I haven't dropped off the earth - we left August 16 to take our son, Thomas, to his freshman year at Wake Forest University, which he is attending with the help of a track and field scholarship. Thomas is a thrower, not a runner - he's too tall (6'3") and too big (200 very lean pounds) to run competitively at the Div. 1 college level. But he can heave a shotput and a discus: he won third in the former and second in the latter at the Tenn. state championship meet last May.

Having returned Saturday, it was back to work for me and then yesterday in late afternoon I rode for the first time on a hot-air balloon. The balloonist, commercial pilot Richard Arnold, owns Dream Flights Ballooning here in Franklin, Tenn.

The sky was overcast with a small threat of rain (which didn't develop), so we flew low since visibility aloft was limited. The flight lasted about an hour, although getting the balloon out of the cow pasture we landed in proved to be more of a challenge than it first appeared. A local man very kindly lent a hand.

We took off from an elementary schoolyard and passed over a subdivision before heading over the industrial part of Franklin, thence to the countryside. I took my digital-video camera and my digital still camera and made a DVD therefrom.

As you can see from the video grabs below, we didn't merely pass over a neighborhood, we also passed through one. At the lowest point, the bottom of the basket was 4-6 feet above the pavement. To see a WMV movie of this part of the flight, visit this post at donaldsensing.com and click on the first image there.

More grabs below.