The Land of Ozz

That’s right folks, gas has dropped to less than $2.00 per gallon in parts of Berkeley County in South Carolina. It seems that new Walmart opened recently in the Monks Corner area and started a price war with their Murphy gas station. On Thursday 11/17/05 the price at Walmart was $1.989 per gallon witha Walmart gift or credit card.

Several other stations in the area lowered their prices to compete with Walmart. This seems to prove that gas prices do not have to be as high as most stations are charging because these other stations were able to quickly lower their prices when a little competition came to town.

NOTE: I have recently removed Haloscan comments and trackbacks from this blog. I will restore comments and trackbacks shortly for this posting. Thank you for your patience.

Below are the links and excerts for those who tracked to this post on my old HaloScan track and comment system:

Dick Durbin - Please Call Your Office! from Another Rovian Conspiracy - MontereyJohn

Scenes from my gas guzzling SUV. Gas prices are now where they were one year ago and inflation is slowing because of this return…. Let’s hope that this reduces the idiotic push for a windfall profits tax and demonization of oil companies. Woops….

$1.99 from Mind in the Qatar

Yep, that was what a gallon of regular gas cost right outside of work this afternoon. And we are not the only place…. Since I am a shareholder of Exxon-Mobile, I am extremely dissappointed! ..

I can not believe it. Our campus pastor up at Seacoast Summerville is blogging. Yeah!!! Way to go Pastor Phil. Check the Summerville Edition.

The Hangar Flying web site is coming along. I decided shortly after I started building the forum that I needed more features than the phpBB native solution had to offer. I could have certainly added mods manually, but that would have been tedious and time consuming. I took the advise of Lee a friend who hosts a forum over at ecfreedive.net and I installed IntegraMOD right up front. IntegraMOD has everything I was looking for to modify my phpBB installation and more. I plan to elaborate more on the specific list of cool things I like about IntegraMOD soon.

HangarFlying.net is a new web site devoted to the promotion of aviation by aviators and others who are interested in aviation. You will also find a forum where you can share experiences, ask questions, or answer questions posted by other forum members. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Update: I have contacted a few aviation bloggers to see if I can get some traffic into Hangar Flying. I hope this track into my friends over at OTA Weekend will help.

Rick Warren celebrated with thousands Christians in Charleston, SC last night. It was a beautiful fall evening in Charleston, SC. The weather was great for an outdoor event at Joe Riley Stadium on the Ashley River near downtown Charleston. There was an awesome Praise and Worship period to kick off the event. The event was put together as a celebration for more than 700 small groups from more than two dozen local churches in the Charleston area who just wrapped up 40 Days of Community. The 40 Days of Community is a program outlined in Rick Warren’s book Better Together What on Earth Are We Here For?. Rick Warren is best known for his book The Purpose-Driven Life. The 40 Days of Community is a program that churches can use to bring small groups together that can go out into the local community and serve. Some of the activities that Charleston area groups participated in are mentioned in an article on Pastor.com.

This was my first time hearing Rick Warren speak in person. We all listened to his lessons weekly during the six weeks of the 40 Days of Community, but those messages were nowhere near as powerful as last night. Pastor Rick Warren strikes me as a much more humble man than I expected from a best selling author. From hearing him speak last night, I think he would rather keep it that way. I think he would rather be know as God’s servant rather than an author. His message was filled with experiences and ideas that would fire up any Christian. He talked about specific ways to help others around the world in very practical terms.

There was only one question that had me curious about this event other than the obvious message that Rick Warren would deliver. My question was how will Pastor Greg Surratt from Seacoast Church and the other local church pastors make this event about God and not just a Rick Warren fan gathering? Well they did a great job. I believe that the Praise and Worship time before Rick Warren was introduced definitely put everyone’s mind on the right thing, God. It ended up being much like a standard Seacoast church service for me with Rick Warren as the guest pastor for the evening. I don’t think it could have been done any better. By the end of the night I was as fired up more than ever and ready to continue to serve God by serving others with even more passion than ever. What better could have come from this event than for every person in attendance to have the same feeling at the end of the night?

This is one of the most rewarding things about being both a dad and a pilot. I get to share my passion with my son. Check out the Big Brother Riley page for pictures and the story.

The month of October was perfect timing for me dust off my wings and take to the air again. My upcoming trip to Alaska was the perfect motivator for me to get back in the air. I hoped that my trip to Alaska would involve a small plane with me at the controls and my wish came true. I had to get brushed up on my skills before I left for Alaska.

I called up a flying friend who is an instructor and asked him if he would fly with me until I got polished up enough on my flying skills to keep from hurting anyone and anything. We spent a couple of hours in a Cessna doing the standard touch and go maneuvers as well as practicing everything from straight and level flight to stalls. It came back to me much faster than I thought it would.

I was put in contact with an experienced aviator in Fairbanks, AK by the name of Pete Haggland. Mr. Haggland was born and raised in Alaska and has been flying for most of his life. He is a certified flight instructor, president of EAA Chapter 1129 and he owns several aircraft. Mr. Haggland has a private air strip next to his house. He offered to take me up in his Super Cub if the weather cooperated while I was there. The weather did cooperate and I did get to go up in the Supper Cub. As a matter of fact, I got to log almost two hours of tail dragger time for the first time. I must say that while it was not the easy to land a tail dragger for the first time it was a load of fun. I am hooked and plan to get my tail wheel sign off in the near future.

We left the snow covered private strip next to Mr. Haggland’s house and flew down to Fairbanks International (FAI) to fuel the plane and do some practice landings on the hard surface where landing a tail dragger is a little less forgiving than on grass or snow. After fueling the plane I climbed into the front of the Super Cub. I felt like I was in paradise even though the temperature hand only climbed into the teens and I was wearing bunny boots, gloves, and a parka. I completed more than a half dozen three point landings with different flap settings. I then tried a couple of wheel landings. I must not have scared Mr. Haggland too much because he let me land back at his private strip which was covered with a few inches of fresh show.

I can not begin to tell you how much fun this was. This is still not number one on my list of Best Days of Flying, but it definitely ranks up there pretty high.

It has been exactly one year since the picture above was taken. Even though I was not told by the doctors at the time, I was only allowed to hold Caden that day because the doctor’s believed that Caden would not survive the very complex open-heart surgery that they were going to perform the next morning and they thought this would be my last chance to ever hold my son. Below is a picture of a true miracle child. The surgeon who operated on Caden’s heart on 11-8-04 (at six days old) recently said that miracle is “an understatement” when talking about Caden.

I have learned more from my experiences with this little boy than from anything else in my life. Most of what I have learn has to do with faith and trust in God. God is awesome. I thank God for the opportunity he has given me to be this little boy’s Daddy.

Happy Birthday Punkie!!!

Read more about Punkie (Caden) on Caden’s Page.

It has been one year since I officially joined the world of blogging. The birth of my son Caden started me on this journey. It has been a great year and I look forward to many more. Happy Birthday Caden and happy Birthday Caden’s Page.