It’s that time again! Here we are with number 4 of the journal series written by me, Blake Guiles. Life is going good right now and I have no complaints, well . . . maybe a few but overall it’s good. I’ve been staying busy with school and just life in general. I went to Halloween Horror Nights last week, I celebrated my girlfriend’s birthday, and I did a whole lot of school work. I’ll give some more detail later, but now it’s time for my wonderful, always exciting classes!
TTH 8:15am-9:30am – Aviation Weather – Since I have this class two days a week, it is broken up so that I have the lecture portion on Thursday and the lab portion on Tuesday. On Thursdays we discuss a certain topic and on Tuesdays we have a lab on what we covered last Thursday. For example: We just had a lecture on turbulence this past Thursday, so this coming Tuesday we will have a lab that involves turbulence. The lab will most likely consist of finding different reports of turbulence and analyzing our findings. Once again, it’s nice to learn something that directly relates to what my career will be. Finding turbulence and staying away from it is important!
TTH 9:45am-11:00am – Business Communications – We’ll, I have finished 3 projects so far and I’ve gotten Bs on all of them. I’m pretty happy about that, but my happiness quickly vanishes when my professor assigns our final project which is a mega-huge-enormous paper that will most likely be the death of me. I have been able to do all the other projects, but this last one is going to be something else. I have 2 partners and we are doing a paper that compares the Airbus 380, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and the new Boeing 747-8. It’s exciting to do all the research regarding all 3 of these awesome planes, but we have to organize all this information into a 20-24 page report . . . and we have no idea where to begin. I know as time goes on I will lose a little bit of stress because we will know what we have to do and how to organize it, but then my stress level will increase when we are approaching the deadline. I’ll keep you updated.
TTH 12:45pm-2:00pm – Intermediate Aeronautics – The past couple of weeks we have been talking about approach, departure, arrival, and holding procedures. All these procedures are usually encountered on every flight and it is pretty important to understand how to use them. My professor has been good at teaching the material and making sure that everyone understands it. He assigned several worksheets and there were a couple of questions that I had so I went to see him in his office and he was very helpful. He stopped right in the middle of what he was doing and made sure that I understood the material on the worksheet. Most professors will do this and I’m glad they do otherwise I would still be confused!
TTH 2:15pm-3:30pm – Air Traffic Management II – If you are an Aeronautical Science major, I highly recommend having an Air Traffic minor. Pilots and Air Traffic Controllers have to have a lot of the same knowledge, so part of this class is a review while the other half is stuff that I will learn soon. For example: We are learning about enroute charts for smaller aircraft and next week I will be covering that in my intermediate aeronautical class. So, once again, an Air Traffic minor is definitely a good idea!
TTHS 5:30pm-8:30pm – Flight – Well last week I did some holding patterns and they went perfectly! I was getting nervous about them because there is so much going on at once, but when I got up there I stayed calm and did a very good job. I was on my way to the holding pattern and I was trying to do some things inside the airplane, and then the Air Traffic Controller came on the radios. He was supposed to say, “Riddle 1-2-3, advise when ready to copy holding instructions.” When he says this, the pilot has a chance to get caught up on things before he has to copy a whole bunch of stuff. Well, instead ATC told me, “Riddle 1-2-3, turn to a heading of three one zero, fly to Ormond Beach VOR track outbound on the three four two Radial from the station, maintain right turns at two thousand feet, expect further clearance at twenty-two thirty.” At which point I said, “Uhhhh, could you repeat that for Riddle 1-2-3.” Then he did and I frantically scratched on a piece of paper, “R-342 / R / 2000 / EFC 22:30.” So that caught me off guard, but instead of getting flustered, like I normally do, I just calmly began the proper procedures and decided I needed to do a teardrop entry. I entered the pattern and established a wind correction angle and flew the pattern a dozen times or so. It went pretty smoothly and I was pleasantly shocked! Next on the agenda is how to navigate in clouds without your primary flight instruments . . . that should definitely be interesting! If you want to learn more about holding patterns, check out this link: http://www.pilotlist.org/zahar/howto.htm
Well, that’s how the classes are going. If you are a loyal journal reader (which I’m sure all of you are) then you know about the BAMFs and their volleyball season. Well we played in the first week, and then didn’t play weeks 2-5, and now it’s week 6 and we are scheduled for games on both Monday and Wednesday. Something happened with the list of teams and since there was a weird number, certain teams couldn’t play every week, but for some reason we weren’t scheduled at all so they are trying to make up for it now. After our next two games the playoffs begin. Woohoo.
I mentioned last week about going to Halloween Horror Nights with some friends. We ended up going on a Thursday and we had a blast. My friend John and I took our girlfriends and it was so funny to watch them get scared every 10 feet. They have people dressed in all sorts of costumes jumping out at you and trying to scare you. Every now and then they would try to scare me or John, but 95% of the time they tried to scare the girls, and 95% of the time they succeeded! We went through a couple different haunted houses and saw a couple of shows. Overall it was fun to walk around and see these creepy looking goblins chasing after screaming girls. I plan on going next year as well!
I’d like to say sorry to all you Cleveland fans and congratulations to all you Boston fans. I’m not a major fan of baseball but, eh, I try.
Well, once again I have managed to survive one of Daytona’s world-renowned activities . . . I, of course, am talking about Biketoberfest! For those of you who don’t know about Biketoberfest, please learn more about it here: http://www.biketoberfest.org/ Well last year I did go down to Main Street and check out the bikes, but this year I decided to stay far away from all the festivities. I think I’ll wait until March when Bike Week rolls around. That’s the good thing about living in an apartment. I live in Port Orange (just south of Daytona) so I’m still 5 minutes from school but I manage to dodge all the heavy traffic of bikes. If I choose to, though, I can take a quick drive and immerse myself in the culture!
Well, I usually don’t watch too much TV (except Family Guy, the Simpsons, and Southpark) but there is a relatively new show on CBS called Kid Nation. In a nutshell, it is a show that puts 40 kids, ages 8-15, in a small town with no “grown-ups” and they are expected to . . . survive I guess. If you haven’t seen the show yet, I recommend watching at least one episode just to see it for yourself. You can watch past episodes on-line here: http://www.cbs.com/primetime/kid_nation/ Just watch one episode and tell me what you think: Anger? Sadness? Laughter? Maybe all of these combined?
I know last journal I talked about The Heartbreak Kid staring Ben Stiller, but this past week I saw a movie with George Clooney titled Michael Clayton. I have to admit, I am a fan of George in just about anything, but this movie was something else. I don’t think there was one aspect of it that I didn’t like. It was well written, all the actors were very convincing and I never saw the ending coming. I will definitely be buying this when it comes out on DVD.
Well I think that will end it for this journal. Sorry to be plugging so many things. I swear that my intent for writing these journals was to give you a look into a sophomore’s life at Embry-Riddle and not to advertise movies and TV shows. Oh well, you should check ’em out anyway. I hope you all are doing well and stay tuned for the next journal when I advertise other TV shows and movies! It should be fun! As always, any ?s feel free to e-mail me anytime! See ya!
-Blake
email: wasteofsoap@yahoo.com
