What a nice weekend! Nice and hot. I love Alabama seasons. Winter sucks, but it only lasts through January and part of February. Spring can last any where from two months to two weeks, but it's windy and wet and usually every night we're woken up by the damn weather alert radio. Summer is deadly hot and humid, but Fall rocks. And it usually lasts until December 31st, around 11:30 pm. You think I'm kidding.

This weekend at the drop zone we had a coaches course. A rated Coach is the first rung on the ladder o' instruction. All student skydivers after AFF must be supervised by someone who at least has a coach rating until they get their license. A coach must have at least a B license and 100 skydives and must pass this course. What's annoying about this setup is I can let someone who has 100 skydives and the coach's rating jump with a student but not someone who doesn't have the rating but has thousands of jumps.

Fortunately that condition is waiverable but it still chaps my hide.

What was fun for me is I got to help out with the coach candidate's freefall skills tests. Which means I got to play the Student From Hell. Hey, I went through that course; and the Accelerated Freefall Instructor course, which is 1000 times worse. The candidates were all over-amping on everything so it's always fun to gig them on stupid things, like wearing your helmet backwards or putting your altimeter on the wrong hand. Or 'slipping' off the airplane so they would have to chase you out the door. Best fun I ever had at someone else's (literal) expense.

I also had 3 AFF dives, which are their own form of fun. Remind me: I need to learn my left from my right.

My brother Ed FINALLY got his A license. He also did his 100th jump which means he got pied. This weekend's theme for me was apparantly 'revenge week'.

Here's a three-fer for word o the day. I looked up this word after reading a column this morning:

semiotic
SYLLABICATION: se·mi·ot·ic
VARIANT FORMS: also se·mi·ot·i·cal (--kl) se·mei·ot·ic (sm-, sm-, sm-) also se·mei·ot·i·cal (--kl)
ADJECTIVE: 1. Of or relating to semantics.
2. Relating to symptomatology.
ETYMOLOGY: Greek smeitikos, observant of signs, significant, from smeisis, indication, from smeioun, to signal, to interpret as a sign, from smeion, sign, from sma.
OTHER FORMS: semi·oti·cal·ly —ADVERB

And just for clarification I looked up this one:

semantics
SYLLABICATION: se·man·tics
NOUN: (used with a sing. or pl. verb) 1. Linguistics The study or science of meaning in language.
2. Linguistics The study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent. Also called semasiology.
3. The meaning or the interpretation of a word, sentence, or other language form: We're basically agreed; let's not quibble over semantics.

As well as this one because I didn't know wtf it was:

symptomatology
SYLLABICATION: symp·to·ma·tol·o·gy
NOUN: 1. The medical science of symptoms.
2. The combined symptoms of a disease.
ETYMOLOGY: New Latin symptmatologia : Greek sumptma, sumptmat-, symptom; see symptom + Latin -logia, -logy.
OTHER FORMS: sympto·mato·logi·cal (-mtl-j-kl) —ADJECTIVE
sympto·mato·logi·cal·ly —ADVERB