Blogging Roller

I just happened to be looking for air show opportunities this morning and found out about the Pope AFB Airshow and Open House, which is happening today and tomorrow. What luck! So I packed up the kids and drove the 1.5 hours from Raleigh down to Fayetteville.

We parked at the Ft. Bragg fairgrounds, took a bus over to the base and despite the waiting in line and the heat, we really enjoyed ourselves. We saw several aerobatic displays, T-33, F-15, F-18 fly-overs and a Heritage Flight* with a F-15 and P-15 flying side-by-side (see below). We got to walk through several C5A and C130 transports and check out tanks and other armored fighting vehicles. There were also some vintage planes on display: a B-25, a Japanese torpedo bomber, P-40 Tomahawk, Hawker Hurricane and others. Very cool stuff (yes, I'm one of those pacifists who is fascinated with military history and hardware, kinda like this guy).

I wasn't able to get many good pictures because of my crummy little camera, which seems to be going bad. I uploaded some of best shots to my Flickr account and tagged them with airshow. Here are a couple of my favorite war birds, a P-51 Mustang and an F-15 Eagle:

* There's a nice gallery of previous Heritage Flights here.

The Smithsonian Air & Space Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles airport is simply amazing. The center "provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and sapce artifacts  that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall." I could have spent a lot more time there, but not everybody in the family shares my fascination with air, space and military history.

Here's a mosaic I created from some of the photos I uploaded to my Flickr account (I used Mosaic Maker to put this together).

Over the weekend, we drove about three hours west towards the mountains to Statesville, NC for the annual Carolina balloon-fest. We saw a tank, an assortment of military helicopters and we even saw some balloons attempt to inflate. Unfortunately, it was way too windy for ballooning. So it was a bit frustrating, but the kids love any chance to take a road trip so it wasn't a total loss. You can see some of my photos on Flickr.

I've been experienting with taking closeups with my new Canon Powershot S500 camera and with Flickr's MetaWeblog API support.

Antique German wine glass

Anil points out a very cool set of then and now photos of New York City called New York Changing.

I should rename this contrived little blogging crutch to Saturday photo. I never seem to get to it until 11:30 Friday night. This week, another photo taken by my father. The photo is a view from the Snowbird Mountain Inn in North Carolina.

I missed a couple of Friday photos, so today I have two for you. Both from the soccer double header last weekend. Alex and Linus had back to back games and my dad was there with his telephoto. First, here is Alex seconds before scoring a goal:

Linus didn't score a goal during his game, but here is a shot of him playing goalie.

Those boys are about as sad as can be today. We just learned that the stray cat we took in last year has stomach cancer. Luna was the sweetest cat. She got along great with my three loud and rowdy boys because she was totally deaf. We will be having another one of those tear-filled back-yard burials again tomorrow. Sigh.

(C) 2003 Charles S. Johnson