Gloomy

If you are sick of me telling you it was another cool, gray, dreary, rainy day, I am even more sick of living through another cool, gray, dreary, rainy day. It's going to be like this tomorrow too, and maybe Saturday and Sunday now, and Monday, and probably Tuesday. Enough with the gray and the rain!!

Kaylee passed two things in Level Two gymnastics today, so that made her happy. :)

I did more time sheet entering and other various things throughout the day. Since I don't feel like talking about errands and work, I'll bring up three totally unrelated aviation things, for no real reason, which some of you may not want to read, just to warn you.

First up in the "Scary but Okay" category, this picture is of a young man, new pilot, and his friend, who landed on top of a snowy mountain and proceeded to slide off of the top of a 1500' cliff sideways. Their plane stopped at this angle, and they were able to climb out the one side and get to safety. Everyone was fine. Personally, I would need a change of shorts.

Secondly, in the "Whatever" category, come internet forums, specifically flying ones. They are full of "experts", that's for sure. Today's "whatever" comment came from one person who said these two things: "The Viking reminded me of the guys I talked with who flew the F104- short wing, lots of power, 'good descent ability.' When you ran out of airspeed it dropped." and then there was "Then (I flew) the Comanche, and it seems like a P-51 from what everyone I have heard - the wing flies perfectly - right until it stops flying." I'll even ignore both "it drops when it stops flying/runs out of airspeed" comments. But the other... So let me get this straight. The Viking flies similar to an F-104, and a Comanche flies similar to a P-51. Seriously? Wait, you're right, I can see how a 4-seat 260HP (usually) tricycle gear family airplane resembles a 1500 HP 2-seat taildragger warbird. After all, they both have wings, a prop, control surfaces and wheels. I sure noticed the similarities. *eyeroll*

Third, in the "Not Good In Any Way" category, this doesn't look that bad, but looks are deceiving. The plane had an engine failure, and the pilot successfully turned the plane around and landed on the runway with a tailwind. He landed long and ran off the end of the runway, which caused the plane to flip over into this shallow water, which you can see is barely over the top. Unfortunately, the Yak canopy doesn't have any significant structure to support it, so a nose-over can crush the occupants. That didn't happen this time, so they avoided injury from both the engine failure and the flip over. But even more unfortunately, the canopy slides aft (back), and if weight is on the canopy, it can't be opened. They couldn't get out, and the two in the plane drowned in just inches of water. What an awful thing. It gives me a bit of the heebie jeebies, and reminds me of the adage of opening the canopy for takeoffs and landings in certain airplanes under certain conditions. *shakes it off*

My laptop is now officially unable to be charged and my desktop fan is groaning and dying, so pretty soon I may be computerless. But it could certainly be worse!

Tomorrow is Friday, cold cut sandwiches and pies...

Kaylee On...

Usually Kaylee chats me up all the way to school and back, and I occasionally get a word in edgewise, but in general it's her. Today on the way to school she got me going. We were talking about what we were going to do about the weekend that's all booked up, and she piped up with "I want to go, but I don't really want to fly there. Why can't we drive? Besides, airplanes are more dangerous than cars anyway." Oh no she di-nt! MY daughter just spouted out that "airplanes are dangerous" line usually reserved for people who don't actually know anything about it? Oh, the horror! So "we" talked about that all the way to school. Serves her right. ;)

I was realistic though-I did point out that flying and driving both are only as safe first as the people doing the flying/driving, and secondly as safe as the people around them doing the flying/driving. At least with flying, you can eliminate a whole lot of #2, not having a steady stream of people just a few feet away from you traveling at deadly rates of speed needing only a sneeze, a break in attention, a sleepy blink or a radio channel change to drift over into disaster--but you do have to be much more conscientious of #1...and that her Dad and I are both very aware of that.

How many parents have thought the words "When you leave this house, you can putz around on the ground in a car, in traffic, in construction, with no view, in a seatbelt, for an entire day or two to get somewhere I can get to in just a few hours if you want to, but while you live in THIS house, you follow OUR rules, and WE'RE flying airplanes!" And how many kids would be annoyed at getting to most of their vacations via airplane? Kaylee's classmates have always thought it was pretty cool. I ought to refuse to let her go for awhile via any method but car and see how long it takes for one of us to arrive and begin having fun hours and hours before she does and much less exhausted before she caves. ;) Seriously. Six and a half hour drive to Missouri or Tennessee, which means after school on Friday she'd get there past 10:30 pm and go right to bed and essentially lose a day of the trip. Or a one hour 30 minute flight there, which means after school on Friday she'd get there by 5:30 pm and have hours to play, eat dinner, etc.

Kaylee came to me this morning holding a doll, asking me to do her hair up like the doll's hair. This is the third different hairstyle she's wanted me to try out on her. The only problem is that I have absolutely no capability in fixing hair. None. I wash mine, and I comb it. Then I'm done for the day. I don't blow dry it and I don't have styling gel usually. I perm it if it goes flat once a year or so. I don't dye it, I usually cut it myself if it gets long enough to bug me, I throw it in a ponytail when I get hot, and otherwise I don't bother with it. So now she wants this poofy here and this braided there and this curled here, and I'll tell you what, I'm trying. She went off to school today satisfied that her hair looked like Jasmine's, but it didn't quite turn out as I planned. Fortunately she was happy with it, so that's what matters. I'm going to need to take hairstyling classes soon. "Well dear, with the shape of your face, this style would look best. Pass Mommy those thinning shears and the hair shapers first..." (Yes, I Googled the terms and yes I know they wouldn't be appropriate for a little girl's already thin hair. :P) I still can't do her bun right for ballet. The last time, a different mom re-did Kaylee's hair backstage because she didn't like how my bun looked. I was just grateful. I can't get pigtail or ponytail scalp lines straight. I am a sad, sad hair-doer. But for her, and only for her, I am trying. :)

When she got home from school, I cut her a chunk of cheese with a glass of milk for a snack, and she was sitting at the table when I saw something moving by her arm. I looked closer, and it was a spider, and it was moving fast, right towards her. So I said "Kaylee, get up." and when she didn't move I said "Kaylee! Get UP!" She looks down, sees the spider right by her, tosses her chunk of cheese into the air, shrieks repeatedly like a girl from a horror movie, and runs to the other side of the room. Meanwhile I'm left rescuing the cheese and looking around for someone else to kill the spider. Such a person doesn't exist, so I do it with a paper towel. It's probably in the trash right now wiggling its way out of the wad. I hate spiders. I really hate spiders. Eight-legged little denizens of evil...

Tonight Kaylee officially finishes her Awanas book by going on a hike with her group at a local park and writing down some things she sees. She also gets to play at a park with several friends for 2 hours, which pleases her to no end, and works for me too. I'm always glad when she can hang out with other good kids and expend some energy and have some fun--and just be a kid. The teen years will get here too soon as it is, so hanging off of monkey bars and going down slides with not a care in the world for an afternoon sounds like a good plan for her to me. :)

May What??

Okay, that's it, I'm officially irritated now. Kaylee had ballet today, and when she walked out, she was carrying a paper having to do with her ballet recital and professional photos. And the date of these photos this year? Saturday, May 16th, at 3:30 p.m. I said, out loud, "You have GOT to be kidding me!!" Is there NO other weekend in May for anybody to have scheduled anything? So now we've got the FKR fly-in, the Painton fly-in, Kaylee's recital photos, Kaylee's slumber party, her Awanas awards ceremony, and Alonna's graduation, all on the same day(s)--Devon's birthday. Six things in three different states at the same time, and the only reason I'm irritated is because I want to do them all! *sigh*

I spent the morning working at the office. I was all alone there, too-Chuck was gone, Steve was gone, nobody was hanging out, and it was a cool, gray, overcast, rather unpleasant day all around. So I entered time sheets and fuel sheets and pilot supplies and payments and all that stuff for awhile, and then I started doing some web research on the history of Nathan's Mustang to pass on to someone else for a project they are working on. I have to admit, that was pretty interesting for me, reading the history of that, well, dataplate anyway. The actual airframe has been replaced in large part a few times due to about two accidents in a row. One accident made me groan in particular. They rebuilt it after it had an accident, and then for its FIRST FLIGHT back, a guy took it up with a passenger, he had no medical and pretty much no real training in Mustangs, and an oil line had been installed improperly, his engine seized and he had to make an emergency landing in a field, ripping up the plane again. On its maiden flight. Illegally. Ugh. At least nobody was killed. It's been "Unruly Julie" and "Saturday Night Special", but "Checkertail Clan" is definitely the best reincarnation of it, with the history of the 325th Fighter Group it was painted to honor, and I have been so thrilled to meet some of the men who actually flew the Checkertail Mustangs during the war. I'm grateful to have had that chance while they were still here. I'm not usually terribly sentimental, but I fail a bit where this plane is concerned. Apparently it's a "girl" thing, but I am admittedly attached.

My laptop now has a blue line dissecting the screen (which it's had for awhile) and now the battery charger isn't plugging in properly, meaning I'll be in the middle of something and boom, the computer goes dead. I have to wiggle/jiggle the cord to get it to start charging again. This is not good. In fact, I'm still irritated. I think I'll go eat the last half of my seafood subway sandwich for dinner while it recharges. :)

Monday

Well, I have a pretty big stack of things I need to get done fairly quickly, and today I took a decent-sized chunk out of them. It kept me busy most of the day while leaving me nothing interesting to talk about. :)

I did enjoy a short article that came out about WASPs, the WWII women pilots who acted as ferry and test pilots while the men were off flying in war. Women were asked to help out, 25,000 did, and 1,800 were selected to do it. At the end of their duty, they were sent home and airlines offered to hire some of them as flight attendants. One woman said "Why should we be flight attendants? We can fly any plane you have." A few did go be flight attendants just to be able to be in the air, even if from the back serving drinks, but many never flew again. I am grateful to live during the times I do.

The other day, I don't remember what happened, but somebody did something wrong and it really irritated Kaylee, and she was talking about some form of revenge. I told her that her doing the wrong thing didn't make anything better, and asked her if that's what Jesus would want her to do. She muttered "No. But Daddy would like it." It was probably not the best lesson that we both snickered for a second...

Communing

Many times if nothing else is happening, we will go do something on Saturday, and will use Sunday afternoon as our "day of rest". This weekend, we didn't plan it this way, but we had no energy or desire to do anything yesterday, so when we were free today, we felt like getting out and about. So after a lunch of bacon, eggs and toast, we got ready and drove out to a local reservoir to go on a nice hike.

It was a really pretty day for it. It was 85 degrees, which means it could have been too hot and muggy to hike around, but there was a lot of wind today which helped cool things off. Today was the first time this year I'd put sunscreen on Kaylee, too. We walked around the water, into the woods, found some little paths, followed some big paths too. Two roads diverged into the woods, and we, we took them both, including the one more traveled, and we're okay with that. ;)

Kaylee spent a lot of time finding sticks and branches to hike with, toss into the water, dig with, lift up, sit on, and do in general whatever she felt like. She tried to swing on vines hanging from the trees, but they were always too long and she never did get a good swing in. She played in the water, played in the grass, played in the trees, just played. Seems like a good way for a kid to spend a Sunday afternoon to me. :) About halfway through, she decided she was tired, hot and thirsty, but fortunately she made it back to the Jeep without a problem-and once she got there, she did pretty much chug down an entire bottle of water.

We decided to stop in a nearby town and have an ice cream cone, and when we got there we noticed a lot of people standing around holding flags, that the street was lined with flags, and that there was obviously something about to happen. We're fortunate we got there when we did, because a minute or two later and we would have been seriously out of luck for a long time. A police car followed by a truck with a big sign on it stating something like "Motorcycle Ride For The Troops". Following that came more motorcycles than I have ever seen in one place at one time. We had a non-stop parade of bikes the entire time we were ordering and eating, then we stood and watched for 10-15 minutes after we were done, and they were still going by. Not slowly, either. They were riding by at cruise speed, wave after wave after wave, non-stop. There had to be a couple of thousand motorcycles that went by. I've never seen anything like it, and I didn't even know that many motorcycles existed in this area. I wonder from how far away people came to do this. When I got home, I Googled it, and it's an annual 75-mile ride in honor of the troops. We just waited there for however long it took them all to get by. I saw about four women on (the front of) bikes, though I'm sure there were more, and I saw a handful of helmets out of the whole group. Probably about 5% or fewer of the riders had helmets, something Kaylee noticed as well. That was one loud "parade"; while there were bikes of every make in there, the Harleys seemed to dominate. At one point I was trying to take a picture of a lady holding a dog and a flag with a stream of bikes going by, but I tipped up my hand, and plopped my entire chocolate almond ice cream cone down the front of my shirt and to the concrete. I jerked, and even the picture was worthless. I went back to the ice cream window, and they gave me another one free of charge, which I thought was really nice and unnecessary since it was my own fault! So we stood there and sucked down our ice cream cones as fast as we could before they melted all over us, by the side of the road in small town, Indiana, and watched bikers going by and waving at the small crowds standing off to the sides. An impromptu show for the afternoon.

We got back home and I took my annual "in front of our flowering pear tree" photo. I did this with Devon when he was born, and continued the tradition with Kaylee, and every year we get our picture together in front of the tree. It's so pretty, delicate white flowers all over. The problem is getting a nice shot. The first one I tried to take myself had the two of us in it, and not one white flower. So I hauled Steve out there and he took a few for us. You can see all the photos from today if you wish, and I even put up a new picture on her main home page. It's a little fuzzy but I love her smile. :)

Laundry, cleaning rooms, dishes, and other household chores finished off the day, and here we go getting ready for the next week already. The next week of yucky weather, again, might I add...

Hot Air

I actually went to bed early last night, even before the news was over, and today I (and everyone in the house) just seemed unable to get going. We could have gone out to the airport and Kaylee could have played, but even my little Energizer Bunny was feeling too lazy to go.

We opened up the windows in the house and let some of this fresh air and sunshine in today, and it's so nice. It's very windy, which is unfortunate because it cancelled our full schedule of airplanes supposedly flying today. The part that made me laugh though was when a couple of the instructors were double-checking with each other that they weren't going to go up in the winds that were gusting up to 40 mph for awhile...because they didn't want to cancel only to hear the other had gone ahead and gone. After all, it is down the runway, right?? It's doable. :) No, everyone agreed that it didn't sound like much fun or good productivity in learning for students today. So instead I've listened to the wind whistle through the house and ring the wind chimes outside, which is actually a very peaceful sound.

Kaylee's little yellow cat is still outside. I looked, and "Golden the girl" is actually "Golden the boy". Kaylee can't get used to calling him "him", since both her other cats are girls, but I don't think Golden much minds either way. Kaylee's been playing outside in the yard most of the day, and Golden has followed her around and hung out with her all the way. It's actually pretty cute.

I was planning on riding my motorcycle today, only to find that my plates are expired. I suppose the high winds might not make it the most fun either, so I'll go get my sticker and wait for a calmer day next week. In the meantime, Steve got some basic maintenance done on it and the Corvette, pumped up the tires, etc., and he took Kaylee for a ride in the Vette. She is old enough to be tall enough to see out now for one thing, and for another she loves being in the front seat, since I'll never let her ride up front in the regular car. She is also begging me to take her on the motorcycle, but that one I won't do. I don't have a helmet to fit her, and I'm not an experienced or current enough rider. There are a lot of things I think it's sad that kids can't do any more without someone thinking they need taken away from you. You know-climb big trees, wander around the neighborhood and have fun with friends for hours, play on a teeter-totter/see-saw, play "red rover red rover" or "dodge ball" or any other physical game, do much of anything without being rolled in bubble wrap. But some things are a definite improvement. Seat belts in cars and helmets/safety on motorcycles are two of them. :)

This has nothing to do with anything, but I was briefly watching part of one of those ridiculous, mindless "frumpy girl gets turned into prom queen" movies. Have you ever noticed that the girl who is getting picked on in these movies, the "unpopular" girl who goes from ugly duckling to swan is more beautiful to start with than anybody I ever had in MY schools? For heaven's sake, Lindsay Lohan is one. "Little Grey" from Grey's Anatomy is "plain Jane" in a parody of one. Ann Hathaway is another. Riiiight, like tall, thin, movie star-like girls are the ones who are terribly unpopular, take off their frumpy glasses, ponytail and baggy clothes and become instant Cool Kids. I don't know who those movies are designed to bring hope to, but it isn't the real life quiet girls in glasses who keep their heads down until they graduate. What I wish I could pass on to the real life girls is that popularity is a vapor that covers up anything that's real. Individuality, specialness, independence, all of it. I went to a lot of different schools all the way through to college; three different high schools my 4 years of high school, and four different colleges too. Ask me where the "popular people" fit into the real world vs. the school world. You don't have to, do you-you already know. :)

Well, the family is back and it's time to fix some steaks and corn. (Doesn't that sound good?) Have a good weekend!

Stuff

I mostly spent today working on paperwork, making phone calls, doing some computer work, and of course spending a couple hours at Glenndale for Friday lunch.

Kaylee has "Over the Hump Handbook Night" at Awanas tonight until 9:30 p.m., so she can finish all her memorization sections, leaving only two craft sections she'll finish next week. In the meantime they will have snacks and games, so she is quite happy to be going and doing something fun tonight, staying out late, etc.

Happy Birthday to Richard by the way!

Well, I don't have much today, so here are a few quick quotes to end on:
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"Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments, but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures." ~Joseph Addison

"True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment." ~William Penn

Committing Aviation

My contacts came in, so after lunch I stopped in to pick them up then headed out to the airport. I would say Nathan (with Steve and Jonathan on board) in the Cheyenne chased me (with Chuck on board) in the T-6 over to Huntington, but the reality is that I chased him, and it wasn't much of a chase. He'd blown past me before I got out of the traffic pattern at Kokomo. :) It was fun to watch though-they were light on fuel and climbing like a homesick angel, as if we were sitting still in the air. It sure does look good.

It was a nice flight over, started getting a little choppy as we got closer to the airport. The winds were from the south/southeast, about half of what was at Kokomo, but it doesn't seem to matter much-that place always seems to have interesting wind currents thanks to the trees. :) I had to be the difficult one and use Runway 9 even though everybody else was using 27, but I wasn't feeling the need to practice a quartering tailwind landing in the T-6 there today, even if it wasn't blowing too hard. We wandered around inside Tim's hangar for awhile, looking at all the projects they are working on currently. We hadn't been up there for awhile, and there are quite a few new yellow airplanes coming together. Finally it was time to come home, and we hopped in the Cheyenne and boogied back to Kokomo. Nathan did another not-even-maximum-performance takeoff, and I could see Steve and Jonathan back there flopped over and facing backwards, with a few "whee" noises being made. When we leveled off, Chuck said he felt like they were in the Vomit Comet (an airplane used to train astronauts in zero gravity operations). It's not so bad up front. ;)

Dale at Huntington joked that he thinks that anyone who lives/works in aviation has probably never actually grown up. We laughed because in some regards it's true. You won't find a lot of irresponsible, immature pilots running around, though there are irresponsible, immature people in every field, so it's not that kind of "not grown-up". But you will find a percentage of petulant teenage-like "I know it all and you can't teach me nothin' 'cause I'm the best!" types (like the below story), and a whole lot of them who just still have an almost childlike happiness in "committing aviation", have fun with flying and enjoy airplanes as much as they did as little kids, still looking up at planes going by overhead like they did as kids too. There's nothing wrong with that one. ;)

Landing came in time for me to run to pick up Kaylee, run her home to change clothes, run her to gymnastics, run over to Glenndale to pick up something for Steve, run it back home to meet him, run back over to pick up Kaylee from gymnastics and sign her up for a slumber party, and finally start settling down. Tonight I have some paperwork I have to organize and get ready for tomorrow. I can't believe how fast the day can go sometimes-I turn around and boom, it's evening again...

I also can't believe the weekend of May 16th, which is actually Devon's birthday. Our niece graduates from high school that weekend, which I'd love to go see. It's also a fly-in picnic at the grass strip down in Missouri where Mom & Ernie fly out of; I had to miss the last one and I was hoping to come to this one. It's also the weekend Kaylee has a slumber party on Saturday that she goes to every year at her gymnastics place that she is really looking forward to, and on Sunday is her Awanas awards night, where she receives her trophy for finishing her book. I know there's something else going on that weekend too, but it's not on the schedule and I can't think of what it is. We may need to divide up that weekend, I don't know...but we're still going to miss something we'd like to do.

Speaking of irresponsible pilots, an NTSB report just came out in full on an airplane accident that happened last year, in a C-172. A student pilot (who was a doctor) took off at night on a cross country trip from California on his way to Reno, and he crashed in the mountains. He wasn't supposed to be flying at night, he had a whopping 1.8 hours experience at night flight; he didn't have permission or a sign-off to take the trip at all, and he basically "borrowed" the airplane on the sly. Worse yet, his toxicology report was just released, and in it he was found to have two different types of drugs including cocaine in his blood and urine, a prescription drug for people in drug treatment programs for opiates in his blood and liver, Prozac, an anti-seizure drug, another addiction treatment drug, Viagra, and a nasal decongestant. Every single drug on there with the exceptions of the decongestant & Viagra were illegal for him to even have a medical with, let alone flying on. (The Viagra can be taken, but you have to wait so long prior to flying, and it shouldn't be in your blood stream). As another pilot said, "Had he reported any of the drug treatments or underlying causes for the Cocaine. SSRIs. Narcotics. Vasopressors (puppy-uppers), seizures, etc., he would never have been in the air in the first place. We will hear about this from Mr. Oberstar again and again in the future. These guys I just wanna beat with a stick." This guy paid for his bad judgement with his life, but boy does he give all of flying a black eye that it doesn't need. No regard for the rules, for safety, for common sense, putting people in danger...he was a walking cocktail of medical problems, bad choices and arrogance. It's people like that who provide the "Big Government" proponents ammunition for cracking down on us. People like him wouldn't follow the rules anyway, as he obviously didn't, so it just hurts people like us who do...

Oh! Jim sent us a photo book of all the flying we did last November, including all the Mustang/T-6 formation flights, my first solo, Ty and Steve C's first flights in the Mustang, all that fun stuff. They're not on disk, so I'll scan in a few someday when I have time, but in the meantime here's one of me having just climbed out of the T-6 after my first solo in it, and below one of Chuck shaking my hand. I'll bring the big book to Glenndale so some folks can see the rest of the photos there-there are some pretty sunset shots and formation shots. :)

Well, I've got some coconut Mahi-Mahi to fix (yum), some more laundry to do (ho hum), and some paperwork to get going on before it gets too late (bummer). Happy Friday tomorrow!

Field Trip & Feline Furor

I didn't have a very good start to this day, but it does get better. :) I got out of bed later than I wanted to, lost my left contact the second time I ever went to put it in (thankfully it was a throwaway trial type), couldn't get the right one back out of my eye and contemplated walking around all day with one contact in, got that out, didn't have anything decent to pack for a sack lunch for today, and when I was putting my makeup on in the car on the way to the school so we'd be on time, I find out I was out of foundation, something you don't know is here because the bottle is opaque. Oh, I love walking around in public without makeup. I scraped out enough to cover a few under eye circles and just went with it so we'd be on time. We walk in the school and everyone is convened in the front area; children, younger siblings, parents, grandparents, and it is chaos. Everyone is excited and loud, including parents, one of whom is chatting loudly over the noise to me, and finally my nerve endings hit the wall and I went back out to my car for a minute to regroup.

It was time to leave, and we went in a caravan to the Garden Gate Greenhouse. This is a really neat place, actually. It's a massive greenhouse with tons of buildings. They raise all sorts of plants from vegetables to flowers to cacti, annuals and perennials, oddball plants, just about anything you can think of. It's run by a Christian family who does these tours, which take about two hours and encompass all their areas, how the soil is made, how the plants are potted and watered, various jobs at the greenhouse, etc., for free. At the end of the tour, the kids are given two potted plants to keep. One that they pot themselves, and another that is called the "Sensitive plant", where the leaves fold up when you disturb the plant. I remember those from when my Dad worked the greenhouse at Shepherd's in Wisconsin. But this place was overrun with children doing this tour, taking up people, time and resources, and they won't accept any money for it. They consider it part of their ministry. It's pretty neat, and Kaylee just adores her plants. She insisted I take pictures of her with them for her Grandma Stants who "knows everything there is about plants!" :)

When we left there, we drove to Grissom Air Reserve Base to the Museum. We grabbed our sack lunches and sat out in a picnic area on the base. It was really chilly out there and the wind was blowing pretty stiffly, so we shivered through our lunch so we could go inside where it was warm. The tour of the museum was fairly quick, but the kids got to sit in several different cockpits and listen to a little bit of history on things like the Hindenburg and the war. Kaylee leaned in and said "But Mommy, we're German!!" with some form of dismay. (That reminds me, I need to finish that conversation when she gets home.) Something the kids are probably too young to appreciate, but there was a "young" man there named Mr. Douglas who was a tailgunner on a B-17 back in World War II. His plane was shot down, killing something like six of his crewmembers, and he rode the plane down until about 400 feet above the ground (he said) before parachuting out and into the arms of the Germans. He remained a Prisoner of War until he was released at the end of the war. He'd lost over 50 pounds, and he said he couldn't wait to get back to his mother's cooking. Pretty amazing...

The kids next were supposed to get a tour of all the static display airplanes outside, but the ground was a swamp. Rather than sending 43 children out into the mud (gak!), we stood on the sidewalk area while our tour guide told us all about each of the planes out there. It was interesting to most of the adults, and WAY too much information for most of the kids. Kaylee leaned in to me and whispered "Mommy. This sounds like one of your airport meetings. Bo-Ring." I started laughing and told her she's right, particularly since they couldn't even walk over to them, touch them, etc. But after that was done they did get to go up into a big Japanese something or other that was on dry ground, and sit in the cockpit and mess with the buttons and such. At one point the tour guide asked everybody who had ever been in an airplane, and about a dozen of us raised our hands. He told everyone how hard you'd have to study and work to become a pilot, then asked how many people wanted to be a pilot when they grew up. A few kids raised their hands, including Kaylee, and I raised my hand too (as did a teacher there). Kaylee shot me this disgusted look, and later came over and scolded me for embarrassing her by raising my hand, starting with the two-syllable version of the word "Mo-om!" Heh heh. (She's certainly getting that teenager "tone" down pat. "Bo-Ring!" and "Mo-om!")

By the time it was time to go, I and everyone around me was quite ready to head for home. I had to make a few stops, but finally we pulled into our driveway, only to find a little yellow kitty meowing by our car door. As soon as we got out, she was all over us, rubbing up on our legs, meowing loudly, and friendly as crazy. My first thought was "oh, great." Sure enough, I can fast forward through this story and say that we have a bowl of food and a bowl of water outside, and have already had three tearful sessions of "why we can't have another cat in the house". Dulce freaked out at the smell of the other cat on Kaylee and won't let Kaylee pet her. Kaylee freaked out when it started to sprinkle a little bit and she begged to bring the kitty inside to save her from the deadly weather. The kitty (who has been named "Golden" by the way) freaks out every time we go on the deck and she sees us, and keeps trying to make a run for our door. Yes, this is going to end well, I can tell. ;)

I was so wiped out I tried to take a nap, but Kaylee was so concerned about the cat that she kept coming to where I was and claiming it was an emergency and that Golden might run away/die/be cold/get wet/get blown away by a tornado/be lonely/think we don't love her. After that last one, I told Kaylee I appreciated her soft heart towards the kitty, but that if she came into my room again for the next 30 minutes, the words "fire" or "massive blood loss" had better be the only things coming out of her mouth, and if those words included "kitten" in the sentence, it didn't count. She paused and said "so I can't tell you if the kitten is on fire and bleeding??" NOW you're catching on. ;) I gave up though. Instead I helped her get ready for Awanas, learn her verses, have a snack, and yes, play with Golden. Outside.

She's only got a few weeks of Awanas left, and she's down to a few sections to say. She's supposed to say 3 tonight, and hopefully finish most of the rest on the Friday Handbook night. And she'll be all done for a come-from-behind finish to the trophy. She's done well working at this each week. Her leader had told her she wouldn't finish her book in time. She came to me and said "But you said I would, Mom." I figured it was as good a time for the lesson as any--don't let other people tell you what you can't do. Even well-meaning people you respect. :)

Well, the rest of pictures from today are up on the site, and I need some food and some R&R. I'm still wiped out...

Too Much Clarity

This morning on the way to school, the song "I Can Only Imagine" came on the radio. I haven't heard it in awhile, and I usually don't listen to it, because it is one of those songs that always gets to me. The first time I heard it was when I was church hunting, and the place we ended up attending had a woman doing a beautiful sign-language/dance to this song. I later used it as the music behind a little presentation I did about Devon. Now I can't hear the song without seeing his life go by too fast one frame at a time and ending at the cemetery. Of course not really ending there though-I can imagine him being welcomed home, walking, healthy, strong. Sometimes the extremely vivid imagination I have always had is a blessing, and sometimes it's been a bit of a trial...I just have to try to direct it sometimes when it starts wandering on its own.

Speaking of SMA, one of the moms I've known for a very long time has a blog with another mom, and the entry I just read is spot on. The feelings, good and bad, the fear and the hope. It's worth a read if you have a minute...

I bit the bullet today, and I got a new eye exam followed by both contacts and glasses. The eye doc told me that I was a good candidate for contacts because my right eye's prescription was twice as strong as my left, and that in glasses it can make my brain have a hard time putting the two images together, but in contacts it won't have that problem. I also wanted to try contacts because I want to wear them while flying, under normal cheap sunglasses. The problem lies in the fact that I can't poke myself in the eye. She was describing how I would have to hold my eye wide open, no blinking, and poke that thing right to the center of my eye. I have a trial pair here in my prescription. Last time I got a contact stuck in my eyeball and about freaked out. But I overcame my problem with seatbelts (bet you didn't know I had that, but I did-felt totally trapped and claustrophobic in them), overcame my problem with helmets for motorcycles and airplanes, overcame my inability to speak in public, so I figured there isn't a lot left beyond getting in dirty bathtubs, holding spiders, letting people touch me nonstop and wearing turtlenecks, all of which I see no need to do, and poking myself in the eye, which I DO see a need to do.

I've been wearing my new glasses and all I can say is "whoa". I can see the quilting pattern on the toilet paper roll, each drop of rain on my windscreen, and I can read the tiny print on a toothpaste tube. The problem is, it's so clear it almost hurts. It DOES feel weird, and if I turn my head too fast it makes my stomach churn. If I close my right or left eye either one and look out the other, it's perfectly normal and clear. But when I open them both at the same time...it just feels very strange. I don't know if it's that "putting two such different images together" brain thing he was talking about, or what, but it's dizzying. I can also see the wrinkles on my hand and the cobweb I missed in the corner. I'm not sure it's such a great thing to have perfect vision. Maybe a little "fuzzy" would be a good thing for everyone to have...

When I was leaving the eye place, the lady behind the desk said "and you're not wearing anything right now?" I said "No", and after looking at my prescription she said "can you actually SEE anything??" Hey, now, it's not THAT bad. My left eye just takes over for both eyes, so I can actually see fine until I try to focus down on little numbers or letters. But hey, I've got it taken care of, because by George I could probably see a mosquito pass gas right about now.

Tonight is an Open House at Kaylee's school, and I have to attend as a board member and photographer. It's a good school, with good teachers and an excellent administrator, and I wish I could find a way to help bring in some extra money to them. They're charging half of what any other private school in town is charging to try to allow people who are struggling financially to still have the option of a private education with a non-denominational but faith-based core. The problem with charging so much less is that you have less money with which to operate, and they are running so tight. The teachers are all accredited, all have a lot of experience, and are all there because they love to teach. The rules are fair, the education is top notch and better than competitive with public school testing results. Here's their website, and if anyone is looking for a good cause to donate to (beyond SMA of course), I know how much it would mean to them.

When I picked Kaylee up from school today, she asked me if she could call her school friend when we got home. I asked her why, and she said because her friend wanted to know what she was wearing tomorrow for their field trip. Kaylee said her problem was that she didn't know what she wanted to wear yet tomorrow, that she is a "wait until the last minute to decide" kind of girl, as she put it. Eight going on 16? :)

Since I know you're on the edge of your seat (eyeroll), I just poked in the contacts. Other than having it keep sticking to my finger instead of coming off onto my eyeball, it didn't go too badly. Now the real question-can I get the buggers back off later tonight? The view is definitely a little less drastic than the one with glasses. I can still see well, and it's still a little nauseating, but it's better.

Ballet, Open House, dinner, and the day moves on.

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"My father used to say to me, 'Whenever you get into a jam, whenever you get into a crisis or an emergency…become the calmest person in the room and you'll be able to figure your way out of it.'" ~Rudolph Giuliani

The Rainy Days of Spring

April showers around here don't bring May flowers-they drown them. Glenndale is a lake again, and our park is a couple of small lakes thinking about merging into a big one again. The good news is that from Wednesday on, we're looking at temperatures rising up to the upper 70s and sunshine, which will hopefully start drying everything out quickly. It's a good thing we have some planes on paved strips too, because these last two seasons have been rough on our little grass strip.

Yesterday was a good Rest At Home day. We slept in a little, even took a nap during the day, played a few games with Kaylee, did a little housework and laundry, you know, stuff. It was a quiet, easy day that required very little. Today being Monday, it's payback for the time off-Steve is swamped.

Even being Monday, it can't be too bad of a day. By noon I'd gotten a decent amount of things done, I'd had lunch with friends, and Nathan had told me I could fly the T-6 into Oshkosh this year. A good start to even a gloomy day as far as I'm concerned! :)

I was smiling at a couple of flying articles too. The first was in "Warbirds", and was the story of a man learning to fly as a cadet pilot during WWII in a Stearman. It's fun to read someone's experiences who learned to fly by looking outside the cockpit, feeling, seeing and hearing changes in the plane, doing aerobatics and spin training at 10 hours flight time...true seat of the pants flying. But what made me smile was the end of his article, where he passes his checkride and is moving up to the next big bird-the Vultee BT-13. His last paragraph was "One stopped at our field the other day, and we got to have a good look at it. Its cadet pilot showed us the cockpit full of new instruments and radios all unknown to the primary trainers. Just when you feel you have everything mastered, the next step makes you feel like a freshman all over again." Ah, the universal long-time half-lament, half-excited at the challenge words of perfectionist pilots everywhere. ;)

The other was in "Flying", on old-time spot landing contests. This made me laugh, because while we don't do it any more, we used to, and I think we still should now and then. Of course at this point egos may have to be bruised to get back into spot landing shape. ;) But this describes them fairly well, though I came in at the tail end of some of this stuff. "You don't hear much about spot landing contests anymore and the anemic attempts I watch on practical tests suggest accuracy landings have gone the way of spin training and dead reckoning skills. So I think we should get 'em back. They're fun--OK, sometimes embarrassing--but a surefire way to sharpen basic skills and not nearly as expensive as the current $300 hamburger run. Classically you close the throttle on downind leg opposite a touchdown point, with the objective of landing on or beyond that target. Add power anywhere on the approach and you're disqualified; touch down before the mains are on or over the line and you're toast. Other than that, it was Katie-Bar-the-Door: no rules. Angle your base leg in or out, use no flaps, some flaps or full flaps and maybe dump them right over the line for a spectacularly abrupt arrival; use slips, with flaps if necessary; open the cowl flaps, windows, doors or emergency exits and deploy arms and feet as necessary to spoil excess lift. Do whatever you need to-but remember the power thing. If the judges hear engine noise on the approach, you're not only disqualified but the object of huge derision from the peanut gallery...guys you always thought were your friends. (...) As you can imagine, this lighthearted Saturday afternoon outing inevitably degenerated into an arm waving, insult hurling, epithet shouting confrontation. Long-time flying buddies loudly assaulted each others' flying abilities, veracity, eyesight and parentage. And in pursuit of a really tacky trophy, nosewheels, friendships and even marriages came unglued. It was glorious fun, and we need more of them. Contests, friendships, trophies and marriages, that is."

That last part is said tongue-in-cheek...mostly. See, the last time Steve and I had a spot landing contest against each other was the last time Steve and I had a spot landing contest against each other. ;) We were doing spot landings at Camel-Lot, both of us in one...152 or 172. At the end of the runway was an abandoned little barn building. The rules were, power off on downwind, if you add power to make the runway, you lose, shortest landing wins as long as it's on the runway. Let's just say that I haven't seen the top of another building that close from an airplane (twice) before or since. I'd almost bet there are tire marks up there. That contest ended in a "tie", which is the result that remains to this day, more than 10 years later... Ah, the good ole days. ;)

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"A goal without a plan is just a wish."~Antoine de Saint Exupéry

"If you are clear about what you want, the world responds with clarity." ~Loretta Staples

Sunny Saturday

Well, our plans for this weekend changed, so we ended up spending the day at the airport, a beautiful, warm, sunny day out. We know the next three days are supposed to be stormy and yucky, and we decided to spend today out and about and doing something, and not waste the good weather day.

When we got there, we figured Kaylee would just have to come flying with us, since as far as we knew it would just be us. It didn't turn out that way, which made Kaylee very happy. :) Steve and I went flying for awhile so I could practice, then Nathan took someone up on a fun flight. On the humorous end of things, originally I was going to take him up on the flight, and he said "we aren't going to go upside down, are we? I don't care for upside down." So I said no problem, we wouldn't go upside down. Then we switched pilots, and Nathan took him up. We were all sitting at the table, and I started laughing and said "Oops. I forgot to tell Nathan that (the guy) said 'no upside down'. That might have been a handy piece of information to pass on." We joked around about the open canopy of the T-6 and hearing somebody yell "Heeellllppp meeeeee!" as the T6 rolled over and over. They DID in fact go upside down. A few times. But the guy was on board with it before they did it after all, and came back all smiles and thumbs-up. Said that's the first time he's been upside down in an airplane, and he had a great time. That's always a good thing! :)

Later that afternoon, we all got to participate in getting the Cherokee 180 finished up. I got to pump the brakes, Chuck got to keep the reservoir filled with hydraulic fluid, Steve collected dripping fluid in a bottle, and Nathan bled the brake lines. Monday the plane goes back online and one more airplane is finished and ready to be flown. That's always a good thing too.

We stayed pretty late, and various people stopped by throughout the day. The kids played great together today, and when they finally wore out (or we did), it was time to pack it up, stop at the little A&W Rootbeer food stand and pick up dinner, and come home...

The End of the Week

It was another beautiful day, and tomorrow appears to be following in its' footsteps. I enjoy the weather where the kids can play outside and get dirty and burn off extra energy and just be kids. And where I can get some extra Vitamin D therapy too.

For the ole logbook, I had one 6 flight this morning and got in about an hour and a half of practice. It's such a short time available to try to get in as much experience as possible here, so I am grateful for these good days. I took along some folks and we had a great time. It's nice when work and fun can collide in the same experience. :) I took along my one-armed glasses and wore them under the sun visor on my helmet, and I could see so much better than I thought, looking at gauges without any effort, that I know now I really do need to get in to the eye doctor's office and get some permanent contacts or glasses. That actually made a noticeable difference-one that has sneaked up a little on me. We had lunch at the office, and later that afternoon took the RG over to Muncie to pick up some parts for two of the airplanes currently down for maintenance. There was a lot of traffic over at the airport, including this one weird-looking taildragger with a big turbine engine that was some homebuilt I'd never seen before...

I got to school exactly on time to pick up Kaylee, and took her on a bit of an errands run since I hadn't been able to go do that earlier. She didn't mind-she actually loves to go to the store, and the bank tellers always give her candy, too. :)

We were home for about 45 minutes, and it was time to head over to Golden Corral for a birthday dinner for Nathan's son Jamie, who is now in the double digits! That is only the second time I've ever eaten at Golden Corral, and the first time Kaylee was a toddler. There is certainly a lot of food, which is one reason I don't often frequent buffets. I hate not getting my money's worth usually, so that is the kind of place I want to go to infrequently lest I end up needing elastic pants. ;) The "Chocolate Infatuation Station" had a warm chocolate gooey volcano thing. Yum. Kaylee was sitting there, and suddenly she jumped up and said "Mom! That's a friend from cheer! Can I go say hi?" I said sure, and she walked over to the other table, the other girl hopped up, they hugged and chatted for awhile, and then Kaylee came back over. I swear, I hang out with people who always know somebody wherever we go! Steve's mom is frequently recognized, Steve Cusick always seems to know somebody, and the last two restaurants I took Kaylee to, she knew at least one of the kids there from somewhere. Last week it was Culvers when she saw a girl from her old school. Tonight there were two separate kids she ran into that she knew. She always runs over and chats for a minute and is happy to see them, the little social thing. It's cute. :) So Happy Birthday to Jamie, the Big 10! (Wow, ten!!) :O

And a happy weekend to you all!

p.s.

I need somebody on a hand-held radio to stand off to the side of the runway for awhile and tell me when it looks just like this on take-off. ;) (Photo by Trey Carroll)

The Good Kind

I do believe I have worn myself out-and I mean that in a good way. This morning I made the rounds of typical errands early, and went out to Kokomo intending to go do some T6 flying on this gorgeous day. The beacon under the belly was loose and needed a little surgery that was harder than it looked, but Nathan got it taken care of, and eventually off I went. I messed around a little in the air to relax and enjoy the view, then just came in and did a bunch of different configurations of TOLS, including wheel landings, which I hadn't done since last year. I flew quite a bit, past lunch time, and then I finally decided I needed some food, so I came on in. As I was driving to Subway, my right foot/leg would shake a little every time I pressed on the accelerator or brake in my car. :)

A lunch and relaxation break later, I went up for another round, mostly air work this time, until I needed to come down for fuel and family. It was a productive day, it felt good and accomplished and fun too. There is always so much work to do, always, but there were several areas of consistent improvement by the end of the day, and progress is good. I've got some sore areas from today-this is a better workout than the treadmill. :)

I got the plane fueled up, and booked out of there to pick up Kaylee from school, run her home, throw her in a gymnastics outfit, and take her to class, where we arrived exactly on time. Meanwhile Steve and Nathan went up in the 6 and had some fun with stalls too.

We all met up for dinner at Mike's Pizza until it was time to head out to Glenndale for the monthly EAA Chapter meeting, where we had a guest speaker; an Air National Guard officer who gave a presentation on Special Use Airspace. We hung out and had a nice time with friends until about dark, when Kaylee finally came inside from playing on skateboards and other various things with a little friend or two, and it was past her bedtime and time to come home.

I don't know about anybody else, but I'm tired! The good kind.

Oh No, You Mean I'm Not...NORMAL??

This was posted on a public forum, heavily edited to just include the funny parts to me. :)

2. Men and women have inherent bents - Men towards work, provision, leadership, and defense. Women to nurturing, being helpmates, and caring for others, etc... Things that are what MOST women traditionally have done. (can't argue with that)

4. Of course there are always the exceptions to the rules, which is "normal" in this world because everything has been messed up since Gen. 3. (So anyone who is an exception to that rule is abnormal and is so messed up simply because of the Sin Nature of man. Interesting.) I know of several girls heavily involved in aviation and I can't for the life of me figure out why! (Uhh, I can think of no good comment to make here. 'Cause some of us like...airplanes?)

5. While in a family business setting, or for personal enjoyment I do NOT think that there's anything wrong with women enjoying planes, (how nice! But if it's okay for family business or personal enjoyment, is it then not okay if they want to do it professionally? Hmm.) I do think that a "normal" gal isn't nearly as likely to be predisposed to like airplanes. (realistically, probably not. But it's still funny to read.) ;)

P.S. This is NOT intended to be offensive to any of my friends on this forum of the opposite gender (Oh, now why would you think any gals might be offended by any of that? Pshaw. ;))
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It'll take me some time to recover from the shocking and new realization that I'm not a normal woman and that only man's sinful nature has allowed me to do something as against my womanly nature as liking airplanes is... *sniff*

(I'm just poking fun at the post, but not identifying it because in reality he meant no harm. Besides, it's okay, I'm fine. Really. My state of "normalness" or lack thereof was resolved many years ago, and I am content with the results.) ;)

Tax Day

Welcome to "hand over your money, punk" or "be sure you say 'thank you' very gratefully when I give you your own money back after holding it all year for you" Day. I didn't realize how many "Tea Parties" were being held today, but I know that it is more than is on this map. Steve ran into one on his way west today, it was packed out, and it wasn't listed on the site. I haven't heard a thing about any of this on the news yet, but of course I haven't been paying much attention, either. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear, does it really make a sound? If groups of people all around the country try to be heard and nobody reports on it, did they really make any noise?

I am calling "Uncle". I am going to the eye doctor here soon, and I am going to look into getting contacts or glasses that I can wear all day. I don't know if I can do contacts (yes, after all the begging I did for them when I was a kid, Mom, I just don't do well poking my finger in my eye after all), but I'm going to do something. I can no longer see out of my right eye clearly at all, even when I close the left and focus, even when I am wearing my old glasses (!), which means my left eye is doing all the work, and it is a lot weaker now too. I can't read restaurant menus or airplane maps or a lot of things. I've even started wearing my one-armed glasses when I drive in the mornings, because I'm so tired my vision is already blurry and my eyes aren't strong enough to focus in. I've fudged my way past driver license and flight visual exams for years now, and the fudging is over. I cave to the inevitable.

This made me laugh. It's a 2-minute-long audio clip of a pilot who called in for a landing because he had to go to the bathroom so badly. "No, it's #2" he says. The controller even gives him specific directions on how to get to the bathroom. Probably only funny to pilots because of all the lingo in there, but it made me smile. Particularly since they named the file "swoop_and_poop.mp3". And many pilots have been in, or had passengers on board who have been in similar dire straits. When Steve and I were kind of dating, we flew to Put-in-Bay, Ohio one night. We weren't very far out from there when I looked over in desperation and said "We need to land. NOW." He said "But it's only 15 minutes..." and I said "I need to LAND. Now!!" It was that or have a wet seat. I won't finish that story in public. ;) He was also flying a bunch of business execs around once, four of them in the back of an airplane with club seating, when one of them who had drank a large cup of coffee got to a point he needed to use his empty cup in another capacity. Imagine kneeling on the floor of an airplane in a business suit amongst three other coworkers Right There. Oh yes. Amusing to come home and talk about--when you aren't the one in the business suit hoping the coffee cup size and/or your...control...will be sufficient. *ahem* Enough potty talk. ;)

Nothing exciting happened with us today. Kaylee had a normal day of school, Steve had a typically abnormal day of work, and my day, well, I returned two phone calls, did laundry and dishes and errands and all that yawner stuff, was supposed to get other things done, and managed to not get diddly done. And frankly, I think I'm going to get more diddly done the rest of the day/night too. I'm declaring today "Useless Laura Day", I guess.
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"The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance." -- Nathaniel Braden

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I…I took the one Less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." -- Robert Frost

"View change as the one constant in your life. Welcome it. Expect it. Anticipate it." -- Denis Waitley

"We generally change ourselves for one of two reasons: inspiration or desperation." -- Jim Rohn

And in honor of Tax Day:
"April showers are taxpayers' tears." -- Arnold Glasow

Puissant

Today in the car Kaylee asked me if she knew every word in the English language. I told her no, that I doubt anybody knows all the words in the English language. After a brief side-track about how God knows all the words, I say he isn't a person, she says Jesus came to earth as a man and he IS God so it does too count, I say okay, okay, fine, smarty pants, but no other human knows every word in the English language. This started us into "So tell me a word I don't know, Mom." I thought for a minute and said "How about 'superfluous'?" She grinned-she liked that word. She wanted to know what it meant, so I told her it meant unimportant, unnecessary. She thought for a minute and wanted me to use it in a sentence. I did, she nodded and skipped off happy to learn a new word.

I was reading someone else's blog, and their spouse used the word "puissant" to describe them. I had to look it up. It means "powerful", "mighty". I like that. And I learned a new word in the English language today too. :)

Little Bits of Nothing

Stop the Presses!

Kaylee JoAnn left the house in jeans today-and it was her choice!

You can't make that girl wear jeans, and I literally mean you can NOT make that girl wear jeans. She has never, ever, ever been able to handle wearing them-she throws a fit just putting them on because of how they feel to her. She only wears soft clothes. So when she came out of her room in jean capri pants this morning, I almost fell over. What's more, they look good on her. In the car on the way to school, she said "Well, I'm trying them. You always say if I tell myself I won't like something I haven't even tried that I'll make myself really not like it. I always say I don't like jeans but I never wear them, so I'm going to really give them a try." Wow. I don't know if it was peer pressure or what that made her choose to give them a try now all of a sudden, but I was pleasantly surprised. :)

Nathan came into the office the other day and said that there is a real crackdown on speeding going on around here until the 24th-some kind of program going on to promote safety-and that they'll get you for even 5 miles over. Not that I need to worry usually, of course. I have certainly seen a large number of officers around this week as I've been driving around too. Then on the radio yesterday they were actually putting out a public announcement telling people about the change and the crackdown. It's a semi-nice thing that we fly with several local officers, sheriffs, etc. :) I was at the airport when one of the sheriffs that I know stopped in, and we chatted for a bit, and then I left. A bit later I was on my way home, and I look in the rear view mirror, and there's an officer behind me. I do an automatic speed check-and as he goes by me, he waves and smiles and I recognize the sheriff I was just talking to...who didn't seem to mind that I was around 5 miles over the limit at the time, as he went by me at about 15 mph over the speed limit. (Why do they get to speed if they're not on an emergency call??) What I'm waiting for is the day when somebody figures out to use one of these guys on a prank to "get" me. Maybe they don't really do stuff like that in real life. I can hope. ;)

The day was "fine". I got stuff done, Kaylee got an A on a math test, ballet is on the menu for the day, the weather is cold gray and unpleasant again, the cats threw up on my floor again, I fell off my exercise wagon this week, I don't know what's for dinner yet, yadda yadda.

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"The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything." ~William Connor Magee

Hello Monday

I was a new woman today after something like 10 hours of sleep! I haven't been to bed in the 9 pm range in a very long time, but it was certainly worth it. I think I remember my head hitting the pillow, but if I moved, or dreamed, or was actually breathing all night long, I wouldn't know it. I don't remember ever being so tired that my eyes wouldn't focus on anything even while wearing glasses before...

I picked Kaylee up from school, and we commenced on a girls'-afternoon-out! I drove her to the local theater and we watched the "Hannah Montana" movie. We got the drink and the snack and everything. She liked the movie and we had a fun time. For awhile she was in the seat next to me with her head lying on my shoulder, holding my hand, just watching. It was sweet. :) Here are a few pictures I took at the theater, on the bottom of this page, including a nice glare she shot me.

As soon as the movie was over, I ran Kaylee home, dropped her off in the driveway, and headed right out to a school board meeting. I learned tonight that one of the girls in Kaylee's class has a little brother in the hospital with RSV right now. RSV is...bad news. I know that it's not as bad on healthy older children as it is on babies and kids like the SMA kids, but it's still bad news, and I wish the siblings hadn't been in school today. The parents didn't think about how contagious this disease is, or didn't know, but I hope nobody else catches it.

Kaylee's end-of-school program is May 12th, but she's actually in school until the end of May thanks to all the bad weather days off and delays that she so enjoyed during the dreary winter months. Okay, I didn't mind either, since we'd get to sleep in, go sledding, etc. :) The school did all the state equivalency testing before Spring Break, and while the results aren't in yet, the teachers looked at them and said they thought the kids would do really well. I strongly dislike this system where teachers have to teach to a test, not teach to learn. Thankfully, so far this school is doing a great job doing both...one of the advantages of being small with dedicated teachers. :)

To end, here's a photo Trey took Saturday at Kokomo in the midst of a roll.

Easter Quietly

Yesterday never really ended. :) Around 2 a.m., Steve and I went into the front room and cuddled up with Kaylee to wake her up for her "par-tay" (party) that she wanted to do. It's her last night of freedom before school starts back up. So in the middle of the night, the three of us had various activities like taking turns singing Karaoke (Kaylee's pretty good on a couple of songs in particular), doing a "Dance" Wii game, hiding an Easter egg and seeing who finds it first and they get to hide it next, etc. Somewhere after 4 a.m. they put on a movie and laid down, and I went ahead and went into bed where I laid there awake until 6 a.m. last I saw on the clock. I was afraid I would sleep too late this morning, but in fact I woke up an hour and 45 minutes later. Finally at 8 a.m. I gave up and got up for the day, fuzzy head and all.

I had made up an Easter basket and hid it last night, so Kaylee's first action of the day was to find her basket, which she did pronto. Steve made pancakes, and I boiled the other 11 eggs so we could dye them. She decorated them as she pleased and I did a few too. After they were done, I hid them around the house while Kaylee was outside, and she went on a little egg hunt. Usually we do it outside, so this year she wanted to do it inside. If we had been thinking, we'd have brought (plastic!) candy-filled eggs out to the airport yesterday and hidden them out there for all the kids to find. They'd have loved that. But it didn't occur to us until it was too late...

I tried to take a nap or two today, but never got more than barely out before Energizer Bunny Kaylee hopped on and woke me up. I don't know how she's still going! Youth. :)

I got out what are called Resurrection Eggs; little eggs that have the Biblical Easter story separated into 12 parts, with a little trinket in each egg that describes the next part of the story. A little rock in one that stands for the stone that was rolled away from the grave, for example. There's a booklet that you can read from and do a devotion for each "egg", but Kaylee didn't give me the chance to tell her the story this year-she told it to me faster than I could tell her anything. :)

And she enjoyed the Easter calls she got from her Grandmas and Grandpas too, thank you! :) I've got some pictures up, just a few nothing fancy from dyeing eggs today, on the bottom half of this page. I have a few photos I took over Saturday as well that I need to put up, and I know Trey took a bunch too, but right now Kaylee is insisting on the computer (politely asking, actually) so she can play a Disney Fairy game before she has to go to bed...

Oh, one more thing I forgot about yesterday. Nathan had been talking about getting a can cruncher out at the hangar so we can recycle all our cans-that works for me, we do it at home anyway. Chuck handed Nathan his root beer can to crunch, Nathan said it wasn't his problem, so I grabbed it, dented it, put it on the floor, and stomped on it to flatten it. One problem. I didn't hit the can square, and it shot out from under my foot and slammed into the side of...a custom Corvette that didn't belong to me. Nathan was standing there and he spun around and faced the other way so that he didn't see a thing, and I think everybody else was mostly quiet as I in a somewhat panicked fashion started looking for a mark, which thank God I did not find, then laid my head on the table to recover. Of all the dumb...good grief. My nausea and adrenaline took awhile to subside, and it may be awhile before I live that one down. ;)

Fun Things

This morning arrived as it was supposed to-warmer with blue skies. The three of us picked up some fried chicken and potato salad and went out to Kokomo, where we enjoyed lunch with quite a few people who stopped in on the nice day. By the time we'd finished with the apple and cherry pie, the day had warmed up a little more, and the "shuffle" began. We had our own personal airport set up in one spot for awhile there, with Dale's Cub, Jim's C-150, Chuck's Citabria, the T-6, the Cheyenne and the Mustang all out; plus we had a parking lot full of cars, Nathan's Corvette, and his Bus all out too. Meanwhile the kids were riding their bikes and scooters around. We'd never be able to do that if we weren't at the back of the airport and mostly out of the way, but it works nicely. For awhile there we even had hangar neighbors out on a segway and golf cart and playing the drums in their hangar. It was...busy!

I rode in the T-6 with Duane flying, and other than some takeoffs and landings, we did rolls (because mine were sloppy and I wanted to figure out why) and accelerated stalls coordinated, then in a slip and a skid, to the left and right, because I hadn't done many of those before and it wasn't something I was comfortable practicing on my own. I've practiced standard, normal, coordinated, unexciting stalls and recoveries on my own. I was glad to see a load put on the wings in an uncoordinated turn and let it do its thing because what Budd Davisson said about T-6 stalls holds true (of course)-they may not be gentle, but they become fairly predictable once you know what to expect. We ended up doing several rolls to recover as the plane went on its back when the stall broke. Kind of fun, actually. As long as you're up at altitude and doing it on purpose, naturally. I enjoyed that and picked up some things I'd needed...

Trey and Duane went up next, and Trey turned his seat around and shot This Video of a loop and a roll being performed with the canopy open, facing backwards in the plane. That just had to feel strange. Click on the "HQ" button at the bottom right of the video box to make it "high quality", and turn down the volume as all you'll hear is the wind noise, loudly. I'm probably not keeping it up long enough to put music to it-just wanted some of you to be able to see it. :)

While all the stuff was out of the hangars, Trey set up a photo shoot, climbed up on a scaffolding platform, and took pictures of the T-6, Mustang, bus and Corvette all arranged in front of the hangar. I look forward to seeing how they turn out, because at ground level it looked good.

When it was time to start putting some of the stuff away, they got several things in, then Nathan took me for a ride in his 'Vette. Did I mention it's not a stock Corvette, but in fact has 950 HP, which is somewhere around 200 more horsepower than the NASCAR boys have at their disposal? I've never seen anything like it (on the ground), as the faster it went the more power it produced and just a tap on the accelerator produced an amazing amount of torque. It got up to...the posted speed limit in the blink of an eye. I do not need one of those. No sir. I couldn't help it, I had an actual grin and giggle every time it would roar. In fact, I am smirking as I type this.

One more quick ugly flight on my part, and it was time to refuel, put everything away, get some food, go home and relax. Kaylee was still awake at 11:30, proving that even when she's exhausted she's a night owl, unfortunately like her mother.

I finished the 4th book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn. It was actually pretty good, including a nice epic battle, strategizing, and anything else I say could be a spoiler, so I won't. Overall, the series is made for teenagers in my opinion, and anything that can get tweens and teens to read over 2200 pages worth of novels is an accomplishment of some sort. It also actually promotes honesty and forthrightness, handling conflict appropriately, waiting until marriage even if you are with your "soul mate", doing the right thing even if it is a personal sacrifice, courage and strength of character. They package that up with good vampires and werewolves as the protagonists to make it more attractive to young people, and the writing is aimed at younger people (again, just in my opinion), but it wasn't as bad as I feared; other than book 2 (which could be skipped without missing much of anything) I wasn't bored, and I actually got into the last book. Kaylee wanted to see the movie when it came out because she heard so much about it from people, and I emphatically said no. I still don't change my opinion of that for her at this age, but it was admittedly not the vampire love story I expected. End of the brief and uninteresting book review. ;)

Speaking of movies, I am going to take Kaylee to see the "Hannah Montana" movie soon. A friend took her daughter to it on Friday when it opened, and said it wasn't too "old" for the girls, but was a pretty good movie they enjoyed. I'm sure Kaylee will like it too.

Tomorrow is Easter, and while it doesn't feel like it is actually here already, I wish you a Happy and Blessed Easter. Me-I'm going to go get a basket ready for Kaylee to find tomorrow. It is not the reason for the season, but it is still fun for her. :)

Thursday

What a beautiful weather day. It was a little painful to stay grounded today when I have so much I want to work on, but those are the breaks. :)

Let's see, I got a Flight Review from Ty. He was really tough, but we got it done. ;) There were nine of us at lunch today, including a friend I don't see very often, Jeremy, who flies for Net Jets now. We ended up spending a year at Purdue in some of the same classes, and we'd both gone to Vincennes too, though at different times. He'd flown with us when we were based out of Kokomo and Camel-Lot...

Let's see. I found book two in the Twilight series to be kind of losing my interest, nothing but 500 pages of Romeo and Juliet romantic angst and introducing a best friend as a werewolf...seeming cheesy to me even though "Lord of the Rings" and "Chronicles of Narnia" and even "Harry Potter" should prove that you can have more than one "magical" creature in a storyline just fine. I finished Eclipse tonight, book three, and liked it better. There was much more action and it kept my interest better. Three books down, the final one to go, but I don't know that I'll have time to read it for awhile since Friday and Saturday should both be pretty busy.

Kaylee couldn't sleep tonight, so she came in and cuddled up next to me for awhile in my chair with her stuffed bear, under a little blanket. After a while she looked over at me and said "You are too hot Mom, you're turned up like on HIGH. Can you turn it down a little??" It made me laugh.

Screaming and Bleeding

A very gross subject title, I know, but it sort of fits both of the first two paragraphs. ;)

Kaylee got her Spring Break Wish today as we went to McDonald's PlayLand for lunch and stayed for 2 1/2 hours. She had fun, almost always had someone to play with, and she never likes to leave. She also won't eat hamburgers or the chicken nuggets, so the only food I can get her to eat from McDonald's right now is a plain fish sandwich. So *I* got a kid's meal with a burger to eat so she could have the toy. There's something kind of funny about that. :) It was obviously Spring Break though, because every child in town was there, and it was chaotically loud in there. If I wouldn't have had a book to tune out my environment, I would have been the crazy lady with my fingers in my ears rocking back and forth in my seat. ;) I knew it would be that way, but the girl loves to go! While she was there, Kaylee scraped her left knee, banged the right knee into a table, hit her head and stubbed two toes. She was a walking accident today, though the bleeding was kept to a minimum at least.

While she was playing, I cracked open the Twilight book(s). I've been too busy with other stuff to read much lately, and these are four pretty large books. I dislike putting a book or series down until I'm done with it, so I've been waiting until the right time. Also, I have to admit, I've had a little trouble getting motivated to read a romance series, let alone one about a 17-year-old girl having met her "soul mate" who is by the way a vampire. The basic premise makes me roll my eyes enough to hurt myself. :) But everybody I know who has read them has enjoyed them, and I've not turned down reading something in my possession so far in life, so I was curious and wanted to give them a shot. I started the first book while Kaylee played at the PlayLand, finished that and am about 200 pages into the second one "New Moon" when I took a break to write this. They're not bad. They aren't my style in general, but they're fine, the writing is...blunt...enough to not be as cheesy as the premise makes it sound, and I do want to see how they end. I did think it was amusing that the main girl in the story, Bella, sounds a lot like I used to be as far as being able to trip, fall, or in some way hurt yourself or break something even in a padded room. Some people didn't call me "Grace" for no reason. Fortunately I'm usually only repeatedly clumsy now if I get flustered, and I don't get flustered all that easily any more. ;)

Kaylee spent a long time playing on a Disney Fairy website, making (safe) little fairy friends and talking to them and decorating her fairy home and all that fun stuff. She had control over my computer for quite awhile, actually. She is still enjoying her time off, and I still don't mind not having to get up quite so early in the mornings this week either!

One more unrelated thought. I was driving around today, and for some reason it occurred to me that I am tired of people telling me what I can't do. I don't mean I have authority issues, I mean all the times people have told me I'm not capable of doing something, I don't have the ability to do something, I shouldn't try something, I won't be able to do it, etc. I've always been fairly patient about that, mostly just ignored the negativity and went on to do or try whatever I felt I needed to do anyway, and then was admittedly slightly smug to myself when I would successfully do whatever it was I was told I couldn't do. But I've had about enough of that. I am not an idiot. I know myself pretty well, I know my strengths and weaknesses, I can evaluate where I fall short and work on it, I am realistic, and I hate failing. So if I do something, in general I feel that it will be something I will be able to accomplish or that I will at minimum gain something important from it. Fortunately my family and close friends have never been anything but supportive to me. I appreciate that, because the world is full enough of people telling you what you shouldn't try, can't accomplish, and won't be able to do in life. What do they know, anyway? When I was young, they bothered me, I wondered if they were right, I worried that they were right. I slowly learned that they were almost never right. They don't know me very well for one thing, and for another it isn't up to them. It was a...freeing realization.
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"Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees." ~Victor Hugo

Formation Practice...

Briefly

Last night we had a freeze advisory, so I went out with garbage bags to cover the plants Kaylee had just watered to try to give them a shot at survival. This morning everything was still alive and in bloom, so apparently Mission Flower Protection was successful.

Kaylee is enjoying her days of freedom so far, and was really excited when I told her I'd take her to McDonald's PlayLand one of these upcoming days. She's done a lot of Wii playing, some playing outside, some hanging out with her mother, and joined our lunches. Nothing too exciting, but she's happy to stay up later and have nothing she has to do.

"Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent." ~Jean Kerr

Spring Break

Spring Break around here this year doesn't mean Florida's Sun-n-Fun like it did last year, and it doesn't mean a vacation for anybody but Kaylee, either. But it does mean she and I get to sleep in a little bit if we want to. :) It also means no ballet, tap, gymnastics or Awanas, which would be good if we were going somewhere, and kind of boring since we aren't.

We didn't really do much today. She played Wii Music quite a bit today, making music videos, creating her own jacket art, and wandering around the game learning how to do it. It's good for rhythm, pitch, different types of instruments, harmony, all sorts of good music things. We also went to lunch with most of the usual suspects, fighting off cold gray snow flurries that shouldn't be here in the middle of Spring.

After lunch I went out to the airport to pay a bill and mostly put the T6 back in order for its rightful owner. :) I showed Kaylee a video that Justin took of the T-6 on start-up and a couple takeoffs and landings, and during the start-up I didn't have my helmet on (I have awhile to wait and let it warm up after it starts, so sometimes I do that during that time). She watched for awhile, and as the prop started blowing my hair around in the sun, she pointed at it and said "Mommy, your hair looks like it's on fire!" Once she said that, I thought...it kind of does. :)

Kaylee watered all of her Grandma's flowers today because she said they looked droopy, which took her five trips with the watering can, but unfortunatly tonight we are supposed to get a big freeze. I'm not sure if they can survive that, which will bum her out. But it was nice of her to do that...

The Next Day

This should be "ABS Day Three", as it's typically a full weekend clinic that they do. But Sunday's weather looked so bad they all bugged out of there Saturday after their last flight of the day. In fact, I woke up Sunday morning bright and early at 8 a.m. to a beautiful looking day, but it didn't last long, and I'm now stuck watching the gray sky have a seemingly permanent drip. If nothing else, it is kind of peaceful and sleepy and relaxing after yesterday.

I did get my photos up-two pages worth so far. There are people shots in there, and a lot of formation airplane stuff. (That's the joy of having your own site-you can put up your own stuff that you enjoy and want to keep for posterity and nobody else has to look.) :)

I don't plan on having anything earth-shattering happen today, so I'll end with some quotes and commence Project Hang Out.
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"The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence." ~Bruce Springsteen

"Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right." ~Henry Ford

ABS Day Two

My internal alarm went off at 3:30 a.m., and I couldn't go back to sleep for about an hour or so, at which time I then had about 45 minutes of sleep before I had to get back up. Kaylee and Steve didn't sleep very well out at the airport either, and neither did poor Chuck and Judy. So we were all a little (okay, a lot) worn out by the end of this day. I have pictures to put up, but it's going to wait for tomorrow!

I got out to the airport at about 6:40 a.m., and everyone was already up out there. The classroom being held on 4-ship formations began at 7 a.m., lasted an hour, then we broke for breakfast, and came back and had the group safety briefing, then broke into small groups and did the individual small formation group going on its own briefing. I went on (riding, not flying) two sorties today, the first one of the day and the first one after lunch break. The first one, I was #2 in a two-ship formation, and the second one I was in #4 of a 4-ship. I took a few photos, but mostly I was just trying to see and recognize the signals, pay attention to procedures, etc. I've actually ridden along on several formation flights, and sometimes kept a hand on the throttle and one on the stick and tried to get a good feel for what's going on, but I didn't really know details like where the fuselage should be on an eschelon turn or whatever. I did pick up some good information today that I hope to retain. I found that in the 2-ship formation, I could keep up with what was happening, see the signals, at least recognize what needed to be done, etc. But in the 4-ship formation, I kept missing things-they would just start happening and I'd never even seen the signal, etc. I was probably just watching everybody else and enjoying the view too much and not watching #3 enough, which you wouldn't do "for real"...

After my last flight with the Bonanza guys for the day, I took up the T-6 with Steve for awhile, who turned his seat around in the back of the 6 so that he was facing backwards. He said it was a great view, but crazy windy. Bob in his RV joined us for awhile, after which I just did a few TOLS, until the next round of Bonanza guys took off to go practice and there was other traffic out there too, and we ended up with 8 Bonanzas doing formation takeoffs on the longer but crosswind runway, 1 Cub using the downwind runway, one guy in the pattern coming in to land on the runway into the wind, and me sitting there waiting for my turn to take off on that same runway. I decided to get out of everybody's way at that point, and came on in. :) I enjoyed the flight though-it was a beautiful day for it!

Next came the clean-up. All the tables, chairs, food, trash, putting everything back in order, etc. That took awhile, then a group of 12 of us went out to Applebees afterwards. Dale, Dawn, Charlie, Ty, Sheryl, Chuck, Judy, me, Steve, and three kids got a couple of big tables pushed together and had dinner. Nathan texted in while we were sitting there, and hit us all at once, so a few of us each sent him back one different word to complete a sentence, just to be irritating. :)

Kaylee, Maggie and Hannah played outside all day long, and when she got home tonight, she crawled in her bed and went to sleep without even saying goodnight to any of us. She is Wiped Out, which is pretty funny. I love what fresh air does for kids. Well, Steve sat down in the chair and passed out too, so it's not just kids. ;) I almost went out when I got home, but I got up to do one thing, and then I wanted to see my pictures, and then I found my second wind. But when I go to bed here shortly, I don't think I'm going to be spending much time tossing and turning, that's for sure. In fact, I think I just hit the wall. I'm going to bed! Pictures tomorrow. :)