A bunch of lives...

Yet another certificate with my name on it.  Agusta Westland AW139 Instructor on Simulator, or IOS.  Former simulator instruction courses involved watching another instructor instruct, as he pointed out what he was doing, and eventually we'd swap seats and I'd run the show and he'd help out, and in time, he'd cut me loose and I'd be on my own.  This was simulator time totally dedicated to me running the sim.  No student.  Although one of us would often reach up front to engage autopilots or engine controls, or even hop in the seat and try to fly through a full stuck right pedal or single engine overshoot utilizing the limitations of the autopilot.  To say I was having fun would be a massive understatement.  I love this shit.

But then back at the Hilton, still struggling to sync iclouds and google drives and sort files, I opened my calendar and noted the days at home were few and far between.  With my six weeks off, I had spent better than a week in Italy, and a full week here in Newark.  I had made the most of it, but I am missing home.  I thought I'd be home for a full two week after this but it's barely ten days, then I'm back to Tanzania and my life there.

I look back and see the stages of my life and each is so different.  My youth with my folks of course, my first jobs throwing hay bails and driving tractors on the farm, highschool, days of homelessness nestled in the mountains of Jasper, washing dishes and struggling to get by, actually stealing bread to feed myself, then living back at home and working construction to pay for a pilots licence (okay, keep me in beer money while my folks paid for my pilot's licence), the early days of bush flying with Bell 47's, the old bubble helicopters from M.A.S.H., my years in Northern Quebec fighting forest fires and moving mineral exploration drills , my years as an EMS pilot in Northern Ontario, my stint of EMS in downtown Toronto, whipping into scene calls on the 401, flying Bandage One to rooftop heliports downtown, and watching myself on the local news nearly nightly, to the venerable S61 days out of Halifax, day/night flying two hundred miles out into the North Atlantic with a non-deiced, non-autopilot equipped helicopter flying five hour IMC sorties returning to ILS approaches at min fuel to hundred foot ceilings and a quarter mile visibility, then the Super Puma and instructing in Norway, equipped with an anti-ice system so proficient we were often launching and returning in full on blizzards and refueling and heading back out into the melee, eighty knots winds be damned, and then losing the contract and heading into off into the world with the International touring pool.  Each stage not defined so much by the job I had, but by the place I lived and people I worked with, and each so different from the stage prior, it's own memories and regrets and pleasures.  I included the line in one of my songs "I've lived a bunch of lives, better believe me" and I meant it.  What life next?  As I stated in an earlier post; ".....the unknown is where things start getting interesting."  I'll keep plugging along, but if things change, if there's yet another life out there for me, experience has shown, we humans have an uncanny knack of adapting.  Bring it on.