Tue - 6 Jan/15

A cold front is arriving. I will need to bring in the electric heater for the bedroom tomorrow as the freezing weather arrives in northern Florida. Today it will be in the low 70's F. Very pleasant.

Tuesday is a day to relax. No Tuesday park activities that we participate in. Watched a few of our regular morning and afternoon TV programs. We put on an old George Carlin from our collection - just for laughs (grin).

Charlotte did a little embroidery in the RV.

Then she sat outside for a bit to enjoy the sunshine after making a trip to the office to buy tickets for an upcoming show in the main clubhouse. More on that when it happens mid-month.

We teamed up for lunch. Nothing fancy and ready in a jiffy - just hot dogs with the last of the berry pie for dessert.

After lunch we settled in to relax and watch another movie from our collection: Flight starring Denzel Washington.

Writer John Gatins based the scene loosely on Alaska Airlines Flight 261, which crashed into the Pacific Ocean en route to San Francisco in 2000. As in the film, pilot Ted Thompson amazingly rolled the stricken craft upside down to try and slow its descent.

According to black box recordings cited in the official report of the accident, one crew member says: “at least upside down we're flyin’”. A similar version of this line is used in the film.

Sadly, the heroic efforts of Thompson and co-pilot First Officer Bill Tansky weren’t enough to stop the plane crashing into the Pacific and killing all 88 people aboard. As in the film, the cause of the crash was fatigue of a jackscrew due to overuse and poor maintenance. Unlike ‘Flight’ though, the heroism of the pilots was not in doubt. They were posthumously awarded the Airline Pilots Association Gold Medal for Heroism.

As the crew explains in our exclusive making-of video, the intense effect was created by building the entire plane cabin - which weighed 30,000 pounds - and strapping it to a giant rotating gimbal (a piece of kit that pivots and rotates around an object, in this case, the fake cabin). It means the passengers and crew of the plane were actually hanging upside down – those panicked looks aren’t 100 per cent acting.

I used the movie time to update the computers. A much slower process on park Wi-Fi compared to at home using Ultra High Speed Cable.

Evening also meant Jeopardy. On Tuesday, TV also means CBS - starting with NCIS.

Charlotte did so more embroidery in the evening as I did the blog.