It’s April already and still the winter wont let go. Believe it or now we had a good six or eight inches of snow today!
The bug fix marathon continues at work. It went from a month to six weeks, to two months, and now ten weeks. I took a couple days off for spring break; hopefully we’re wrapping it all up this week.
If we’re not traveling on spring break we usually like to go a museum. New York has lots of them. I’ve been living here over 25 years and still haven’t seen many of them. So last Thursday we went to the Intrepid. This was Michelle’s idea but I’ve never been and always wanted to go.
The Intrepid is a WWII aircraft carrier that’s docked on the West side of Manhattan, on a pier along with a submarine, a bunch of historic aircraft and spaceships and other attractions. The carrier itself is very intersting, although you have to watch your head if you’re tall (the sub is even worse). It has alot of history; in addition to fighting in WWII it participated in the space program, pick up at least one Gemini capsule after splashdown.
The airplane collection is really cool too. Many of them are navy planes intended for use on the carrier. A few helicopters too, a Harrier jet, and a Gemini capsule (a replica I think). There’s an A-12 Blackbird, and that’s only the third coolest plane.
They have a Space Shuttle. This one is Enterprise, which was the prototype that mostly rode on the back of a 747 and detached to test its flying and landing capability. It never actually went into orbit. Unfortunately you can’t go in inside. At this point we’ve seen three of the four existing shuttles: Enterprise, Endeavor and Discovery. Only Atlantis remains.
But the coolest was they have a Concorde! Sixties vintage jet setting for the rich and famous to the extreme at Mach 2 and 60,000 feet! Apparently there were only twenty ever made, fourteen operational as passenger jets, about a dozen still in existence, and only three or four in North America. You can take an in-depth tour where they let you go inside and sit in the passenger cabin, and even up in the cockpit. Somehow I ended up debating the musical merits of Phil Collins, who famously flew the Concorde in 1985 to open both the UK and American portions of the Live Aid concert, with our tour guide, who was not a big Genesis fan, and not aware that Phil also played behind a reunited Led Zeppelin that night.
Last Friday Jay and I finished mixing our jazz record. And it sounds really great if I say so myself. Now it’s on the mastering and getting CD’s made. I don’t really have a concept for the cover art yet, but I’m turning over a few ideas. We do have a handful of photos of the group in the recording session we can use.
Saturday the weather was actually nice and we raked up the yard and started getting ready for spring. I even started up the Mustang and let it run in the driveway for a few minutes. The plan was to take it out for a ride today, but as I mentioned, it snowed.