Nature’s Leaf Blower.

Remember that I mentioned at some point the wind would come and blow the leaves into the neighbor(s) yard(s)? Well, that day was last Sunday morning!

I apologize for the wind noise in advance. I did this on my iPhone which makes no attempt at compensating for windy conditions.

I love that part of nature. I no longer have to have a leaf blower. We enjoy the leaves and color until the first major wind storm and then they are all gone!!

During the time I took the video above I also took a time lapse from the front yard. At the beginning of the video above Mongrel and I move in and out of the frame. Here’s what the day looked like all sped up:

The winds have died down some. That leaves us with autumn with the color gone and we seemed to be moving very hard towards full blown winter. We’ve had fires in the fireplace pretty much every hour of the day for a few weeks now. At least it’s warm inside.

Since the wind wasn’t so bad tonight I was able to get out and do some flying. We spent some time today trying to figure out if we can get a cat in a plane and fly him around. After a careful pre-flight inspection we’ve decided to work on that a while longer.

He seemed to be up for it, though.

This plane has a symmetrical wing which means that it flies upside down as easily as right side up. Definitely an acrobatic bird. I’ll be doing some repairs on this guy as well as replacing all of the electronics related to telemetry and flight control with new, updated avionics. This plane was built long ago with some very old electronics but by a person with wicked engineering skill.

You may recall, I bought this at auction a few months ago. Along with 3 more planes. This one is the largest and heaviest of them all. It’ll be the last one I get flying if things go like I planned. Hopefully by the end of winter or maybe spring I’ll be flying this guy regularly. Of the four I bought I have one of them back in the air and it’s a hoot to fly. It’s previous life was a glider that was launched in to the air with a rubber band. I’ve added a small motor, electronic speed controller, new servos and a flight control receiver. Now I hand launch it, fly it up high and then just glide around after that. Pretty cool.

But before the Extra comes off the earth I’ll pre-flight the crap out of it. I built one of these in the 90’s when I lived overseas where I crashed it on it’s first flight. I have better skill now. And a great place to practice and fly them.

Thanksgiving is in a couple of days. I hope you all are with friends and family or where ever it is that you find happiness this time of year.

Happy Thanksgiving!