Taking A Bite

Winter has decided to put up a fight after all, and after this really nice patch of weather we've been having that nobody has taken for granted, Winter took a bite today. The snow isn't nearly as deep as they anticipated, but the effect is almost worse this way. Instead of a "pretty" blanket of thick, white snow, we had a gray, windy, gusty day of dingy white stuff blowing sideways into your face, your windows, and over the dirty hard ground. Tonight the wind chill is expected to get down to five below zero. Not nice.

On the other hand, today's weather meant I didn't end up having to fly today. And while that's not really a good thing in general, for me, today, it was. I was glad to be able to get some other stuff done instead, sleep in a little, not freeze in a hangar waiting for somebody to preflight, or waiting for gas, or whatever.

Kaylee has started playing "Words with Friends" (Scrabble for you normal people) with me. She's on her Kindle and I'm on an iPad. Sometimes during an evening when she's supposed to be in bed, I'll get a "word" from her. Once I made my next word "Bed", and she yelled from the other room "VERY FUNNY MOM!" Heh. I am not really a game person in general, but I do sort of like scrabble, and I like playing with Kaylee because it helps her vocabulary and her spelling (neither of which is weak to begin with) in a fun way instead of just drilling spelling word lists. I also don't deliberately dumb it down for her. The first time we played, I beat her by over 200 points. But the second time we played, I only beat her by 47 points. I told her that I wouldn't go easy on her, but that when she won, she would actually win, for real. She's trying hard to do just that now. :)

Now that I gave Mom a Kaylee story for Grandma, here's another flying one from yesterday. ;) When we were on the ground at St. Louis Downtown, the student went to pick up his clearance by calling clearance delivery. He expected them to come back with "24B, go ahead", like Grissom usually does, so he could come back and request his clearance. Instead, they started off on his clearance rapid fire talking, and it wasn't an easy one. "24B cleared via the Turbo Six Departure, Alpha Charlie Xray, Alpha Charlie Xray, somethin somethin then direct OKK climb maintain 3000 expect 9000 in 10 minutes freq 123.7 squawk 1234" all said with about one breath. He didn't get it all the first time, so they repeated it, and he didn't have it all the second time, so they repeated it slower, then they came back and said "There are TWO Alpha Charlie Xrays, TWO, not one", so he gets that. Finally we've got everything set up into the GPS, got everything figured out and where to go. This takes a moment. We take off, St. Louis has us go to a heading, then another, then within 10 seconds has us completely change our routing. So the poor guy is hand flying in the clouds now, trying to change the GPS to the new stuff while talking to St. Louis. He says to me "WHY??? Why did they give us that whole thing and then change it 10 seconds after we took off??" I just sat there and grinned. It's good practice, man. Welcome to aviation in busy airspace. ;)

When I got back to Kokomo around 5, I hadn't eaten any real food since the day before. Fortunately I HAD wised up lately and packed snacks, so I'd eaten some peanut butter crackers, and some peanut M&Ms, which are good for protein too. But I was ready for a sandwich, so I stopped on my way home. I decided to sit in the parking lot and eat it while it was hot, before I went home and didn't have anything for other people, so I pulled into a parking spot, put it in park, and debated on turning the car off to save gas or leaving it running for the heater. The heater won. As soon as I decided to leave it running, my right hand reached up and bumped into the dash, seeking a mixture knob so I could lean it out and not burn so much fuel. As soon as I realized what I had just done, I stopped with my arm in the air, shook my head, and said "Time to go home, Laura."

Jeffrey may have been pretty bored here these two days, but I'm afraid there hasn't been much going on to help entertain him right now. He did help Kaylee with her math homework once though, and I'm sure that was exciting... Well, Steve is busy fixing dinner so I should go help. ;)