Day 8

On Wednesday I woke up uncharacteristically early; not at all by my own choice. Something woke me up around 5am and I just could not find my way back to the Sandman's office to drift off again. I instead took the opportunity to get up about an hour and a half early, take a long shower, cook and eat a large breakfast (and prepare a tasty sack lunch) and work on some side projects in my room. I have a model of a Cessna airplane that I received as a Christmas gift that I need to finish soon. It came with a voucher for a single pilot's lesson and I want to finish the model before I sign up to take my trip up into the wild blue.

I have the main chassis put together already and I'm working on assembling the wings and attaching them to the main body. It looks very realistic and I've been taking my time to detail paint everything (dials included) with pins and toothpicks so it looks as lifelike as possible. So far, I'm very close to having it look like a bona fide, working miniature.

So close, in fact, that I started to daydream about flying it. It was either the insomnia that I seemed stricken by that morning or the fumes from the model glue (or both) that transported me to a world of miniatures where I was flying in my little plane. I soared down my street and over my old elementary school. Then I drifted through the clouds to downtown. I flew amongst the plastic model buildings that seemed so real in miniature-land and turned towards the airport by the river.

I began my approach, but then realized that I had painted my miniature radio wrong. I forgot to paint on the microphone jack and had no way to talk to the plastic people in the control tower!

I looked through every window I had and saw a plastic Hawaiian Airlines 747 bearing down on me from behind the plane (I believe that's aft). I banked sharply towards the river to the right (starboard) and looked for a vacant runway. It was about then when my master caution light began blinking red-yellow-red-yellow (it was made of plastic and couldn't actually light up to blink). I had painted the fuel gauge at near-empty and was now running on fumes.

I'd never really flown a plane before, and doubted I could dead-stick it in on a runway without hurting myself or my little petroleum-based plastic aircraft. So I turned towards the river and tried my best to glide down to it.

As the plane began skipping across the surface I heard singing. There wasn't that kind of radio in the plane, I thought as I looked around the inside of the cockpit and saw not aeronautical controls but a wooden desk with a partially-assembled Cessna model on top of it. Then I realized that I had dozed off and was hearing my alarm from next to my bed behind me.

I stretched and got up, ready to start my day for real this time. I headed off to language classes and then went to the rock gym for a light workout afterwards. After I got home for the day I put my model away and pulled out my homework for tomorrow.

My second real class of the term is tomorrow; something about operations management.

Who knows what that means anyway?

Day 8 of 100 - Summary: Model glue and insomnia make life much more interesting.