Oshkosh, Day Four

This morning I went over to Warbirds to attend a T-6 forum. The one I went to two years ago was all about maintenance issues, and was thus very boring considering I'm neither an owner nor a mechanic but simply an operator who not only didn't need to know most of what they were talking about but didn't have a clue what they were talking about. I pretty much expected this forum to be the same thing, but I was wrong. It was actually a really good forum, lasted an hour and a half (which is long) and had to be cut off due to time even though folks were still engaged and participating. It had to do with safety, proficiency, judgment, all that stuff, but was packaged with humor, anecdotes, and audience participation. I sat in the back and didn't say anything like a good girl, but I did actually learn a couple of things about the Six specifically that I hadn't known, and I did find the safety briefing to be different than the usual, and thus even kind of interesting.

At the barn store here on the field, I bought a package of Wisconsin String Cheese. Oh man. This stuff makes the string cheese I get in Indiana worthless. Every year I say that, but every year it still surprises me how good this stuff is. Wisconsin does a lot of things wrong, but their string cheese is not one of them. ;)

I attended another forum today, one hosted by the WASPS. You know, those women who flew military aircraft during the war to help free up the men pilots. One woman was asked "So what did you fly?" and she responded with "I flew whatever I could get my hands on. Whenever something new arrived, I would beg, borrow, steal, barter, whatever in order to get some time in it." She sounds like my kind of woman. ;) I've always admired the WASPS, and like the Tuskeegee Airmen, I can't help but be bothered by the situation they faced while impressed with how they handled it. The other thing she said that made me smile was that the WASPS flew the same planes as the men "and we did it better than the men" as far as their non-combat safety record. Doesn't really surprise me in either case. Anyone who has to work as hard as they did to get where they were was going to be of a personality type to demand excellence and will certainly have more than a little perserverance going for them.

Tonight is pork chops on the grill and homemade ice cream. I'm watching the air show while the ice cream is churning. Steve and Nathan are out on the flight line watching the warbirds take off after spending the day on the grounds checking everything out, which I did this morning after my T6 forum, the kids are cleaning the golf cart and helping AE make ice cream, and on towards another day.