Labor Day weekend gave me some time to hammer out some house projects. Olessia wanted to display her dolls she brought back from Russia. So we had picked out some shelves and lighting and I got those mounted (pictures are in the gallery). I’m not quite ready to do my own track lighting install, so the wall mount approach was used.
We went to the Cleveland Air Show on Monday. We got back late on Monday so last night (Tuesday) I finished the last of the home projects – gluing the front siding back up on the front of the house. This was a different section which hadn’t been glued yet. So now the front of the house is looking good again.
The Air Show was good. Not a lot of static displays. There were about 4 A-10s, 2 F-18s, A C-130, a Navy helicopter (the Navy’s newest apparently), Metro Life Flight’s helicopter, a Continental airlines plane, 4 Canadian military aircraft, and some other Navy stuff. That was about it. No C-5 Galaxy or handful of C-130 aircraft. In fact, I don’t think there was any Air Force aircraft on static display (the C-130 was Air Force Reserves). I’m guessing all the aircraft are out and about saving the world from evil-doers. Sadly, and to put things in perspective, there were more consession booths then there were static aircraft.
The show wasn’t all bad though. We really had a lot of fun at NASA Glen’s display. Every year their display gets better and better (I think) and bigger too. They had a bus setup as a theatre and we kinda looked at it like it was goofy (it looked goofy on the outside), but inside it was really nicely decked out. They had a big flat panel display in the back and you sit in a swivle lounge chair. We watched a 7 minute movie on MER. The video was awesome. Great choice of music – Lenny Kravitz’s “I want to fly away” (I think that was the song) as they showed the launch and landing of a rover. Then the movie ended with Steven Tyler of Aerosmith telling us to stay in school (that kind of made us laugh). From the bus, we moved onto their display tent and it had a lot of displays showing the work done at Glen Research in Cleveland. If I read the display correctly, they used their wind tunnels to help test the foam insolation for Discovery’s return to flight (they even had foam we could touch). Olessia even had her picture taken – I have to get it scanned in. They had a setup where they take a picture and then almost instantly impose the person’s face inside a space suit and then print it out – all in under a minute, I would say.
Ok, so we had fun at the NASA booth. The highlight of the show, the reason we paid crazy prices for tickets and for food, the reason why we waited and walked around the show for 3+ hours, was all to see the Thunderbirds demonstration. It was an excellent show. What was cool was on Saturday and Sunday, we could hear the Thunderbirds getting ready over our house area – about 5-10 minutes before 4pm (4pm is when their show actually starts). It was good stuff. I have pictures from this event being developed – I should have them on Thursday, maybe.