Angela D

i was a passenger on a little regional airliner today (a beech 1900d), and noticed something odd watching the instruments when the pilot started the engines.

when the engines lit the turbine temperature spiked (as expected), started down (ditto), then spiked a second time before going down and staying there. it was on the second spike that the engine sounded like it had actually started.

is this an artifact of the pt6-a's unusual design? or is something else happening?

i've largely given up being annoyed by "to be, like..." as a way of quoting something or somebody.

the one that annoys me now is people who think they are being polite or something by prefacing questions with "do you know..."

earlier this afternoon i was walking down the street and a guy was, like, "do you know where the bus stop is?" rather than a literal answer "yes, i know where the bus stop is." i just pointed across the street... :-}

I'm currently watching Engrenages ("Spiral" in English) and have noticed, once again, that while there are lots of friendly colloquial terms for men, the female equivalents aren't generally friendly e.g. un gars vs. une garce. When the new boss referred to Capitaine Berthaud as "une gonzesse" he wasn't being polite. And so on.

What sort of terms would French people use when an English person might greet a group of female friends with something like "Hi, gals!"?

I just took a phone call from somebody with a heavy accent, looking for somebody who, if they ever worked for our company (which used to be a lot bigger), hasn't worked here in 15 years.

We get lots of calls like this, looking for assorted improbable names. The callers say they're from various financial institutions, insist it's personal business, and get flustered if challenged.

It strains credibility that their client databases are that badly out of date. My feeling is that somebody is up to something, but I can't, for the life of me, imagine what.

Any ideas?

it looks like i'll be flying across the border for the first time in the next couple of weeks, and am interested in hearing any words of wisdom from others who have done so. transport canada vs faa gotchas, that sort of thing.

i've reviewed the faa aim, the relevant charts and afds. anything else a visiting pilot should know?

daytime vfr, btw. first things first. :-)

We've all seen the Apple "I'm a Mac...and I'm a PC" ads. I liked them, but always wondered what they would be like if they had two women instead of two men.

Suppose you were casting director. Who would you cast as Mac? As PC?

i was playing with nasa's solar eclipse page (http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/JSEX/JSEX-index.html)... and was intrigued to find that i am in the middle of a 1000 year gap between total eclipses. the last one here was in 1670, while the next will be in 2771. there are lots of near-misses in the meantime (e.g. 1979), but a thousand years between eclipses seems high...

how is it for you?

do you ever get music playing in your head that just won't stop?

earlier this morning i had a battle going on between _bleed like me_ (garbage) and _girl panic_ (duran duran).

now it's a much older duran duran tune, _my own way_, the original 12" single they now call the night version.

and you?

i was getting ready for a flight yesterday and a colleague was surprised at my shoes, a pair of girly little canvas runners. i told him that they give me good feel on the rudder pedals. my instructor says i take off like a 747 pilot, so i must be doing something right. :-)

mr. colleague (a former air cadets 1970s pilot) seemed skeptical, like somehow real pilots were supposed to wear army boots or something. my favourite ballerina flats are just not on, as far as he's concerned.

what sorts of shoes do you wear in the cockpit? why?

i was just looking over the listings for the local lgbt film festival, which starts in a couple of weeks, and was a little disappointed that every trans-related movie is to do with transition, coming out, all that sort of stuff. not one has a character who just *is* trans and gets on with his/her life. i'm sure gun hill road (for example) is an excellent movie, but my transition was a long time ago.

if you were producing a movie with a trans character, what sort of story would you like to see? my own recent story sounds like a movie: middle-aged woman solves health problem (my gall bladder), faces personal disappointment (too fat to fit in plane), resolves disappointing issue (loses weight), has new adventures (flying), finds new meaning in her life. and that's without saying a word about her genetics...

so what sort of story would you tell, or like to see told?

for the first couple of years after my srs i celebrated it, but after that i stopped. getting on with my life, or something like that.

this year is different, since it will be 25 years next week. i'm not sure what, if anything, i'll do. but if any anniversary is worth celebrating, it's this one. this is hot on the heels of a milestone earlier this month: i've now been officially a woman for the majority of my life.

i recently saw the bbc drama "micro men", and was struck by the portrayal of roger wilson (now sophie wilson), techie guru of acorn computers in the '80s.

she reminded me strongly of myself, pre-transition. major social awkwardness, fumblingly trying to be feminine but not quite getting it quite right, and being perceived as slightly weird instead...

i've now reached my weight loss target, having lost 142 pounds over the past year and a half. nothing special, just counting calories and exercising.

so i'm now moving to maintenance mode. what sort of things have people found useful for making this transition? for keeping their weight stable, and keeping those pounds off?

i was just checking the web page of an organization I'm involved with, and their page of ongoing activities now has a picture of me landing a plane. i don't mind: it's a good landing. i had just had my hair done that afternoon, but david clarke makes it hard to tell... :-)

i would mind a great deal if it said i was trans, but it doesn't. i've never discussed this aspect of me with them (i can't see how it would matter), and don't plan to.

how do others feel about pictures of themselves, online or not? i had difficulty even looking in the mirror at one time, but that's long past. i like what i see.

i've seen lots of pictures of andrej pejic lately, and got to thinking about how it might affect your self-image (and possibly gender identity) if you were a boy but people always thought you looked like a girl.

pre-transition people often had a hard time telling if i was a boy or a girl, or gendered me as female. even in my teens people told me "you're so pretty you should have been a girl". looking girlish made my transition relatively smooth, but i still wonder, you know, one of those chicken and egg things. i know there are examples of the other extreme, big burly sorts who transition, but they would never have had the experience of looking in a shop window, wondering who the woman is who is looking out at them, and realizing it's their own reflection...

what do others think?

a recent question reminded me of a time in my teens when i was so horrified by my voice changing that i could hardly talk at all, and basically shut up for several years.

i didn't talk much again until i figured out some aspects of a more feminine voice - with head resonance and breathy intonation (but not the right pitch just yet) i sounded like a frequency-shifted woman's voice. it sounded weird, but i could live with it until i transitioned and learned to do it properly.

i had my first experience flying a plane with a glass cockpit last weekend, a cessna 172sp with a g1000. this was quite the contrast to the cherokees i usually fly! al the same information, but presented in a very different way.

do you like glass cockpits? hate them?

i've overheard conversations about me over the years, and three comments from my teens and early '20s stick in my mind.

in high school: "he's a big guy, but he's such a fairy!"

just after high school, riding the bus: "that guy's sitting like he's wearing a dress!"

a couple of years later: "that girl's so tall and so skinny! i'm jealous!"