Very Fine Shoes

“Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the control of fear, mastery of fear.”
–Mark Twain

I didn’t know until now that Mark Twain and I share a birthday.  Cool!



Very Fine Shoes
2.5″ x 3.5″ Watercolor ATC

I spent so much time on my Banty, that I didn’t get to paint anything else over the weekend.   I  guess we’ll tip toe through the shoe pile this week and see what else is hiding in there.  When I look at some of these shoes, it amazes me that I put so much detail in that itty bitty little space.  Fun!!! 






Last night, I made it to my flight lesson in McAlester, ready to go up with the remnants of my cold.  I did the pre-flight, the run-up,  and taxied onto runway 02, announcing my intentions on the radio.    All is well.  I begin the takeoff roll, when I notice the airspeed indicator is not working.  I pulled the throttle all the way back and slowly brought the plane to a stop.  No airspeed indicator, no takeoff.  So…. I taxied back to the hangar and we stowed the plane.

Even though it was sad that I didn’t get to fly, it was a great lesson.  It’s not often that a student gets to experience equipment failure in real-time.  We read about it and we are taught about it, but when it really happens, it is burned into our brain cells.  If I hadn’t noticed the airspeed indicator (yeah… like that would happen!),  my instructor was going to let me take off and then we’d learn about how to handle the failure in the air and get the plane safely back.    Maybe next time we can pretend. 


Mark Twain

• Born: 30 November 1835
• Birthplace: Florida, Missouri
• Died: 21 April 1910 (heart failure)
• Best Known As: The author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

Name at birth: Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Mark Twain is on nearly everyone’s list of all-time great American authors. Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri and as a young man held a series of jobs which included work as a printer’s apprentice, a Mississippi riverboat pilot, and a newspaperman in Nevada and San Francisco. He moved gradually from journalism to travel writing and then to fiction, aided by the success of his 1869 travel memoir The Innocents Abroad. His humorous tales of human nature, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885), remain standard texts in high school and college literature classes. In his own day Twain was a tremendously popular figure and a celebrated public speaker who toured widely. Other Twain classics include Life on the Mississippi (1883) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and the short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867).

Twain was born and died in years in which Halley’s Comet passed by Earth: 1835 and 1910… His pseudonym, Mark Twain, was taken from Mississippi riverboat terminology; it’s a measure of depth… Twain married the former Olivia Langdon in 1870; she died in 1904, and the melancholy tone of Twain’s later writings is often attributed to his depression over her death.