Gliding.fi

Wednesday 25.11.2015 – Optional tasks

Weather is becoming hotter and windy. I watched the news this morning and saw the weather forecast with fire warnings. In Finland we either have fire warnings or not, there’s nothing in between. Here the scale is something like “low-moderate”, “high” etc. until it goes to “extreme” and “catastrophic”. Well, who haven’t seen the news of bush fires in Australia or California for example.

Pilots got optional tasks in the briefing, meaning it wasn’t mandatory flying. Some of teams are still going through technical inspection and one team arrived just today, also part of British team was collecting their gliders from the quarantine at Sydney.

I spent some time at the launch point, the hot weather wasn’t at all that exhausting as it was in Ocseny, Hungary last summer. It’s because humidity is much lower here. I had forgotten my camera‘s power on last night, and the battery was dead at that time when I was supposed to go to the launch point. I decided to go there anyway and take pictures with my iPhone instead. I ended up taking one 2 minute video, just walking through the grid. I passed the British team, and Matt was standing there without a shirt, when I had just passed them, I heard someone (Coxy?) saying with “posh” British accent “Hi, my name is Matt, would you like to see my chest”, then I turned back and…well if you see the video, you know what happened. I got back from the airfield with USA team crew member Tony, who is from Wichita, Kansas. It’s a famous city, as I know quite many people who have flown their simulator training there.

The day was very successful with the website, I got more privileges on the publishing system and now we just need to decide what we want to publish under Galleries and should the name Galleries be changed.

Flying weather was simple: just blue thermals. Those people, who I saw after their flights, looked mostly exhausted and Hungarian pilot (Tamás) had quite a red face, which we would call as “panda tan” but you might now it with term “ski tan”. But hey, today’s red is tomorrow’s brown, right?

The wind got really strong at one point in the afternoon and some of the parasols at the club house terrace fell down because of the strong wind. Or perhaps it was just a thermal starting from the apron.

In the evening we had T-Bone steaks, green salad, warm potato salad, tomato with fetta (Europeans notice, not feta, but the package says fetta), penne pasta with tomato sauce, with soft and luscious bread rolls. I fixed some garlic butter for myself, which I love with my steaks.

One problem there is still to be fixed, and that’s my phone issue. I brought an htc phone with me, and it has a Telstra card in it, but it won’t use 3G and if I try to use facebook or Pages manager with it, it will freeze, which isn’t good news for my job here. Adam’s girlfriend was so kind and she posted Adam’s spare phone here so I keep my fingers crossed that the problem will be sorted out soon. If not, that only means that I am not able to post anything in real time from the airfield or do anything from the accommodation.

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