Mission

We took our day of rest in our way. Kaylee slept in, relaxed for a little while to recuperate from her super busy day yesterday and lack of sleep the night before. This afternoon I took her to a birthday party at the local skating rink. She's done rollerblading out at the hangar, but she's never worn regular roller skates and been on a rollerskating surface. She could hardly stand up at first, but by the end she was speeding around the track. She says she still can't make sharp turns or stand still on the track without falling, and she counted eight wipe-outs today, but she had a great time and was really glad she went. She spent the rest of her evening doing her chores, picking up her room, reading a book, and playing on the computer, before reading our devotions for the night and heading up to catch up on some more sleep.

Steve spent some time relaxing with a friend, then took the day to work on projects around the house, indoors and outdoors.

I was planning on staying home and relaxing today. I started off well, finishing up a new novel that I started on the trip to Alabama last week. Then once I needed to take Kaylee to her party, and came back two hours later to get her only to find out they extended it for an hour, I had to come home only to turn around an hour later to get her again. At this point I was staring at what a gorgeous day it was, just like yesterday. I let yesterday get away from me because I didn't feel like doing anything, and I still didn't feel like doing anything, but it was nagging at me. How many nice days do we have left this year? I have some stuff I need to get accomplished. So I went back out to Kokomo and pulled out the T-6. The airport itself was really busy, but "our" guys were all doing different things today, so it was just me out at the hangar. I brought my iPod along and just wore my Bose headset so I could put in the ear pieces for the music. Some motivational music later, I took off, circled over the house to say hi, then climbed up to a nice respectable and safe altitude at which to do some stalls. I lost count of how many stalls I did--maybe 30 or 40. The more aggressively you stall it, the more interesting it is. You don't get a lot of warning in this plane before it breaks, but there is a split second, if you're not entering it too abruptly, where you can feel it just before the right wing lets go. I was determining a few things, like how best to teach the stalls, recoveries from various degrees of abruptness and over-corrections that people might do, etc. Finally I decided that was good enough for today, and did quite a few rolls to the left and right before coming in and working on 3-point and wheel landings for a bit. One nice wheel landing was actually supposed to be a 3-pointer, but that's the way it works sometimes. ;) There were a bunch of us in the pattern, and about after my 6th landing another person entered the fray, this time to practice instrument approaches, so I decided to call it mission accomplished for the day...