On Monday night, Queer Joe from New Hope stopped by our knitting night at Presto.  When he asked if anyone had a blog, I was embarrassed to tell him that I haven't updated mine in nearly three months.  He promised to link to it anyway, but meanwhile I figured I'd better do my part and provide an update of what I've been doing for the past few weeks.  So here it is:

Knitting: In September I had to fly out to California for week.  I can't sleep on planes, so to pass the hours I knit Springtime in Philadelphia Canopy.  It's a cleverly written pattern, and smoothes out nicely when blocked on a 10-inch dinner plate.  I wore it every day until my friend Mel lost it during a fun night out on the town in Wilmington.  Luckily she found it the next day! 

I also finished Rosamund's Cardigan, from the Fall 2009 Interweave Knits, in Elann Highland Chunky yarn.  It's knit with a reversible cable from the top down, and as I got closer and closer to the hem I realized I was a skein and a half short.  After debating whether to turn it into a cropped cardi, or to frog it entirely and knit it again as a more fitted sweater, my Monday night knit friends convinced me to check Ravelry to see if someone had with extra yarn in that color.  I never thought I'd find any in the right dye lot - I bought the yarn more than a year ago for a project I never even started - but I found it and did my first swap with a very nice knitter in Texas.  So I was able to finish my Rosamund's Cardigan to the correct length, and it's now blocking, as it has been for the past 8 (!!) days.  I've never had a sweater take that long to block.

Now I'm working on Talia from Knitty.com, and a few other smaller projects, but I have some travel coming up, so I'll need another big project to keep me busy. 

Adventure: October turned out to be adventure sport month!  I turned 30 last year, and I wanted to celebrate it by hang gliding.  My birthday is in December, and unfortunately in the northeast U.S. it's too cold to hang glide from about November to March, so I had to put my birthday celebration on hold for a while.  But I kept talking about hang gliding and how much I wanted to go to just about anyone who would listen, so when my co-worker Joan wanted to go soaring in glider planes, she figured I might be interested, too.  Of course I was! 

The Brandywine Soaring Association does intro flights out of a small airport in Pennsylvania.  Joan, our other friend Cara and I all trekked out there one Sunday in October to try it out.  The two-seat glider is very small and light: 

We went up one at a time.  The instructor sat in back, and let us handle the controls.  I got to turn, go faster and slow it down, and I even helped to line it up for landing.  At least I think I did, the instructor had his own set of controls, so he may have just pretended to let me guide the plane.  Joan is already a pilot, so she got to do all that and more. 

Because the glider doesn't have an engine, it has to be towed into the air by another plane.  Skilled glider pilots can stay up for hours as the plane glides down - they do it by seeking out thermal air currents and riding them even higher.  If you find enough thermals, you can stay up forever.  For our intro flights, once we got up to 3,500 feet, the instructor told us to pull the lever that releases the cord attaching the glider to the tow plane.  It's kind of a jolt when that happens - the ride up is so smooth that you can almost forget that you're sitting on top of 600 lbs of aluminum, but once the cord is cut the plane starts getting bounced around by the wind and suddenly you're very much aware that there's only the "science" of thermodynamics that's keeping you from plummeting to certain death.  After a few minutes of panic, I settled down and started to enjoy the view: 

  

When it came time to land, though, I shut my eyes and did what I always do when I'm in an airplane that hits turbulence: I said my prayers to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travellers.  I think it worked, because the instructor landed us safely.  It was super cool, though, and I'd love to do it again.  Next time they might make me sign a liability waiver - Cara, Joan and I are all attorneys, and I think the instructor was kind of taken aback once he found that out. 

Later on in October I finally got to go hang gliding!!  My friend Kati and I went to Highland Aerosports in Maryland.  In different parts of the country you can go hang gliding by jumping off a cliff or a steep hill and soaring away, but Maryland is so flat that you have to be towed up, just like with the glider planes.  Here's the tow plane at Highland Aerosports:


It takes you up to 2,500 feet, then just like with the glider plane, the instructor releases the tow line and you're set free to glide down to the ground.  The gliders they use for instruction carry two people in a tandem set-up.  The instructor gets in first in the lower harness, then the student climbs in above him.  Our instructor was Sunny, and as the tow plane pulled us up I asked him if anyone had ever thrown up on him.  He said yes, but please try not to.  I thought it might be a struggle, since I'm kind of scared of heights, but to my surprise it wasn't scary at all!  The whole ride felt smooth and effortless.  I took a lot of photos on the way up, here are a few:

Here's one as we got a little higher:

And here's one of the tow plane in action:

All of my photos are from the way up because after Sunny released the cord, he let me control the glider.  You guide a hang glider by shifting your bodyweight in relation to the glider's frame.  Pushing yourself back slows the glider down, but you have to keep it going at least 25 mph because if it slows down too much the glider will stall.  Pulling yourself forward makes the glider speed up, and you can turn by pulling yourself to the right or left. 

It wasn't scary because there was no sensation of falling, or even of any movement at all.  It's also very safe: in 10 or so years of operation, Highland Aerosports hasn't had any accidents - believe me, I asked. 

Running: I was going to post an update about my running over the past few months, but I'm actually running in a 10k Turkey Trot tomorrow morning, so that update will have to wait until later.  I promise to update more frequently in the future!