e.g. 0984 vs 7090 on my camera) though yesterday’s ground-level Courthouse snap was my idea on her camera. If you like her work, please consider posting a comment and/or using our Contact link near the upper right of every page. A little encouragement might get her snapping and posting more often. 🙂

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