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Home Page for WaterFlyer
Information About Me
Screen Name: WaterFlyer Member Name: RONALD WHITLEY Location: SPRINGFIELD, VA USA Birth Date: 1/9/45 Sex: Male Marital Status: Single Computers: HP pentium 100 mhz 24 megs ram Hobbies: Float plane flying, squirrels, turtles, motorcycles, camping, fishing, etc. Occupation: Engineer - If I haven't done it! It can't be done! :) Quote: Home Page located at http://home.aol.com/waterflyer Searchable by: AOL and Internet
WELCOME TO WATERFLYER'S HOME PAGE! Hi Ya! :)
You are visitor #
a very special award awaits the one millionth visitor! :)
It is about time you found me! ...... here I am! :) as you have already guessed, my name is Ron Whitley. The following paragraphs will tell you a little bit about me, my likes, dislikes and desires..... Probably more than you ever thought you needed to know, and it is all,
ABOUT ME ...... :)
I was born in Sibley hospital, Washington, D.C. a Capricorn and a Washington native, something of a rarity I am told! I am now a Springfield, Va. resident...... which is still on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., I am self employed a non smoker with an even disposition, 6 ft tall, 200 lbs. I have green eyes and brown curly hair with little wisps of gray that tend to make me look distinguished and I am told that I am not too hard to look at. I am fairly strong and healthy with a medium muscular build and take to tasks requiring exercise readily. I have an outgoing personality, fairly gregarious and really enjoy a good party, so put your party hats on!
I am generally an early riser and am considered by my friends to be honest, hard working and an achiever. I am a homeowner, financially secure and not a moocher. I enjoy working on mechanical things, or rather tinkering around the house or on my motorcycle, etc. My interests are many, varied and run the gamut between a good chess game to hard labor.
My first love is flying, I am a F.A.A. Certified Flight Instructor with a commercial license. I am also an outdoorsman and like to go camping, fishing and swimming - hence I have an amphibious float plane, am a member of the Seaplane Pilots Association and the Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association.
AIRCRAFT OWNERS AND PILOTS ASSOCIATION
EXPLORE YOUR AIRPORT KNOWLEDGE!
Summer & Spring are my favorite times of the year. In the Winter I love downhill skiing! I am either a beginning expert? or, an expert beginner (not sure which). I have been married twice, (I am a slow learner), divorced twice with no kids either marriage. Hope I have satisfied some of your curiosities with this dissertation.
I am a newbie at this computer stuff ........ I keep hitting the CTRL button but still feel like I am still not in full control. :) Most of the time I feel like a monkey locked in a room with a typewriter ......... but sooner or later I'll print out something intelligible...... or, find some other use for this evolved typewriter? This is my second attempt at a home page and I am certainly limited by the aol Your Home Page. My first attempt went south when I innocently decided to update my aol profile and found that if I did that it would erase my home page! So I decided to expand on my first home page, add a few pictures and try to explain my personality a little bit better! your opinion, comments, criticisms and or suggestions would be very much appreciated!
MY NORMAL INTERESTS:
My likes include such things as fishing, swimming, partying, gardening, camping, birds, working on my house, landscaping. I could, of course, elaborate to a great degree about each and every thing that I do, I have instead linked you up to some interesting links that I’m sure will not only explain what I enjoy about each little thing, but be interesting reading to you as well!
This is a picture of my humble abode!
OTHER INTERESTS
which tend to escape the normal realm are Flying, Darts, Chess, Motorcycling, squirrels, my bar, turtles (even have a turtle farm), heating with a wood stove, and computers! Covering first things first of course I offer a (flying) link that should prove interesting I think!
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS!
The photo at the beginning of my home page was my amphibious float plane...... a Cessna 185 with Wipline 3730 floats. It has hydraulic landing gear that drop down out of the floats so that it can land on land and retract into the floats for water landings....... Hmmm, I have often wondered about that. ... since landing are made on land, should not they be called waterings on water? :-)
The Cessna 185 has a IO520 continental engine which develops 300 HP at sea level and consumes up to 16 gph of aviation fuel........ with 84 gal fuel tanks and flying at 75% power you can get a range of 6 hours at a speed of 145 mph and maintain a 45 min reserve. The wingspan is 24 ft 6 in and it is equipped with Wipline 3730 amphibious floats. It a four seater that can carry a full load of adults off to fantasy island or any other destination at just the hint of adventure!
I have flown my float plane as far north as Maine as far south as Florida and as far west as Denver Colo. It is been a great companion of mine on many trips including trips to the Oshkosh air show in Wisconsin and the Sun N Fun air show in Lakeland Florida. But my favorite place so far is the SPAs Safety seminar held on Pleasant lake in Speculator, New York where as many as a hundred other float planes will show up to dock their planes on the white sanded shores of Lake Pleasant proving that birds of a feather like to flock together!
I belong to the Washington Area Darting Association and have since about 1975. When it was first established. I have always enjoyed the game and for a while got pretty good at it...... I am probably no better than an average player at the present time....... but think that I could sharpen up with just a few games!
Back in the good ole days a game of 301 would last an average of 12 to 16 darts! nowadays, I am lucky to be able to get on in that amount of time! :-) but I still enjoy the game enough that I put a dart board up in my basement and still take on all comers with gusto..... One of the best bar games I can think of !!
At present I own 2 motorcycles...... both are Honda 750s. One is a 1971 that I bought new in 1971 and the other is one that I have built from the ground up! I have changed the rake on the front end and extended the front forks about 8inches. I used to work on motorcycles out of my garage and in fact when I built the additional 3 car garage, I heated and air conditioned it as a shop! I used to really enjoy working on and riding my motorcycle but lately have not had the time to enjoy one of lifes great pleasures! Both the motorcycles that I presently own have been bored out to 836cc and have the equivilent of a 3/4 race cam in them. I have installed oversized valves with heavier springs, upped the jets in the carburators to almost a half again bigger than they originally were and dropped a tooth off the counter shaft sprocket and ended up with a bike that can turn 12 seconds in the 1/4 mile! :)
These guys are kinda camera shy, but I managed to shoot this one anyway!
The squirrels on my property have finally gotten to where they eat out of my hand! This I consider quite an accomplishment as it is taken a number of years to get them to this point! I always carry a pocket full of peanuts with me so that I do not disappoint them when they come running up looking for something! and they do come running up as soon as they see my coming! I consider them my pets and go thru a 5 lb bag of peanuts each week feeding them!
There was somewhat of a battle over the bird feeders for a while until I figured out how to defeat them on their on ground! At one point I had a bird feeder mounted on an aluminum pole that they had learned to climb up...... so I greased the pole with grease from the kitchen.....ugh..... while they didn’t like the grease they would try climbing up the pole and then lick off the grease that they had smeared all over themselves while making the attempt. I discontinued that practice because not only was it awfully messy, but I was afraid of making the squirrels ill.
The only way I have found to defeat those very agile tree dwellers is by taking a long bamboo pole and stretching it between two trees so that the bird feeder, when it is hung from the pole is at least 4 feet off the ground and at least 8 feet from the nearest tree! Even then, there was this one special squirrel that could just barely make the jump by climbing the nearest tree much higher than the target, (the birdfeeder), and when he jumped would make a very violent landing causing the feeder to spray birdseed all over the ground.... Lots of squirrels used to hang around the feeder when he would make his jumps to reap the spoils of victory.......... but finally I moved the feeder to a spot where it was too difficult for him to make his jump...... so he quit..... have not seen him for a while...... but he was definitely my best Jumper!
A few of my squirrels have been around long enough to earn a name...... I’ll remember ‘ole scar for a long time. He was probably the bravest of all my squirrels and there was one we called the Catcher, because he could actually catch the peanuts that we threw him with his front paws! But I think the average life of a squirrel in the wild is about 1 year. That is not to say that they do not live longer..... But life in the wild is kinda rough and the chances of dying young or as a baby are considerable, so the longest I expect to see a squirrel hang around is about 2 or 3 years tops beyond that he is setting an old age record !
I finished off my basement about 4 years ago and put a full service bar down there for my parties. I have done the front of the bar in stone..... The bar top is Butcher block stained the same as the wall cabinets, chairs and swinging doors!
This is a picture of me at my bar holding a glass of dark beer...... I think Budweisher is my favorite beer, but I have a host of other alcoholic drinks that I have learned to like alot too!
Behind the bar I have installed a small dishwasher, a refrigerator with an ice maker and a 4 keg beer cooler! All the comforts of a professional bar with none of the hassles of being carded! :-)
My favorite drink and the one I like to fix for guests the most is Love Potion #9 It’s made with Southern Comfort, Creme de Banana, a splash of Grenadine, Ameretto and OJ poured gently over a 1/2 cup or crushed ice and blended until smooth. Topped off with a cherry and slice of orange. I always put a little umbrella in there for the ladies....... ummm, ummmm! Good!
There are 17 of those little monsters in there and when they give birth the babies aren
any bigger than your thumb nail!
When I bought my house it had a terrible gravel driveway that was about 200 feet long and varied possibly 20 feet in height over half that distance...... from the road it went down to the lowest place in about the middle and then started up the hill to the house...... You had to have a running start to make it into the garage. If you were unfortunate enough to come to a stop on the hill, you would have to go back down the hill and start again!
I filled in the bottom of the driveway at least 6 feet deep with broken up pieces of asphalt and gravel, about a hundred 100 wheeler truck loads! I did this to raise the lowest point of the driveway and lessen the degree of the hill that had to be climbed to get to the house and make the driveway more manageable. In so doing, I found that I needed to build a tree well around three trees near the top of the drive to protect them against the fill! Note: You can not fill around the base of a tree without killing the tree..... so a tree well is necessary!
I used RR ties to encircle the tree. Each RR tie is about 9 feet long and I used 5 ties to completely go around all three trees. At first I had decided to call this the Pentagon, since it was 5 sided, but when I planted my garden I would find turtles in my garden attracted by the tomatoes, etc. those suckers would take one bite out of a tomato and then move on...... So, I would catch them and put them in the pentagon........ After a while the number of turtles started adding up! I have 17 turtles in there now, have renamed the Pentagon,......... it is now called the turtle farm. I have found that their favorite foods seem to be fried chicken, steamed corn and an occasional leaf of lettuce...... :-)
When I bought my house I made sure that I had an alternative source of heat, the woodstove! I installed the woodstove down my basement so that the natural convection of the heated air would circulate naturally and eventually heat the whole house......and except for your coldest days, it seems to do the job with no problems...... but on the really cold days..... it gets a little brisk on the top level in the mornings so Ie augmented the heat with a gas furnace that utilizes a set back thermostat! I also built a wood chute from a small side window that allows me to bring wood in from the outside without traipsing thru the whole house with armfuls of wood, creating more mess than you would want to clean...
I used to go out on weekends and cut down trees, limb them, cut into 2 foot lengths and load them into my truck. I’d then haul them home, unload them, and then split them with my log splitter and stack them. Then came the 70’s when everybody and his brother seemed to be looking for wood to burn and it got awfully scarce! But the fad seems to have died up for there are not only as many people out there foraging for wood, but they have passed ecological laws and those tree cutting companies that used to dump their truck load of wood at the dump, now had to pay big bucks to get rid of their wood! Now, because of the new laws.......I call the tree service companies and tell them that I will accept a load of wood from them if they cut it to about 24 inches!
I bought my computer in October of 1995. I got a Hewlett Packard Pentium processor....... 1.2 Gig, 8mb memory, 100 mhz. I didn’t know much about computers but I had several friends that had been pushing my for years to join the computer craze and buy a computer! I resisted as much as I could arguing that the computer could not do anything that I was not already doing and I was doing it a lot cheaper without one!
Finally, in Oct of last year I caved in and bought a computer...... now I had to learn how to operate it! Not an easy task for someone who just barely knew how to type! :-) I took a Windows 95 class from the computer store that sold me the computer, but found that lacking in adequate overall computer training...... I tried to pick as much up from my friends as I could but this computer thing was bigger than all of us! So, I decided to enroll in Northern Virginia Community College to further my education with computers...... I enrolled in Computer information service 125 and 150...... I found these classes informative and educational but still lacking the training that I was seeking! I was not sure what I wanted but I needed to know! I have since purchasing my computer, upgraded it to 24 megs of ram and a 28.8 modem..... Windows 95 works a little bit better now! :-)
This homepage is the full extent of what I have been able to glean about computers since last October and represents the full extent of my computer knowledge and expertise! You tell me what you think........ am I doing poor, OK?, fair, good, very good, or excellent? Any help that is offered will be cheerfully accepted and eagerly pursued, suggestion welcomed!
I used to really enjoy a good game of chess........ but it is been so long that I am not even sure that I know how to spell the name of the game...... I am a little out of practice but, like my darts, feel that if I put a few games under my belt I could be a competitor again! :-)
I was a member of the USCF (United States Chess Federation), back in 1964....... I started out with a rating so low that it didn have a number assigned to it.... but eventually I got up to a 1700 rating..... at the time that was about an A player..... but above an A, was expert, master, and grand master!
Now, if you have managed to last until here the least that you ought to do is send me your comments! Hope ya liked it! :)
Changes last made on: Wednesday October 02, 1996 02:30 EDT