LJ wanderers: I have a very liberal "friending" policy: if you add me to your reading list, I'll add you to mine.

I try to at least skim every post on my f-list, though I tend to skip posts about dreams and most memes. I don't always click on LJ-cuts (which is why I don't usually use them), and I never play videos. I only comment when I feel like I have something to say, and I don't expect any more then that from people who've added me to their f-list.

Swap-Bot wanderers: Unfortunately, all of my craft-related posts are behind a filter, to avoid cluttering my non-crafty LJ-friends' pages. To see them, you would need an LJ, to get on my friends' list, and to get into the "crafty" filter. Though that's not exactly hard, I will occasionally post some craft pictures here (below the cut) so you can see what I'm up to and into. More pictures are also available on my Flickr account.

( Four craft pictures )

Cheers!

Over coffee, a friend and I were discussing what it is to go to a gym, to workout, as a woman. She had made the mistake of looking online for inspiration to get more fit, which led to a nearly endless stream of "how to lose weight" messages. She observed that even some of the seemingly empowering messages have weight-related messages lurking: "I feel more confident (now that I'm a size four)", "I finally feel like I can wear a bathing suit (because large women shouldn't wear bathing suits)", "I feel so good about myself (as long as I keep the weight off)". She bemoaned the fact that even if she doesn't care about losing weight, just getting healthier and more fit, she's going to appear to be participating in this larger dialogue that somehow smaller is better.

Even if you are actively trying to lose weight, resist the messages that tell you that losing weight is the only way to become attractive and healthy. There are healthy, confident, attractive people of all sizes.

Almost a year ago, I started a new gym routine which did result in some loss of weight and inches and considerable increase in strength, stamina, and overall fitness. Through the process, I've been actively trying to resist weight-loss and appearance-focused messages (with mixed results). Thus:

Advice for women about how to go to the gym without buying into the dominant paradigm surrounding weight loss

Choose an appropriate goal measurement: If your goal is to get more fit, define "fit" first: lose the unhealthy belly fat, get stronger, improve your cardiovascular health, have less joint pain, whatever. Then choose a way of measuring your results that corresponds to your goal. Don't default to using a scale; your weight often isn't meaningful as a measure of fitness. Alternatives to the scale includes taking body measurements, figuring out your one rep maximum, checking your resting heart rate or your heart rate recovery rate, calculating your body fat percentage, or track your pain in a journal.

Choose a reasonable schedule for tracking your changes and an appropriate way to measure your progress.

Lift weights: You won't bulk up (unless you really try to), but you will increase your strength, improve your fitness, boost your metabolism, and prevent bone loss. And the messages around lifting aren't focused on weight loss.

Go to a coed gym: I went to a Curves women-only gym for years and only switched to a co-ed gym last year. Though Curves tries to focus on a nebulous concept of "empowerment", there were always people around discussing their weight loss (or lack thereof), there were weight-loss support groups run in the gym, and the business' magazine was full of ads for diet foods. In contrast, my new gym, a Steve Nash Fitness World, has DotFit, which is always advertised as a way to "support your fitness goals" and never exclusively as a weight-loss product. Advertising to get to both men and women is less likely to feed into "skinny is better" message, and going to a co-ed gym means fewer ads aimed just at women.

Unfortunately, the above might be changing. I wrote the paragraph above, then remembered a new series of poster ads in my new gym, featuring weight loss success stories, both men and women, from Fitness World locations around the country. Still, men don't talk about their weight loss on the treadmill and women seem to talk about it less when men are around.

Workout early: Maybe it's just at my gym, but I've found that working out early in the morning means working out with a different group of people than going to the gym during the day or after work. The early morning group (at our gym, that's 5:30 to 7 AM) are dedicated. They are the hardcore fitness people, including lots of amateur body builders. I find working out with them inspiring and non-intimidating: you can learn a lot about lifting and using the machines by watching them, but they are entirely focused on what they are doing and don't care what you are up to. In contrast, the weight area is busier after work, but seems cluttered with people who are more interested in socializing than in lifting.

Do lots of different things: By incorporating a lot of different activities, including some in the gym and some outside of it, into your week, you make getting healthier part of your daily life. The prevailing messages around weight continue to keep "losing weight" and "dieting" as a category of activity separate from everything else – something you do for a limited time until you reach a magic number – so making physical activity just another part of life counters that story perfectly.

Trying different physical activities gives you lots of choices if something isn't working for you. Life is too short to do things you don't enjoy. For a while, I pushed myself to run on the treadmill even though I disliked it, but I found that the recumbent bike and elliptical machine are both more enjoyable for getting my cardio. Also, I tried a step class last week... never again! On the other hand, I've discovered several fitness classes I do enjoy and have added them to my weekly schedule.

I also pick and choose my classes at the gym based on the instructors. I prefer ones who push you to your personal best over ones who just yell orders. The second one – barking out "go faster", "get your knees higher", "squat deeper" – often makes me feel inadequate, where a teacher who says "go as fast as you can" and "if you can, go deeper on these last five reps" encourages me to try a bit harder, but without the damaging messages.

Get two for one: Learn self-defence techniques or how to dance, and get your fitness needs met while focusing on learning, not losing.

Don't buy all new clothes: When your body starts changing, especially if you do lose inches, don't run out and buy a whole new wardrobe. Replace items that don't fit anymore as needed, but keep wearing what does still work. Buying all new clothes is part of the story that you will workout until you reach a certain size, then stop. Instead, know that your body will always be changing, so you'll always be adjusting your wardrobe to suit you now. Also, if you purchase all new clothes all of a sudden, you are more likely to get comments about weight loss, which tends to reinforce that as being the most valuable result of the process, instead of whatever your goal actually is.

Choose who to talk to: Avoid sharing your fitness efforts, especially when they are new and fragile, with people who want to talk about dieting and losing weight. Talk to people who also have health goals. Talk to people who also want to get fitter, stronger, healthier, more flexible. Talk to people who are already living the kind of healthy, active life you are aiming for.

Choose how to talk about it: Beliefs become words, and words become beliefs. Your subconscious thoughts about what you are doing will be expressed in what you say about it, and what you say will shape your subconscious in turn. Reinforce the beliefs you want with the words you choose when talking about your workouts and your goals.

No guilt: Probably the hardest of all, but most important to getting free of the trap, is to refuse to guilt yourself and to stop "should-ing" yourself. Workout because you want to, because it feels good, because you want the results, because it feels good when you stop, but not because you should.

I know, I know; everyone's kid is the most talented, the most adorable, the most intelligent... but, seriously, my nephew is brilliant.

My sister is very modest about the obvious genius of her first-born. In conversation, she tends to focus on how rapidly he is changing, comparing what he can do today to what he could do a week or a month ago. This provides plenty of conversation fodder, as two-and-a-half year olds do change almost daily, but she does miss out on a lot of opportunities to brag.

We were at my sister's place yesterday for a family dinner. Towards the end of the evening, I was telling William, my nephew, that I was getting tired. My Mom laughed that Russ was going to have to carry me from the car if I fell asleep on the drive home. William ran up to Russ: "Uncle Russ, are you ready to carry Aunt 'Lissa? If she's asleep, you have to carry her!"

Russ did scoop me up and teasingly carried me towards the front hall. William ran ahead and unlocked and opened the front door - a new trick he has only acquired in the last week or so, to my sister's consternation.

Setting aside his acute listening skills and ability to carry through on ideas, I think art is where his best talents may lie. I received my first nephew-made birthday card this year. Here's the outside of the card, which I flattened and scanned:



Observe the colour choices, the freedom of the movement of the lines, and the placement of the art relative to the page. I think he has perfectly captured that elusive thing about childhood: the way joy can so easily turn into angst, and how chaotic, yet contained, life must seem from a toddler's perspective.

Here's the inside of the card:



Such a joyful spill of stickers, with such delightful placement. Observe the choice to put just one sticker upside down: such whimsy!

Clearly, William is an artist ahead of his time. Just wait to see his first pieces to appear in the Museum of Modern Art in eighteen to twenty years.

A murder of crows, a herd of cattle, a parliament of owls... we need a collective noun for paragliders.

The options I've heard most often are gaggle and flock, which do make sense given that we do resemble geese when we launch. Unfortunately, both words only properly apply to geese on the ground; geese in the air are a skein, a team, or a wedge, and none of those terms seem quite right. And one term that applies to us both on the ground and in the air would be easier. For that same reason, I'm not especially fond of a flight, such as for storks and swallows, as it doesn't sound like it could be applied to paragliders on the ground.

Hang gliders sometimes call us jellyfish (all in good fun, of course), so perhaps we could adopt one of the collective nouns for jellyfish: fluther or smack... though a "smack of paragliders" has some unfortunate implications and a "fluther of paragliders" is just difficult to say.

We could name ourselves for hawks: a boil for when two or more are spiralling in flight or a kettle for when flying in large numbers. Or after eagles: a convocation of paragliders. Perhaps it is a little presumptuous to name ourselves after birds of prey, though.

Yesterday Russ and I volunteered at the Outdoor Adventure Show for iParaglide. Towards the end of the day, a bunch of our fellow pilots came by and the conversation soon turned to everyone's newest toys: one person's new harness, another's new helmet with shiny visor, someone's new camera with helmet mount, another's new wing... there's always a new shiny coming out.

As a community, paragliders are pretty camera-happy. We're very fond of taking pictures and video of ourselves and each other. We also love our gadgets, such as GPS trackers, varios, and all kinds of other tools, especially if they help us brag about our flights on the internet. Therefore, in the tradition of many collective nouns coming from descriptions of a group's characteristics or habits of life, I would like to propose a flash of paragliders.

Christmas always makes me think about toys. I was thrilled when I saw a news story the other day that said that some of the most requested presents for this year, after fancy electronic gizmos, are classics like Legos and Barbies.

When my sister and I were little, we didn't get random toys; new toys came at Christmas and birthdays, though we were spoiled on both of those occasions.

I was a kid in the 1980s, with many of the accompanying toys:

I had a Pound Puppy. The one I had came in a two pack in a cardboard doghouse; my sister and I each got one of the plush dogs for Christmas.

I had a Care Bear. I watched the Care Bear movie three times in the 48-hours we had it rented for my birthday sleep-over, but still only had one of the toys.

I had a couple of Barbies and some accessories, though my sister and I didn't really play with them a lot. I really only played Barbie when I had school friends over.

I had a couple of Popples, though they mostly came from garage sales, bought with my tiny allowance. I was late to a lot of the minor trends because I wasn't allowed to watch cartoons, so I missed the advertising and only tended to learn about the new toy fashions once my friends already something to show off.

I had a Cabbage Patch Kid at the peak of the craze. Long before there was Tickle Me Elmo causing riots in the toy stores, there were sold-out Cabbage Patch Kids. My sister had a little boy doll, bought still in box from the trunk of a car in the swimming pool parking lot from a mother whose daughter did not want a boy Cabbage Patch Doll, even if it was the only one left in town. My sister's friends were mostly boys, so she had no problem receiving Solomon. I had a little black Cabbage Patch Kid doll, which was perhaps unsurprisingly still on the store shelf in a small northern town where even the local "ethnic" restaurant – a Chinese restaurant with as much batter as chicken in their sweet-and-sour chicken balls – was probably run by white people. My doll came with the name Charlotte, but I just couldn't remember it ("It's something like carrot...") so my Mom and I applied to have it changed to Amanda. I bet my mother still has the revised "birth certificate" somewhere that the Cabbage Patch people sent us.

But there were a few things my parents didn't buy for me.

Mom didn't like Snugglebumms. I think she recognized that they were a short-lived fad with limited entertainment value. Or maybe she just didn't like that the name included "bum". Or maybe there weren't any available in the two aisles of toys in our small town department store. Anyway, for some reason, she didn't like them and so I didn't have one, except the one I made out of a scrap of terry cloth and some embroidery thread. Mom had to thread the needle for me.

I also never received a Teddy Ruxpin, despite my utter fascination with them when I saw them in a toy store in the "big city" (Sudbury). I spent many hours trying to re-create the Ruxpin experience: I recorded my own audio tapes, then sat my Ogi, my favourite teddy bear, in front of a ghettoblaster covered with a pumpkin-orange, rust-red, and harvest-yellow crocheted granny-square blanket. I would play the audio tape back while my sister and I would pretend that Ogi was talking. Sometimes I would do different voices on the tapes and sit multiple toys in front of the ghettoblaster so they could have a conversation with each other. This kept me happily entertained for hours at a time for weeks, using only things we already had laying around the house. My mother's wisdom shows again: I'm sure many a talking bear ended up stuffed in the back of a closet after only a couple of hours of use.

My sister and I did spend a lot of time playing with Precious Places, Charmkins, Playmobil, and Lego, all jumbled together and laid out in elaborate cities on a double-bed sized, wheeled platform that Dad made for us. The platform was brilliant because it could be rolled under the guest bed in the basement, so our games could remain intact when my mother vacuumed or when guests stayed over. We had to remove the Precious Places houses first, but all the roads and shorter buildings could stay.

However many hours we spent playing with those toys, however, we spent even more playing with no props at all. We had to: we would go camping in our motor home for weeks at a time in the summer, and there wasn't a lot of room for anything beyond a couple of packs of cards, a pile of library books, some paper and markers for drawing, and a couple of stuffed animals each. Together, we invented new worlds and spent entire days in them.

I've been spending more time in toy stores since my nephew was born. There are so many great toys out there – some new innovations and some classics – and I've had no problems choosing gifts for him so far. I look forward to buying him gifts for many, many years, but I keep returning to the idea that sometimes the best toys are the ones you didn't have.

I'm in that tedious stage of sick where I can't actually do anything - too weak, and any cold air or physical exertion makes me cough - but where I am not sick enough to be apathetic about it. I have pneumonia. Just a mild case, and the antibiotics seem to be working, but it has got me housebound... actually, pretty much chairbound. My cat's happy at least; my lap currently makes the perfect place for a ten-hour nap.

But it does give me some time to actually write up our latest flying adventures. Hard to believe it was three weeks ago, but we finally got in our first entirely solo flying day. On October 14th, the three of us who have been flying together since our first Slope Soaring class did some evening weather forecasting, and reached the conclusion that the next day may very well be flyable. Another check in the morning and a quick phone consultation, and we were off. Russ and I picked up Craig in front of his building in the mid-morning (later than we usually go out, as the outflow was expected to linger, perhaps in part due to the time of year), and we were off to the mountain.

On the way up, the conversation was about cloud formations, Starbucks bakery items, and Russ and I's brand new niece (born at 1 AM the day before), and was carefully not about being nervous about our first unsupervised flights. Maybe I was the only one.

We know the LZ well at this point, so we drove straight up the mountain. We've been flying Mount Woodside all summer, so everything was familiar as we pulled into the parking lot, sorted out water bottles and granola bars, then packed our wings up to the launch. Russ volunteered to drive the first round, so Craig and I got our wings laid out, checked our lines rather obsessively, then got in line. There wasn't a lot of wind, but it was a bit cross at times, so the line was slow moving as each pilot had to carefully wait for the right cycle to come straight up the mountain. Since there wasn't a lot of lift, no one was rushing and the feeling on launch was fairly relaxed and mellow. Lots of pilots were just hanging out, waiting to see how the day was going to develop.

The three of us did sled runs all day. There was some lift out there, but it was hard to stay in. Those who stayed up were working hard for it and spending a lot of time "scratching" (circling in areas of no lift or drop while looking for a thermal). Russ, Craig, and I just focused on good launches and landings, and we got in three flights each.




In the pictures above, I can almost hear myself saying "c'mon, c'mon! Pull!", which is pretty much what I was probably thinking.

We all had good forward launches all day. I had one - my second launch of the day - where a little gust popped me a bit when I stabilized the wing, so I unloaded it a bit, but I remembered my training, fully committed to getting my weight down and running hard, and successfully launched despite the brief mis-step. When Craig had a little problem with his wing not coming up evenly, he aborted it cleanly, then shook it off and had a great launch shortly after. We were doing it: making decisions and being responsible for ourselves.

The perfect end for me was my last landing of the day. I came in over the south-west corner, over the "three sisters" - the trees on the Riverside LZ that we use to estimate our elevation - and noticed that I was lower than usual, so I turned on to downwind. As I made my next turn on to base, my feet were level with the tree tops: the absolute perfect height. I turned on to final, lined up with the runway and flared at the perfect height. I felt like I stepped out of the air and on to the ground, and I found myself in the first third of the runway, right where I had wanted to land. I even had time to turn to face my wing and bring it down tidily.

I may have ruined the cool factor of such a good landing by turning to my friends who'd already landed and screaming "Did you see that!" across the entire field.

The local flying season is definitely slowing. By the time I am healthy, we will probably be into the rainy time of year. Russ and I hope to get in some travelling with our wings during the off-season, and hopefully there will be kiting and slope soaring and maybe a random winter flying day or two at Mount Blanchard, but it was still nice to end on a high note: "Did you see that!"

While Russ and I were in Las Vegas this past weekend, three more students graduated from the novice licensing program from iParaglide. Ducky, Jim, and Simon were all people we'd been carpooling, kiting, and flying with frequently, so Russ, Craig, and I have been hoping to have many adventures with them post-graduation too. To that end, we've been plotting our first supervision-free flights, hopefully for next weekend or the weekend after.

Russ and I have been flying with our school since our graduations, because Russ has been playing landing coach every flyable weekend. It has its advantages, not the least of which is an automatic non-flying driver in the form of our teacher, but it means that we don't necessarily feel like independent pilots. In order to really feel like we've graduated, we need to fly without our teacher around.

I did take one step towards that feeling recently. I was the last of our group to launch on one of the rounds. As I was setting my wing up, our teacher headed down to pick the students back up for the next round. For the first time, I was on my own: I was going to launch without my teacher within sight. To further increase the pressure, there were many experienced pilots on launch, including some tandem pilots and teachers from another paragliding school. Luckily, the conditions were ones I am very comfortable with - low winds for a forward launch - and there was one friendly face on launch: Mark, a pilot I flew with last year when he was finishing his novice license and I was starting mine.

After we both landed, Mark told me that it was a good launch, but I already knew that. I brought the wing up evenly, checked it well, and ran down into a smooth flight. I even got a bit of lift as I played around in front of the ridge.

The next step is a new novice flying adventure. Our teacher isn't going to be at the mountain next weekend, so it'll just be us, with our shiny new licenses, making our own decisions, launching and landing ourselves, being pilots.

We went to Las Vegas last weekend. It wasn't on our List - that is to say, Vegas isn't one of the places we are eager to visit - but exceptions must be made for weddings.

If we're going to Vegas just once, we figured to "do" Vegas. We saw a lot of casinos and their famous free displays and shows. We missed out on celebrity impersonators - unless you count the poorly done Elvis on the street, which we don't - but managed to fit most everything else into three days.

Wedding: We went down for two of Russ' co-workers' wedding. It wasn't a Vegas quicky, and wasn't done by Elvis, but was in a casino ballroom.

Gambling: Penny slots between the wedding and reception. I lost $1 and Russ lost $5 or $10. We're big spenders, we are.

Shopping: Speaking of big spenders, I found a $10 purse at a cheesy gift store amongst the fancy designer stores. I needed something to carry to the wedding and found something ten minutes before we had to leave for the ceremony.

Shows: Burlesque, strip, drag, and Cirque du Soleil... we managed all four by seeing Zumanity.

Bar hopping: Not our usual choice of activity, but with some peer pressure encouragement from other wedding guests and some coupons, we hit a couple of bars before the reception, including the very odd Minus 5, where the walls, chairs, tables, decorations, and glasses are all made of ice.



Buffet: After you've overindulged in everything else, it seems natural to overeat too. We only went to one buffet, since we are trying to be healthier (the gym in our hotel was very acceptable). The Monday breakfast buffet kept us full through our afternoon flight home.

Vegas is surreal. It is fake - Disney for adults - and completely lacking in irony. The tourists are almost as odd as the city; there's almost a desperation about them, a constant performance of how much fun they are having at all times.

While exploring faux New York, and faux Italy, and faux everywhere else, Russ and I had some fascinating conversations about capitalism, commercialism, racism, classism, and some of the unfortunate implications and problematic choices of "Zumanity". And in between, we just gave ourselves over to the experience, including a trip to the world's largest gift store (where we got caught under the awning by a magnificent rain storm - a day's worth of rain in 15 minutes: not everything in Vegas is fake) and taking at least one cheesy tourist photo:

In a high school class, there's at least one: the student who struggled but who worked their butt off. Their graduation is a big deal. Everyone is cheering for them; everyone is so proud of them: their family and friends, their teachers, often even their fellow graduates. I wasn't that student in school; my graduation was taken for granted by everyone, including myself. I am a natural at book learning.

Paragliding cannot be learned from a book. I have no illusions that I am a natural at paragliding. Russ has taken to it a lot more quickly than I have and is already an apprentice instructor for iParaglide, assisting at the slope soaring training hill and landing students at the mountain. Our teacher, Dion, was telling Russ about how to make the slope soaring classes run efficiently, emphasizing the need to identify any struggling students early on so they can get extra help and not slow down the rest of the class. That was definitely me in my first class.

Through the course of the training for my novice license, I've struggled with no-wind launches, accurate landings, reverse launches, and kiting... almost everything, really. And I've slowly learned each of those things with extra help from Dion and his other teachers, some tutoring from Russ, lots of practice, loads of visualizing, and sheer stubbornness. I still have a lot to learn, but I can now do reliable no-wind launches, fairly accurate and very safe landings, reverse kiting for as long as I want in good wind and forward kiting for short periods, and I've done two reverse launches at the mountain.

At the end of last summer, Dion and I both thought that I was going to need extra flights after the minimum twenty to get through all my requirements, but when things started clicking for me, it all came together very quickly. I had my graduation flight last Monday, August 1st. It was my third flight of the day and I launched at about 5 PM, when the wind was just settling down again. I did my best reverse launch yet and glided off into the late afternoon sun.

I will never get tired of the view at 2000 feet. The miracle of being in the air, just me and the wind and all that space on all sides is just so powerful. Even a "sled run" - a flight where you launch, fly straight to the landing zone (LZ) and land - gives me ten magical minutes of kicking back in my harness and enjoying the view. I needed the launch and landing practice and I was flying in the morning, before there's a lot of lift, so that’s what a lot of my flights ended up being this year.

On my graduation flight, the evening winds and the ridge lift meant that I didn't have to head straight to the LZ. Instead, I flew back and forth along the ridge, letting the air hold me up, riding over invisible waves of thermals, choosing where to go next. I almost started crying at one point, as I realized that I was in the midst of a dream come true. That was exactly the kind of flying I've always wanted to do.

On the radio, Dion made a point of telling me that it was a good launch and that I was flying well, around supervising a newer student's launch and flight. He is always reassuring and encouraging on the radio, but he sounded especially proud that day.

As of this evening, I'm on the list of members of the Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association of Canada. This video, taken by Russ moments after I landed, pretty much summarizes how I feel:

We're grounded again this weekend – more rain – so I'm thinking about paragliding instead of flying.

Even when I'm not flying, I love watching it. I watch a lot of videos on the Internet. I've watched a lot of landings from the shade of the one tree on the landing zone (the "LZ"). While waiting for my turn to launch, I've seen some beautiful forward and reverse launches, some tandem launches, some hang glider launches, and a couple of top landings. I even love hanging out while people kite their wings, especially hearing the sound as the wing rises into the air and snaps into stability.

A couple of weeks ago, I was left alone on the launch for twenty minutes or so when our instructor from iParaglide went to pick up other pilots while the weather settled down a little. As I was sitting out in the sun, enjoying the quiet and scenery, a beat-up truck rumbled into the parking lot. A bunch of young men with sturdy builds piled out, beer cans in hand, and clambered up on to the launch. Being a female alone at the top of a logging road... I stood up and tried to look friendly and confident.

"You flying?" one asked me.

"Not yet. The wind's too strong still and I'm waiting for my teacher to come back with the other students. Hopefully I'll be launching before the sun starts to go down."

"This is perfect wind for me," a guy with helmet hair says. Turns out, he's a hang glider who flew earlier and just caught a ride back up to his truck with these guys. There was no reason to walk up to launch with them, but maybe he was being a bit cautious about leaving a woman alone with these strangers. The hang gliders I've met so far have been very mannerly; two of them supplied rags and clean water and helped mop me off after I fell into some mud upon landing last year.

"Did you fly earlier?" a guy asks.

"Not yet. Two other pilots from my class did; they are stronger than I am, so they could launch in more wind."

"Cool. So, this is where you jump off?" a guy with a beer asks, peering over the edge a bit.

"They don't jump; they fly," the first guy says to him, and then to me: "This is the first time he has come up with us."

The guys, apparently, come up all the time to watch paragliders and hang gliders launch. It's a thing to do on a sunny day: drive up the mountain, drink some beers, watch people fly. I told the new guy a little bit about how paragliding works and answered everyone's questions. It was all pretty friendly, except when I got a bit annoyed with them when they set off a firecracker on launch while my wing was bundled just off to the side.

They got tired of waiting and drove off before my teacher got back, which was good because the wind never did mellow and no one got to fly again that day. Driving down from launch is kind of depressing.

The next week, as we were packing our wings on the LZ, an old man came roaring through the field on a motorcycle. When he saw us, he stopped and greeted our teacher, Dion, warmly. The guy on the bike is Joe, the owner of the land we have to pass through to drive to our LZ. He doesn't fly himself, but he is a huge fan of paragliders and hang gliders. Before his stroke, he used to drive people up to the launch for free, just to hear their stories. Now, he is looking at buying the LZ land from his neighbour to make sure it continues to be available to us.

Dion has offered many times to teach Joe to fly or to take him on a tandem flight, but Joe's too worried about breaking a hip. He is happy to just watch:

"I can just spend hours watching you all fly. It's the ultimate in beauty and relaxation. It's like a ballet. When a bunch of gliders and some hangies are up there, it's like paradise to me."

I plan to quote Joe when trying to convince a nearby city to let us launch and land in some municipal parks. What a sales pitch!