Apartments No More!

Allison and I are officially finished with apartment living forever. Well, we hope anyway. I mean I'm not ruling out never living in one again, just not for a long while. :-) I turned in the keys and did a final walk-through with management. She was impressed by the condition we left it, only taking a glance in each room before signing us off. Here's one last look from cleaning day last Sunday.

Fun at an NYC Airport

Yesterday (Saturday Aug. 2nd) I flew to LaGuardia, one of the 3 airports that serves New York City. LGA is located in north Queens, a borough of NYC. Flying in there can be quite scenic no matter which runway is being used for landing. The flow yesterday for aircraft arriving from the south was to fly over Staten Island directly to the Statue of Liberty and then to follow the Hudson river until turning back towards the airport to land. My First Officer had the best view during the river portion with a fantastic view of Manhattan.

We arrived early to the gate. But leaving is another story.

We were more than ready on time but the gate had several CRJ flights leaving at the same time. We finished boarding about 25 minutes after scheduled departure. This probably caused what was to come.

We taxied out and were informed by ground control that west and south departures were shut down. This means the air traffic controllers that control airplanes after they leave the airport area could no longer handle any more flights. This was due to the large line of thunderstorms to the west of NYC. We were the SECOND airplane to be stopped behind a US Airways plane who was first.

3 hours later, yes, THREE HOURS LATER, we took off. Luckily I had an excellent flight attendant taking care of our 48 people in the cabin. Plus I made something like 7 or 8 PA announcments over the course as things changed or didn't change. I can only wonder had we taxied out ON TIME we probably would have left.

There ended up being 2 lines of weather that moved through. At one point we had almost 40 airplanes in line behind us. I found out later when we arrived after all that mess that one passenger who was 78 years old was traveling with her mother. What?!? Her mother? She was 101!!! And the 78 woman hadn't flown in 30 years. I told her this was one heck of a return to flying!

I put my camera up on the dash to record our landing in LGA. When you watch, no, we are not in a constant bank, the camera was sitting at an angle.



Click here to see some pictures.

And as Allison mentioned in the post immediately following this one, I have pictures of her new classroom and you can view those here. Enjoy!

It's Back To School Season

Well I can't tell you how excited I am about the new school year!!!!! I'm in Cobb County at a wonderful elementary school that is only 2.7 miles from our new house! It's a K-2 school and I will have a TON of teachers on my team which will be exciting because there will be so many ideas to share. It is called Kennesaw Elementary School or Kennesaw Primary (apparently it switched over to a primary school not too many years ago. After school starts you'll be able to access a blog on that website where I'll be posting information about my class. It will be a neat way for you to know what I'm up to in the classroom. As of now though I don't have a web page yet.

This past week I have been up at school everyday for either training or setting up my room. Sometimes I stayed till six! I am not finished but things feel a lot better now. I have all of the big furniture basically where I want it and most of my things have a place to go now. It's funny after five years of teaching you'd think I'd be quick at this. However, I have found that I just need to throw somethings away!

As soon as Dave is back with the laptop I'll be happy to post some pictures of my progress. He came up to school and helped me out for almost the whole day on Thursday!! Boy did he help! I was soooo thankful to have him there.

To be continued...