She fell from the sky!

A human body falling from 9,000 feet is still just a speck in the sky. You can't tell if it's whirling around out of control, if it's merely plummeting, or if it's dropping with any sort of aerodynamic behavior.

When that human body is your beloved wife, anchor of your existence, you really hope the parachute works.

Omaha before the jump. Photo by Kouryou-chan
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

Omaha jumped out of an airplane today. I had promised her that she could do that sometime this year, the weather was beautiful, fallenpegasus had suggested it and since I had just undertaken a minor project for him he drove her down to the airfield. FallenPegasus pointed out that it could not be considered a "perfectly good" airplane as, after all, the door was open. Kouryou-chan and I followed a half hour later after I had made lunch for the two of us. We arrived at the field in time to watch Omaha suit up and talk to her cameraman, and then she trundled off to the airplane while the rest of us raced down to the landing spot.

There wasn't much to see. The plane was a tiny speck in the sky, and then so were the bodies falling to the ground. Eventually, we saw some chutes and watched as

Coming in for a landing
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

they came towards the ground. Some of the more experienced ones were quite impressive as they did pinwheels less than fifty feet from the ground and then came racing it towards the landing field as speeds that scared me. The first tandem landed much more sedately, and I stopped worrying too much about Omaha. I hadn't seen anyone falling out of control from the aircraft after all.

She was the last to land, so we felt safe

Kouryou-chan runs out to Omaha
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

running out to her.

The first words out of her mouth were "Wooo! I have to do that again!" She was obviously very happy and quite thrilled with the whole adventure, and we'll have film from the cameraman that went down with her in a couple of days. I'm just glad she made it to the ground in one piece. Yeah, I know, FallenPegasus has done this a dozen times and he's still intact, but still.

It is too darned hot

It was too hot today. We had a long list of things we wanted to get done, but only one of which we actually got to. We need to build a second retaining wall corner to the first for the space between the primary retaining wall and the foundation of our property, so we headed out to Home Depot to get gravel, stones, and fresh sand for the kids' playpit. The gravel and sand totaled up to the weight tolerence of our little station wagon, so we skipped the stones. But finding everything, getting the advice we needed, and packing it took so long that by the time we were done we headed to the Southcenter mall food court to have a very late lunch.

It's hard to go out and find drinks that aren't heavily sugared or caffeinated. I eventually settled on a jug of grapefruit juice and a turkey-and-cranberry sandwich. I'm trying to eat better, really.

We got home and just dumped the gravel, but we cleaned out the sandpit and replaced the old sand with fresh sand. Afterward, Omaha played with Kouryou-chan in the pit for a bit, then I took over and we made castles and sculptures. She's a bit lonely; her sister is at her mothers', the neighbors to the west are out for the weekend and the neighbors to the east have been gone as well. (Although listening to them get in their cars this morning was painful; the little girl was screaming over and over, "I can't, I can't!" and the mother was shouting at her and... oy. What is with people whose immediate response is to turn everything up to 11 and leave it there?)