Duxford Girl

... consensual chocolate egg sex!

Yipee, it's that time of the year again. For those of you who don't know what Lent is, it's the 40-day lead up to Easter. Supposedly Jesus went through a wander through the desert to find himself (because Europe hadn't been invented yet) and this was a long, miserable thing so Catholics celebrate this story by giving something up for 40 days. Hence the reason for Shrove Tuesday or Fat Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. The day before Lent is meant to clean all the tasty crap out of your cupboards. Shiny plastic beads and booby flashing came later but I'm fuzzy on the biblical relevance of that.

Today is known as Ash Wednesday, the official beginning of Lent. While growing up Catholic, we usually had pancakes the Tuesday before at school (when indoctrinating children, fun is part of the formula) then on Wednesday, we'd write down our horrible sins on pieces of paper (guilt and fear would be the other part of the propaganda formula) that would then be burned, the ashes used to mark our foreheads in the sign of the cross.

Driving on the highway, the other day, my iPod shuffled to this song by the Cranberries. I'd forgotten how much I liked it.

It can happen to anyone and untreated depression can cause a person to shut out everybody.

For more on Bell's Let's Talk project: http://letstalk.bell.ca/en/

I like this advert.



It's a good time of year for Bell to run this campaign because it's a brutal time for those of us who live in parts northern and also suffer with a mental illness.

I've been wanting to get back into the left seat for several months now but since I still have to finish the last four courses of my master of commerce, flight lessons are at least a year in the future for now. So instead, I've been working on my theory, reading my FTGU and trying to absorb as much as possible so that when the opportunity presents itself, I can get my license and ratings as quickly as possible.

It's no shock then that all this flying stuff has nestled itself into my subconscious and cropped up in my dreams. For years I've had a re-occurring dream of watching a mid-air collision. The circumstances surrounding the collision have always been different but I've always on the ground, looking up, watching it happen. I hadn't had a dream like that for several years but the other night I dreamt that I could see YYC from my patio and that I watched a runway incursion happen when a private jet landing on 34 collided with a 747 on 09. I wasn't sleeping very well to begin with because I was wrestling with a bout of insomnia so when I woke up from the 3-seconds of decent sleep that the dream had likely occurred in I was unable to get back to sleep. However, it wasn't because I felt scared by a nightmare (the likely outcome in the past), it was because I couldn't figure out why an ATC would clear a 737 to 09 in the first place and why the captain would take the clearance and a myriad of other thoughts that keep running through my mind every time I restlessly repositioned myself hoping I would find a configuration that I would finally fall asleep in.

When the morning came, I still hadn't slept and I was still thinking about the dream. It was like having a song stuck in my head. The cure for a stuck song, is to listen to it. So I decided to do the same thing with my dream, except in the form of a little obsessive web research.

Having said that, when it comes to runway incursions, there's a clear choice to obsess over: The 1977 Tenerife Disaster. You can read up on this disaster included in the links of this page:
http://www.project-tenerife.com/engels

and also watch an excellent NOVA documentary about it here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/deadliest-plane-crash.html

I've been taking heat on Facebook for my opinions about my recent post about Lance Armstrong. There seems to be the feeling that I'm unforgiving and awash in schadenfreude and only commenting because it's fun to watch a successful person take a dive. This is all understandable, as, I wasn't exactly kind in my last article about Armstrong (which doesn't set me aside from professional writers dealing with the same topic, by the way). However, perhaps I need to clear up some of the misconceptions people may have about me based on this article.

After years of speculation, a massive investigation (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/11/sports/cycling/doping-agencys-evidence.html), several team-mates testifying, losing all seven of his Tour De France (http://www.letour.fr/le-tour/2013/us) titles and being banned from several endurance sport competitions (http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/14/sport/armstrong-doping-allegations/index.html)... wait for it...

LANCE ARMSTRONG ADMITS TO DOPING!

I'd forgotten how much I like this song:



Maybe I'll learn to play it someday on my new piano. Once I clear out a space for it, hire movers and have it tuned.

“told she was too fat to be anorexic”

“They told me that I was too fat to have an eating disorder and that I was cutting for attention”

“Come-on get over it and stop eating so much”

“I've been diagnosed with an eating disorder and my friends don't believe me because I'm still overweight”

These are only a few of the many quotes from a website entitled http://callbs.ca/#home. The purpose of this organisation is to bring awareness about the stigma and misunderstanding of mental illness among teens. It offers materials for awareness events and a wall where people can “Call BS” about various things that they have heard about their behaviour. It is an excellent project but as I browsed the site I was shocked to see how many people had written about eating disorders and the lack of understanding they received about the disorder.