I like my car. After airing up the tires and spending lots of time on the highway, my Honda Fit achieved 34.6 MPG. That makes me happy. Sell your gas-guzzler and buy a Honda.

Tuesday night I had a special training session for work. A coworker and I spent two hours in a 737-700 flight simulator at Southwest. Yes, we both flew a bit, but the point was for us to observe an instructor pilot performing several different scenarios. I can’t adequately describe for you how realistic the simulator is, but it makes even gray-haired pilots sweat every year during their training. When we took off, I was pushed back into the seat, and I felt every bump on the “runway.” It was absolutely amazing. We saw landings in fog, stalls, windshear, engine-out climbouts, and landings on icy runways – the types of problems that our pilots don’t see on a daily basis but need to be able to handle if they ever do come up. I tried climbing out of Reno, an airport in a mountainous region of Nevada, right after an engine failure. It made me very glad that we have such well-trained and capable pilots up front rather than myself! I would tell you to go get your own sim while you’re getting your Honda, but they’re pretty expensive and hard to fit in your garage.

I also updated the Family page with links to cousin websites for Jeff and Lisa Cerney (excellent and timely if you can stomach the frequent pro-Aggie comments) and Joe and Erin Cerney (horribly out of date, but worth a look due to cute pics of daughter Paige).