Today after work I found myself on 360 about 20 minutes early for a meeting. I had just turned from 183 onto 360 southbound and saw half the orange disk of the sun disappear over the horizon. The sky was calm and a bit overcast, and the sunset was serene.

Since I was early I stopped at the Bull Creek greenbelt to pass some time. There weren't any other cars in the parking lot, so I probably had the whole place to myself. I walked in a bit and sat on the rock watching a waterfall for a few minutes. The rock was cold, so I continued onwards. The air was cool, the ground was damp but not wet, the creek was babbling away, it was really pleasant. It's so nice to have natural areas like that just a few minutes drive away. I must visit there more often.

The meeting was the annual general meeting of the Fault Line Flyers soaring club. Aside from the usual review of finances and so on, there was a new position created for Facilities Coordinator. This person would be responsible for making sure that maintenance tasks like mowing the runway, vehicle repair, etc get done. It turns out that I got nominated for this position, and since I was the only one who accepted the nomination, I'm it.

I've never done anything like this before, and was a bit apprehensive about it. But I learned long ago that if you don't push yourself and do things outside your envelope of comfort, you'll never grow. I don't expect it to be a huge amount of work.

We need more student pilots! On the day I passed my pilot license test last october, there became three fewer student pilots and three more licensed pilots at the club. Some days the instructors end up sitting around wondering what to do. If you've ever had a desire to fly, this is the way to do it. Soaring is a beautiful sport that gives you an awesome feeling of freedom and control. Once you're airborne and disconnected from the tow plane, the skies become yours. And it won't break the bank, either. Come out for a demo flight on the first saturday of each month (weather permitting, details on the web site).

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm taking on too much stuff. Besides my day job and flying-related things, I'm also helping put together the web site for the 2005 North American Esperanto Congress that will be held here in Austin in june. I'm working on distjournal which is a distributed blog idea that some of us have been thinking about. I'm studying French a lot, Spanish a bit, I want to continue learning Japanese, and I'd like to learn Mandarin. Oh, and Russian too. I've written some fun little Konfabulator widgets that are almost done. I should continue practicing my Esperanto because I'll probably decide to go to Lithuania in july for a huge worldwide Esperanto congress. I want to install a cruise control unit in my Insight because for some reason it doesn't have one.

And yet, I slack. A lot. My livejournal friends page offers about a hundred new posts a day, I can play with Keyhole for hours, I'm always hanging out with friends on irc, Wikipedia often captures my interest... the list goes on.

I'm happy about how things are going.