In tough economic times, everybody's got to downsize

And for that reason, I have decided, rather expeditiously and without much thought - a process not unlike one employed by an upper chamber of a Legislature - to consolidate my two blogs into one.

As of today, Life of Nicolas will no longer exist...I mean, I will exist, I hope, but the blog by that title will not. This is a bargain for my reader (<-- that was not a typo) since now all my pointless drivel will be in one easy to find location.

Concurrent with my hasty and un-thought-out decision, I have imported all my posts from Life of Nicolas to this site. That being said, you have a better chance of finding Waldo than you do of finding the Life of Nicolas posts now on this blog.

If there is a grain of thought in my radical decision, it would have something to do with the fact that I was tired of finding material for two blogs. And, also, my life is pretty uninteresting, so there you go.

As a consequence of today's announcement, I want to be clear that although you will still receive premium airplane and airplane accessory news and commentary here, you may also have to contend with thoughts unrelated to aviation. To those who object to that, I say, "My house, my rules."

If I sound snarky, it may be because I was at work until 3:30 a.m. last night - that's Sunday night for those of you keeping track at home - and I am still at work right now, at 10:30 p.m. I have worked 65 hours since Thursday. Just in case you were wondering.

I'm getting quite the reputation

At work the other day, I was in the middle of some pretty intense budget discussion when all of a sudden the conversation was interrupted so that I could be introduced to somebody walking by the office where I was at. "So-and-so, this is Nicolas. He has a blog about airplanes."

It was said with some authority, so it was flattering, I must say. Maybe my peers see me as the go-to-person on airplane knowledge. It's my niche.

By the way, I feel guilt for not being able to post as much recently. If this blog were a child, it would already have been taken away by Child Protective Services for neglect. But, in the crazy world I operate in, this time of year is simply not condusive to anything but work and sleep.

The farm is gone

Today I effectively gave up my share of the family farm in Argentina- the farm I didn't even know I owned a part of until a few days ago. This is the deal - my grandfather, a long time ago, bought a farm with a friend of his. When my grandfather passed away, according to Argentinean rules of inheritance, half of the farm went to my grandmother, and the other half was split among my grandfather's three sons.

Then, when my father passed away, my sister and I assumed his share, splitting it down the middle. So, if my math is right, which is doubtful, I own 1/12th of the farm. Here's how I figure it - my grandmother has one - half, each son has a third. Therefore, you have to split my sister and my third in half, yielding 1/6. But, then, remember that we are only operating with half a farm to begin with, so split that 1/6 one more time and you arrive at 1/12.

Maybe I would have been a good farmer. Probably not.

I love living by a decent airport

In Fort Collins, you could go days without seeing a decent airplane flying overhead because the airport was crap. There was only one commercial flight of significance flying out of the airport, and usually it was not routed near the city on takeoff or landing.

But, alas, that is much different now. Granted, Albany is nowhere near your O'Hares, Atlantas, or JFKs, but at least the active runways usually ensure a few good views of flights coming in or heading out.

I thought of this last weekend as I was out chasing waterfalls and I got a good look of this little guy heading into ALB. I could not get the best look in the world, but it looked like a US Airways Dash 8.
Yeah, yeah, it's not the most exciting thing in the world, but it's much better than anything you could hope to get around Fort Collins.

Chasing Waterfalls: Installment #1

I grew up as an avid birdwatcher. I still have my trusty bird book with all the species I have seen checked off with the date and the location spotted. I am not much of a birdwatcher anymore, which is odd because given that I live in a part of the country that I have not birdwatched, I could be checking off all sorts of new species.

The one issue I had with birdwatching was that every now and then, I would see a bird but not be able to identify it before it flew away. Although one can be fairly certain of what they had seen, you cannot check it off your list if even a grain of doubt exists. So, instead of seeing a bobolink, you had seen what you thought was a bobolink. And thus what you had actually seen was really an LBB - code among birdwatchers for Little Brown Bird.

For Christmas, I was given a waterfall guide to the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, and I thought, "What a great way to get back into looking for things highlighted in a book and checking them off once I've seen them." And it's so much easier because waterfalls cannot fly away.

So, last weekend, I embarked on installment #1 of this mission. The goal is to see as many of the waterfalls in the region by the end of this year. I started off with two easy ones around the Capital Region: Cohoes Falls and the falls near Lock 7. To be fair, I had seen both of them already, but I had not seen them since I had been given the book. Thus, the previous visits were not sufficient to "check them off."

This rule of mine was questioned heavily by Diane, but eventually she caved, marking the first time in the history of mankind that I won a debate.

Here's a photo history of our afternoon:

We started off at Cohoes Falls, which incidentally, is the second highest waterfall in New York State.

Then, we headed towards Lock 7, conveniently located close to this great place on Denison to get a good meal with good company.

My new BFF

Amid the coverage of the Continental tragedy in Buffalo, I found a Times Union article which could be a chronicle of my life. The story recounts the detective work of one Mark Abbott as such:

Mark Abbott, a self-described "aviation geek" from Denver, said the aircraft parked at Gate C1 at Albany International Airport last week quickly drew his attention...Abbott, a service technician, said he made note of the plane's tail number — N200WQ — and later followed its progress on a flight tracker Web site. The plane left the gate at Newark at 11:53 a.m., but didn't take off until 2:23 p.m., according to data from flightstats.com.

When he does it, people write stories in the paper. When I do that, people laugh and point at me. What the hell?

One small step for (hu)man

Remember the good ol' days when I used to blog a lot ... you know, that small time of year known as June - December. Well, those days are gone. So, readers - all six of you - you're going to have to settle for these junky posts, that frankly, don't even merit the free space that I have on the internet.

But, it's my blog, so I don't really care what you think about the lax quality of posts lately.

For those that are still reading, first of all, perhaps you should go spend some time with your loved ones instead of reading this crap. Second of all, I made a huge stride in my flight-simming tonight.

Unfortunately, even for plane lovers like myself, the same old routine on flight-sim can get stale. Today, however, realizing I had nothing to lose but time, I set the weather to the harshest setting, which, unbeknownst (sp?) to me requires the pilot (me) to file an IFR. I found out how to do it, and set myself up to fly from Burlington to Albany in a King Air 350.

The weather was nasty the whole way. I saw the terminal as I took off, and the next thing I saw was south Albany on my approach. If you look carefully on the picture below, you can see the rain reflected in the strobe light.

It was awesome. I was in contact with ATC the whole way. They gave me specific flight levels and headings, and led me to the approach. Flying this way after what I had been doing is like learning to play cricket after starting with 301.