Then I went to the airfield to fit the compass to the plane, but I found a couple of cracks in the mount before I tightened it down. No worries, as I'm not in a hurry to do anything, so I took it home and glued it all back together again.

I moved the CAT5 cable coming into the office from the wireless router so it's going to a socket on the wall, rather than just being a 8' trailing lead hanging out of the wall. Now I just need to connect it to my router, rather than use the DSL throughout, and I can turn the DSL off :o)

Still fighting the dodgy bug. Hateful thing.

I've lost the will to scan, as I'm still feeling poorly.

I feel like I'm coming down with another damned cold. That's not fair, I only had one a few months ago.

No, it's not a too-muhr.

I did a bit more on the photo scanning project.

This'll give me a VOIP phone, so we'll see how that goes.

The photo scanning project continues...

The plan is that once I have them all scanned in, I can throw them out (a lot are starting to look crappy), and burn the 600dpi scans onto a CD or three. I'd do them to a DVD, but a few of my machines here won't read a DVD-R :o(

Anyways, it's amazing to see some people back when they were young :o)

In the late morning / afternoon, the family Kelly came over to fuss Chloe. While they were here, we went out to lunch, bought a TV and let the girls play at the park in the Galleria. Oh, and bought Dave's birthday present, but he doesn't know what that is yet, so I won't spoil the surprise here (it's not what he's expecting though).

After that excitement, I got to the airport fairly early, as is my usual practice. It had been bright and sunny over the river, but in Noo Yoik it was foggy. The nice United Airlines put me on an earlier flight, but that was delayed because of the fog. As the time for my original flight started to get closer, I asked whether I could get on that flight, but my seat would seem to have been given to somebody else :o( No matter, (dull, duller) Dulles was fogged in too, so there's a good chance that wouldn't work out anyway. They put me on a flight to San Francisco. I got to sit next to Angus James Falkener, from New Zealand, but he was born in New York, and left when he was 3, but he's 6 now, he has a sister Maddy and a brother George, and really really likes puzzle books, but his favourite is probably crosswords, but he can colour in really well too, as long as his pencils are sharp, but Scooby Doo on the Gameboy is great - he's got to the 3rd level lots of times, but only a few times has he made the 4th level, where there are spiders and crabs and ghosts to stomp on, but Scooby can karate kick stuff, he wants a dog when he gets home, even though they're a lot of responsibility, and are we flying yet, or are we taxying, he definitely felt like we're moving, is this the runway, how high are we going to be, and how long will it take to get to San Francisco, why are they serving lunch when he's just had lunch, he wasn't hungry because he'd just eaten a whole pack of Lifesavers. His parents were taken up with the other 2, and the girl on the other side of me said "it's going to be a long flight" and put her headphones on... thanks.

We actually did OK, with the colouring (I was an advisor), crosswords (I helped with the spelling) and games in the puzzle book.

Having arrived in San Francisco, I managed to beg onto the wait list for the next-but-one flight to Sacramento, rather than wait 5 hours. Of course, that was running late, and I managed to get on it, but didn't get back to Sacramento until almost 10pm. It's funny, they suck their teeth and say they doubt you'll get on the flight, then ask you what your seating preferences are when you do get on - there were probably 4 or 5 seats free, even with me on the plane. I got home late, and just toddled off to bed.

I also played with the trim control for a while, as I'd adjusted the tail, and managed to make the plane very heavy to take off, and very heavy to land, but I didn't get it quite right. I'll have to play with that some time when I'm out of the circuit.

When I landed, I had trouble turning in to the area by the hangars, so I think the grease in the tailwheel's all frozen solid or something, so that's next on my list of "things to do on the plane".

No flying though - it was hammering it down with rain, to the point that I moved the plane so that the drips from the roof weren't landing on it.

After everything was done, several of us went for a late lunch. As it was getting dark, it stopped raining. Typical.

I started New Year's day grotesquely early at the SPCA walking dogs. It's kind of cool to see the sun come up on the 1st of January, and not just because I haven't gone to bed yet :o)

In the afternoon, my next door neighbour, Jim and I got to brace the fence between us after the wind (39.8mph, so far, according to the weather station) broke a few of the 4x4 uprights. It's OK, the builders use the cheapest wood they can find, and after 10 years...