Family & Fun

As Mondays go, this one was interesting, at least for me.

Steve, Kaylee and I met up with my cousin Jimmy and his wife Jane for lunch today. I haven't seen them in a couple of years now, and they live in Kansas. They were only here because they came to the NCAA Championship Final Four games, and since we're only an hour away, they made time to come on up and say hi, which is great. :) Jim was looking at Kaylee and he told her that he remembered when I was born, and that she looks exactly like I did at that age. He was one of my favorite cousins when I was a kid--fun loving, mischievous, "ornery", and he was the first person to let me drive a real car on the backroads when I was too young. ;) Anyway, it was good to see them!

I did all those "administrative duties" like post office, getting all the airport bills out, going to the computer store, doing a few things at home, etc., and then went back out to Kokomo to go up in the Decathlon with Mike and do some aerobatic basic components. We flew close to an hour and a half, and I enjoyed it. I'm doing a refresher course from 'back to the basics' on to get back more of my proficiency in aerobatics. Today was working on crisp up lines and down lines and transitions and such. I started off doing a 45 degree up and down line, then did the 90 degree up and down lines (vertical straight up at the sky and straight back down at the ground). After about an hour and a half of working on fine tuning where to look and when and managing the changing forces on the plane as your airspeed and pitch changes, I was starting to feel it, that little voice in your head that says "keeeeeep going and you're not going to feeeeeel good." So I did two more because I wanted to get something down a little better, then called it for the day and came in and did a couple of takeoffs and landings. It felt good and I enjoyed the workout on pitch and look forward to the next one where we'll start working on the basics of the roll axis. Knife edge, inverted, etc. Another nice thing is that it helps get me back into the arena of how it's best taught; the progression of maneuvers, good phraseology, etc...

Fun!