Author: Todd Osborne

2 Days and Counting…

Posted on by Todd Osborne

We have now officially crossed into day 3, with more than 48 hours free of cigarettes. Yesterday got a bit interesting, but we made it. Missy and I were both short-tempered. We went to Harbor Freight Tools (one of my favorite stores) to do some window shopping and then stopped by West Town Mall so Missy could see the new Sephora store. It was amazing, a brand new store full of nothing but cosmetics, and yet they were sold out of the only thing Missy was looking for! Halle also got a Water Massage.

We had lunch at Denny’s, I noticed the hash browns did not taste right. Missy doesn’t like Mountain Dew anymore (yes, hell froze over). I hope this is not our taste buds waking up after years of smoking related paralysis. When we got home I took a short nap and then cleaned and vacuumed the inside of the Explorer, I will do my truck tomorrow.

I don’t want to jinx our quit, but it does not seem that hard this time around. I’m not sure why, but my cravings are not that bad and I can easily deal with them. The lozenges help some, and I like to chew on straws. This makes me look like a tard but I don’t care, it’s working.

Missy and Halle just left to go see a princess movie, I had to pass. I am working on some AutoCAD drawings for the basement of the new house. I wonder if the home appraisers know their life may be in jeopardy this week? 🙂

One Day Down

Posted on by Todd Osborne

Well we made it through our first full day of not smoking, 24 hours. I did revise my plan just a little and allowed myself to buy a box of nicotine lozenges that I can use when the cravings are real bad and won’t go away. They are mint flavored and I went through 4 yesterday. I also bought myself a large Ice Tea container, a new cup and straw to drink from, and cut up some straws for something to chew on. Seems that little things like that may make a difference.

We also took it pretty easy yesterday. Missy and Halle went horseback riding and I did a little shopping in the early afternoon. We both took a nap in the late afternoon and I finished the evening playing Grand Theft Auto 4 and then watched the movie Vantage Point. It was a nice day, and not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

I’m not sure yet what we will do today. It is a very nice day for flying, so maybe that will happen later. I am only sure of what will NOT happen today, we will not smoke.

Not having the appraisal back yet on the house adds stress, so we are hoping that is done by mid-week. I hope we are worrying about something that is not an issue. 26 days to closing right now if all goes well!

Independence Day

Posted on by Todd Osborne

The picture to the left is the amount of money we have spent SO FAR this year alone on cigarettes at Kwik Trip. It was taken out of Quicken today, $1,474.18 year-to-date. It says Groceries for Category, and sometimes this includes Coke or Mountain Dew, but the vast majority of that money is cigarettes. And we don’t only buy smokes at Kwik Trip, we buy them at other places as well. $1,474.18 is likely LESS than we have actually spent on them. It’s hard to read, but every 2-3 days we spend about $20-$25 on cigarettes at Kwik Trip.

Everyone in the US knows that tomorrow is the 4th of July, Independence Day. Tomorrow is also Independence Day for Missy and me. We are quitting smoking, for good, no more. I smoke much more than Missy, between 1 and 2 packs per day, she smokes about a 1/2 pack. I have been smoking since I was 15 years old and am pushing 40 pretty hard now, so I know that I NEED to quit.

I am writing this blog entry for me to read tomorrow, this weekend, next week, and next month. Even 6 months or more down the road, to remind myself why I am quitting and what it is like to be a smoker. My reasons are quitting are many, here are just a few…

  1. Delaney, Haley, and Halle. My daughters need me to be around for a good long time. They need my financial and parental support for many years to come. And I need them. I want to be around to walk each of them down the aisle at their wedding, and want to have many good years of playing with my grandchildren.
  2. Missy needs me too. I’m not sure why 🙂 I know I need her in my life, things are much more in balance since I have known and loved her.
  3. Everything I enjoy doing for fun is so anti-smoking it’s not even funny. I love to SCUBA dive, but go through air so fast that I can only stay underwater about 1/2 as long as my non-smoking friends. I have recently taken up flying aerobatics, which is physically as well as mentally challenging. To perform aerobatics well you have to be in good physical shape.
  4. Flying in general. Aviation is my passion, and part of being able to fly is passing an FAA required medical examination every 1-2 years. A heart attack can, and likely will, ground a pilot for the rest of his life. I would like to become a flight instructor some day, but will have to have at least a 2nd class FAA medical, something that would be almost impossible to get should I suffer from any of the smoking related health issues.
  5. I enjoy boxing. Not competitive boxing so much, though I have tried that, but getting a good cardio workout punching a heavy bag. I hate exercise in general, but do enjoy boxing. Right now I get winded walking up the stairs in my house, and the heavy bag has not even been mounted in over 2 years.
  6. I am tired of coughing. I cough a lot, smokers cough. The mornings are the worse, when all the crap in your lungs has a chance to settle overnight. It is sometimes so bad that I get into a coughing fit in the morning for several minutes and have a hard time catching my breath. Remember that Todd, how your chest feels right now. Gooey, for lack of a better word, like your lungs are full of snot. Not a pretty picture is it? Remember that next week, as your lungs start to clear out, and the nicotine cravings are real bad. I’ve done this before, I know I feel MUCH better just a few days after I quit. My lungs clear very quickly and I notice the difference. There is near immediate payment for my struggles, don’t give up!
  7. I’ve heard that quitting smoking increases your sex drive. Hell, that should be reason enough!
  8. Thanks to our Communist governor Jim Doyle, and equally Communist Madison Mayor Dave, a pack of smokes cost $4.50. So that’s about $9 a day for me and $2.25 for Missy. $11.25 per day to kills ourselves real slow. Over $330 per month so we can shave 10-15 years off our lives? There are a lot of things we could spend $330 per month on. Or to look at it another way, $3,960 a year, that is a real nice vacation for Missy and me, as well as all of our kids! $3,960 would probably pay for ALL of the home improvements we would like to do to the home we are hoping to purchase later this month. We might even be able to fill up the Explorer and my F-150! 🙂
  9. Just feeling better in general. Sure the first week will be tough, but that week will pass.

I have tried to quit many times in the past and failed, but that was due to me not “really” wanting to quit. Other people wanted me to quit, I thought it “would be nice to quit”, but was never committed to it. I am now, and I know we NEED to quit. This blog entry is part of my plan, writing down the reasons that I want to quit, so that I can review them later. Another part of the plan is rewards for good behavior. I will let Missy create her own rewards, and whatever she comes up with will be fine with me. But here are my cookies:

  1. At 1 week, next Friday, I am going to rent a Cessna 152 and fly the hell out of it for 1 hour, solo, just flying around Madison doing whatever I feel like. Even money vs. smoking.
  2. At 1 month I am going to order the Acro Sport 2 airplane plans. I have wanted a set for some time and they cost $125. Smoking would have cost me $189 in this time frame, so I will already be $64 ahead.
  3. At 2 months, I am going to buy a bandsaw. The one I want costs $190, so I will then be $144 ahead.
  4. At 3 months I am going to order some Sitka Spruce to build the wings of the Acro Sport. I will spend about $250 on this, $20 less than smoking that month, and $164 more in my pocket than if I had smoked.
  5. At 6 months I am going to buy my own parachute. A used one runs about $600, and over the previous 3 months I will have saved $810 by not smoking. I will still be $374 in the black.
  6. At 1 year I am going to go skydiving. That only costs about $150, and it’s not worth keeping track of the money saved anymore by not smoking, that is just my reward for 1 year of not smoking. Do something that I have always wanted to do.

So there, I have listed some of the reasons I want to quit, and the rewards I will give to myself when I reach milestones along the way. I am going to quit Cold Turkey, which I know will make for 2-7 days of hell, but will also get the nicotine out of my system completely and quickly. I don’t want to do this slowly. I don’t want to use a patch, gum, inhaler, or anything else. To me those just prolong the misery, cost money, and I have tried them in the past. Just quit. Like Haley says “Just stop doing it”. She’s right, there is a lot of wisdom in a 7 year old.

Haley's Birthday and Immelman Turns

Posted on by Todd Osborne

Happy Birthday Bug! It’s hard to believe you are 7 years old already! We all love you very much!

Today I flew my 5th aerobatic lesson with Mike Love. We started out with the normal aileron rolls on our way out to the practice area. We actually went a little farther north, just beyond the Wisconsin River near Sauk City because other students were practicing to the south. Once we got there, I did several loops, pretty nice ones too. So now aileron rolls and loops are old hat, not really a challenge to me anymore, and they don’t make me sick. Time to move on!

When you are learning aerobatics you start of with rolls and loops because they are the building blocks of more complex maneuvers. I was hoping for some Cuban 8’s today, but those will have to wait, the Immelman Turn is the obvious next step. It is named for the World War 1 German ace that invented it. The object of the Immelman is to reverse direction by 180 degrees while gaining altitude and losing airspeed. It is the nearly opposite of a Split-S. If the animation below does not work, just click it.

To perform the Immelman in a Cessna Aerobat you start by diving to get your speed up to 130 knots, about 10 knots faster than when doing a loop. You then pull up to about 3.5-4 G’s and hold that until you are near the top of the loop. At the top, you provide a little gentle forward pressure, just enough to hang there for a short second. This is real easy so far, now on to the part I had trouble with.

To roll the wings level you can roll either left or right, but have to initially provide opposite rudder. So if you roll left, you need some right rudder, and vice-versa. But you only use opposite rudder for a second, then switch to the other foot. It is similar to doing a crosswind landing, but upside down. I had a problem with this. I just could not seem to roll left and use right rudder, or roll right and use left. It actually became quite humorous, I just could not convince my feet to do what I wanted them to. The result was dubbed “The Osborne Turn” by my instructor, it is like an Immelman, but instead of turning 180 degrees, you turn either 90 or 270. Quite interesting 🙂

The first one I did actually resulted in me being pinned to the ceiling of the plane. I did not have my seatbelts tight enough, and the hang-time at the top of the loop made my head hit the ceiling. It was not comfortable, but it was funny. I tightened the seatbelts 🙂

Mike also warned me about the possiblity of spinning out of the top of an Immelman, that it is sometimes called the Immelman Spin because of the good likelihood of this happening. I guess I just had to prove it to myself. I did spin out of one unintentionally, but even that was fun.

I never really got the hang of the Immelman, at least not yet, so I will be back to face these again next week. The rest of the flight was real nice, a beautiful morning to fly.

Appraisal, Part Two

Posted on by Todd Osborne

Well after going back and fore several times with the owner of the house, we have all agreed on the final terms and signed the required contracts to purchase. All of the paperwork will be delivered to the mortgage company on Monday or Tuesday, at which time the FHA appraisal will be ordered. It already seems like we have come very far in this process, but we are acutely aware that had the last appraisal been done correctly we would already have been in our new home for almost a month now.

So we are back into waiting mode, hoping that everything goes well. If it does, we will close on our new home the end of July, just a little over 4 weeks from now. If it doesn’t, we will either close the end of August with a different mortgage company (non-FHA), or will be stuck in our rented duplex until the spring. We don’t even want to think about that right now. So we will just wait and see what happens, and try not to get our hopes up just yet. I did instruct the mortgage company that I absolutely will not pay for an appraisal done by Lynette Richter.

Though we are trying to keep emotion out of this right now, we did hit Menards this afternoon and looked at ceiling fans, cabinet hardware, pre-hung door frames, paint, and other stuff we will hopefully need to purchase very soon. Keeping our fingers crossed….

Counter the Counter and Aerobatics Part 4

Posted on by Todd Osborne

As expected, the lady that owns the home we made the offer on has countered our offer. It seems we are not that far apart, but we did submit a counter to her counter. I guess this can go on forever 🙂 One of the things she requested was some information about our family. Seems she is careful about who she sells the house too, and this is something that I actually like and welcome. I wrote her a nice letter to introduce her to our family, and also extended an invitation for her to visit the home once we get settled in. I realize that she has many memories here, and would welcome her visit if she cares to come back from time to time to visit those memories. I also enjoy talking to older people, so that would be fun.

We should find out this evening if she is planning to accept our counter offer, and are of course hoping that she does. I am not looking forward to the appraisal, since this is what killed the last deal, but I know it has to be done.

I did fly my 4th aerobatic lesson yesterday over my lunch break. Mike and I did 4 or 5 aileron rolls to warm up, followed by 4 loops, and 2 spins. Mike was right, I am building up a tolerance quickly to aerobatics, I did not even feel slightly sick following these maneuvers. I flew the plane quite well and Mike was very happy with my performance. I almost messed up one of the loops by letting the back pressure on the yoke go a bit early, which almost resulted in a tail slide, but I was able to correct that.

I had not done a spin since the late 80’s, so I told Mike I wanted to spin it, and without any coaching from him. I wanted to see if I still remembered how to get out of a spin. I did, too well. The first spin I let loose of the yoke too early and broke the spin before we completed 1/4 turn. That was bad, so I went for another. This time I let the spin fully develop and we completed 1 rotation before I broke it, only about 15 degrees off from my chosen heading. Not bad.

We had a very fun flight and these maneuvers are not scaring me at all any longer, they are just plain fun. Possibly the lack of fear is also making my stomach handle the flights a bit better as well. Now don’t think for a second that my lack of fear means lack of respect or complacency, far from it. I am just feeling more and more comfortable flying like this, which makes it even more enjoyable.

My approach was high and my landing long, the only thing I guess I can ding myself on yesterday. But the landing was soft and good. I told Mike that it reminds me of my instrument training. You work so hard in a short period of time that you are mentally, and somewhat physically, tired when it comes time to land. This was my first bad approach in a while, so maybe it was just a fluke. I will hold myself to my normal tolerances next time. Mike is a stickler for good approaches and landings, he literally wrote books on the subject, so I do appreciate his input in correcting any bad habits I have picked up over the years.

Making Another Offer

Posted on by Todd Osborne

As expected, the first home we looked at yesterday was our favorite, so we have decided to make an offer on it. Our Realtor was going to write it up yesterday and will bring it over later today for us to sign. The sellers will then have until Tuesday to accept or counter the offer, and we expect a counter.

We looked at two other houses as well. The house on Martin Street we ruled out because it did not have air conditioning, and would need a lot of updating and other work. It did have an excellent hot tub room, but that could not make up for the other many shortcomings.

A rebuilt home on the corner of Church and Brewery was very cool. It had a ton of woodwork and, at least to me, felt like a very large cabin style home. I loved the house since I am always partial to a lot of woodwork, but the location is terrible. It almost touches the house next door and has a horrible yard. In addition, when they rebuilt the home, they kept the original stone basement and added a crawl-space under the new addition. This means the basement is like a dungeon and has no usable area at all.

As for the home we are making an offer on. It does need some updating because it is owned by an older lady that has lived there since the house was built in 1992. There is some wallpaper that must come down, but not too much. We will have some substantial painting to do, both interior and on the rear sundeck, but the deck is a major selling point, very nice. The carpet is in good condition and the kitchen will only require removal of a hideous stove exhaust system and updated hardware for the cabinets. All walls are basic white and without crown molding, so a few dollars and a few weekends of work will totally overhaul the upstairs and make it very nice. I would also replace all of the overhead light fixtures with ceiling fans in all bedrooms, something I have a ton of experience doing.

The basement is about 1/3 finished, which is perfect for me. The part that is finished was done very well and creates a large family and game room, with a 1/2 bathroom. When I walked into the unfinished section is when I fell in love with the house.

There is probably 800-900 square feet that is studded in and insulated already, all exterior walls. An additional 150 or so square feet is provided as a cold storage room, with built in shelves. In the main basement there are beefy hand-made shelves along an entire wall, and a great space to build in. I will be able to add a workshop and office for me, as well as another play/family area. Another bedroom, or one shared with my office, would also be quite easy to build.

Having the exterior walls studded and insulated will save me a lot of money when I finish the basement, which would be right after the closing (at least my office). I haven’t yet drawn up my plans for how to finish it, but just guessing I would need about 75 2×4″, 20-30 sheets of drywall, 3-4 interior doors, electrical wire and outlets, tape and mud, trim, paint and misc. hardware. Carpet will likely be the most expensive single item, so will probably wait just a little while.

Even though I am just dreaming at this point, we are hopeful that we will have an accepted offer and a closing date set by the end of this week. Then we will sweat yet another appraisal. I have already told the mortgage companies that I will not pay for an appraisal done by Landsafe and/or Lynette Richter, because they totally suck. See the previous home offer for more information on Landsafe and Lynette Richter.

More House Shopping

Posted on by Todd Osborne

After a couple of months off from house shopping, we are back at it this morning. I was able to get us pre-approved for a new mortgage, possibly two, this week. The best one may be through Jules Stewart at iFreedom Direct, but it also looks like our local State Bank of Cross Plains may have a good one too.

The problem is there are not many homes we like for sale in Cross Plains right now, and we are limiting our search to the village, or at least the township, so that the kids will not have to change schools. Did I mention that we love Cross Plains? 🙂 There is one home that seems nice and we are going to look at it this morning. It is on Thinnes Street, just a couple of blocks from my ex-wife (our only nearby babysitter), which of course means my daughters.

We are looking at homes considerably less expensive than before, about $50-60k less in fact. I am hoping that the lower priced homes will have an easier time appraising, and if not, that the owners, who are typically older, may be able to make up any shortcomings in a low appraisal. The home this morning is on the market for $234,500, and has been on the market a little over a month.

There are 3 other possibilities as well, but this home is our favorite so we are going to look at it first. Our lease has expired, but the landlords are allowing us to stay here month-to-month. But that is only until the end of August, so we either have to buy a home by then, or sign a new lease that will take us into at least spring of 2009, something we are trying hard to avoid.

Officially Addicted

Posted on by Todd Osborne

I was warned, by my aerobatic flight instructor Mike Love, that once I started learning aerobatics I would be addicted. I am. I had my third aerobatic lesson today, and added the barrel roll to my fledgling aerobatic arsenal of aileron rolls and loops. I pretty much have aileron rolls down to a science, and they are the most fun for me to perform. I still get a bit sick each time I go out for a lesson, but it is getting less and less each time.

The last two lessons I took Dramamine, which may have helped just a little bit. But from my SCUBA diving experience I know that TripTone works well for me, as I also get sea sick quite easily. I could not find it locally, but Walgreens ordered me two boxes today, so I will have them for my lesson next week.

Nobody in my family wants to know when I am flying aerobatics, so I tell them after I am done. I am looking forward to being able to practice solo in the near future, but will have to purchase my own parachute. Legally, a parachute is not required when doing aerobatics solo, but I sure like the peace of mind it provides, even if a somewhat false sense of security. The rental units are “seat” type parachutes, which means there is about 2″ of padding on your butt. This is just enough that my long legs cannot comfortably fit under the instrument panel, making the use of the brakes on the ground quite difficult. Mike handles this for my comfort, but I am looking for a used emergency parachute that is of the backpack variety, without the part that goes under your butt. Mike won’t be there to handle the brakes for me when I am solo!

I am also discovering a newly re-found love of the Cessna 152. It is small and uncomfortable for someone my size (6’5″), but it sure is fun! I usually fly 172’s, which are fun and easy, but the 152 is a wonderful little airplane. Especially the Aerobat, pictured above. It has minimal instruments and no gyro’s, very different from the planes I normally fly, which are decked out for full IFR flight. Getting in and out of the 152 is a challenge, especially with the parachute, but it sure is a blast to fly. I had almost forgotten how great these little airplanes are!

So when I win that lottery, I will of course still purchase a twin-engine Beech Baron, but I will also pick up a Cessna 152 Aerobat. These ugly old birds just put a smile on your face so fast I just won’t be able to resist having one in my hanger.