The End and the Beginning Again

The girls stayed up late last night, laughing and talking and making noise long after the rest of the house was asleep, and my daughter was in the middle of that too, of course. It's good to hear unfettered joyfulness around. :)

For lunch we all went into town to Meridee's Breadbasket, a kvetchy place in downtown Franklin where my niece works. The restaurant was so packed out that it was standing room only, people moving and lots of loud talking and just...packed. I was okay for about 10 minutes, and then as people were pushing past me, with nowhere to go, I shot Steve a look and saw him shooting me one, too. We were about at the end of our doability on tight crowds, but fortunately once we got a table and sat down, it thinned out and quieted down. It's a neat restaurant. Brick and wicker and warm and cozy, and when it's quiet, it's a very peaceful looking place to sit and eat soups, salads, sandwiches and bakery items. The fierce energy in there when it gets busy is perfect for my niece's personality--she thrives on activity and busyness, and what drains me will energize her. Isn't it funny how we are all different like that? :)

It's not New Year's Night yet--I'm writing this in the afternoon while the girls are watching a movie and the guys are watching TV. We'll be having lasagna for dinner, then will probably play a game or two and watch the ball fall in New Yawk City to bring in 2013.

I'm still not much of a resolutions kind of person, but I do spend some time evaluating things now and then. It will be hard to find years with more personal challenges than 1998-2000 had. Remembering those years puts most other things into perspective, and that is a good thing too. This year of 2012 had some difficult moments, and went by sort of sloppily. It mostly went by fast, without a lot of organization on my part. If it were an airplane, it more flew me while I hung on for the ride than me being the one in charge of it. I don't much care for that, so that is one bigger change I plan to work on for 2013. I have a couple of other things to focus on for the upcoming year as well, such as getting better control of my health. A horribly cliche resolution, but I started it weeks ago, so it doesn't really count as such. ;) As I said, I've been consistently working on my stretching, and I recently added in some strength too. As I can keep up with it, I'll add in a little cardio too, and just attempt to stop the decline. I'm not looking to be model status, but I do need to be careful, because the health I've taken for granted isn't going to stay that way for long at this rate. Well, it already isn't with this nerve thing. I guess it's good that it bugs me, because that bugging is what's making me continue to push at it. I also have some aviation-specific goals for 2013. Some light, some bigger. A common one is "No bent metal", and I'd go along with that, too, and throw in "or anything else overly exciting in not-a-good-way, either", please. There are a couple other, smaller things, but many of them relate back to not letting days get by me without me actively taking some sort of charge of them. So, against my usual New Year Principles, there are a couple of my "resolutions" for 2013. Or, as I prefer to think of them, "Re-evaluation of things that need tweaked." ;)

As 2012 winds down to its last few hours here, I pray for my friends and family a year filled with growth, enjoyment, safety, purpose, contentment, drive, strength and peace.

Time

We are all enjoying a quiet evening of various pursuits. Richard and Ann are working on a 2000 piece puzzle of Times Square, which the grandkids stop in and help on now and then. Kaylee and a couple cousins are up in a large fort playing various games. Tanner is beating Steve at ping pong, and some of us are watching a couple of NFL games. Everyone over the age of 22 has had a nap so far today, but that's a foregone conclusion when you have a huge lunch, right? It's not old age, right?

There are eleven of us in the immediate Stants family, when we are all together. We take up an entire row at church, and several tables at a restaurant. It is a nice sight, though. The kids all look like siblings, and act like it too, except without much of the fighting beyond good-natured teasing. At lunch today, Jason's Deli, home of what has to be genetically-engineered potatoes considering they are larger than a normal dinner plate, all the girls sat at one table over there, and it did my heart good to see Kaylee just merged in, one of the group, even though the oldest is 22 and about to graduate from college and the youngest is 15. Kaylee's 11. That's a large age gap for kids and where they are in life, but they love her, and treat her like one of them, and truly care about and are interested in being with her. She can tell the difference between obligatory kindness and real love, and I'll always be so grateful that she has had that from them. She has that from some grandparents too, which I am also grateful for. The girl is loved. Some day, when she's all grown up herself, I believe she's going to look back on the holidays when her grandma let her shoot her for hours straight with nerf darts or jumped around in the living room in front of a TV, or the days her adult cousins hid in a tent with her playing Monopoly or driving her to Kohls and letting her shop with them, and those are the things she's going to remember as the good times in her childhood. Not the big gift she got at Christmas or the trip she took, but the time spent with people who love and accept her for her.

Tonight the kids did the Grandparent Gift Exchange. All five grandkids take a turn picking off of a table of carefully selected goodies, one at a time, until the goodies are gone. Earrings, nail polish, bracelets, books, etc. No whining or fighting over somebody picking something someone else wanted, no fighting, just fun. The grandparents love selecting gifts for the kids and seeing what each one picks out. It's a win/win. :)

Today's church service was about bringing in the new year, and time management, and what does God want you to do with the rest of your life. He had statistics on the average times people spend doing things throughout the year, and let everyone know that approximately 85% of your 2013 is already booked up. Work, sleep, eating, bathroom time, getting ready, driving, errands, etc. He said that basically it works out that each of us has on average 3 hours and 42 minutes per day that is not already booked up, and that's why things like New Year Resolutions fail. Not because you don't know HOW to do something you should do, but you have trouble finding the right WHEN. He suggested writing down two lists. On the left side put what your priorities SHOULD be for 2013, in order of importance. On the right side, put where you actually spend your time now, thus showing what your priorities actually ARE. Then take your calendar for 2013, for the first week of the year, and block off all the time that is already booked. Sleep here, get ready, drive kid to school, go to work, all booked off. Find what time you actually have available, then schedule in your priorities with what should be your #1 priority getting top precedence, and on down. The point was about fulfilling what God wants for you in your life and not living "thoughtlessly", frittering time away, and living 2013 more wisely and thoughtfully than you lived 2012.

Now, that "schedule your time appropriately" thing is a good business/time management tool, for sure, one that helps you use your time effectively, and one that doesn't work when you don't know from one hour to the next, let alone days or weeks ahead of time, where you will be going, when you will be working, and when you'll be free. But you can still be more thoughtful of time spent and be a bit more organized to get in some of those things you need to do that always end up on a back burner during those times you do unexpectedly find yourself with free time...

Dinner, a movie, some computer assistance provided by Steve, me and one of the granddaughters, and time spent with family. A good way to run out the remaining hours of 2012.

Christmas Revisited

Right now the rest of the gang is playing a game called "Would you rather". They give you two unpleasant options that you have to pick between, then explain why, and the consensus wins. One was "would you rather live permanently with a 1/8" split in your lip, or a mouth full of canker sores?" None of the above is not an allowed choice. The last one was "would you rather open a drawer and find 100 black widow spiders or 10 giant rats that run out and hide behind your furniture?" Well, duh. ;)

We enjoyed Christmas Round II today. We had a huge Stants/Cherry brunch first, most people ran to the store for a few minutes, and then it was gift-opening time. Kaylee's good at picking out meaningful gifts for people, and I think everyone was pleased with their gifts. We took the annual photos of the cousins in front of the tree, and group photos. Mostly so we can see the kids grow up--the rest of us just look older. :) I didn't have a chance to wash my hair this morning, so I'm a big fuzzball, but that's okay, it's not about me anyway!

I feel so much better with my neck/back, that sometimes I forget I'm not back to normal. Yesterday Steve said something rude and I swung my arm across my body at him to hit him, and it hurt me so much I couldn't move my arm for about 30 seconds. I can't lift any weight at all straight out to my sides with my palms down, and I can't do a single push up. But the other directions, biceps, etc., are fine. I'll just go to do something, and bam, it's not there, and I'm dropping something or hurt. While we're here, there are 10 lb weights in the room with us, and I've used them each day to work on the things I can do. I have both lighter and heavier weights at home, too, and I still do my stretches each day. I can't think of any other time I've had an "injury" that lasted so long, that took so long to heal. I've never broken a bone, never had more than bruises or sprains, and no major health issues past colds/viruses/bronchitis type things. I'm not sure I have the patience for things not healing fast. Right now my mom is saying "Getting old isn't for sissies" and Chuck is saying "You ain't seen nothin' yet, kid." I can just hear them both. :)

Southern Comfort

Well, here we are in Tennessee, kicking back, listening to the kids laugh and the grownups catch up with what's been going on. I haven't seen Kaylee since we arrived, as she's been assimilated into the Cousins' Gang, where she is most happy.

I woke up at 7:15 this morning to start the day, which wouldn't be bad if you didn't stay up so late the night before. :) D and I took the 340 to Pennsylvania, the Pittsburg area, as chase plane to the Cheyenne. We were doing 207 knots groundspeed with a 1000 fpm rate climb, which was pretty nice. We didn't run into a bit of ice, and other than being set up for an approach that was the opposite direction of traffic in the pattern, and honking off said traffic that I didn't know was there until we were on a 4-mile final and handed off to the local frequency, it was an uneventful flight, as was the flight back home. Three hours round trip. We landed, filled up the airplane again, put everything away, and I ran home to get some food and get the rest of the family ready to go. We had some potential icing issues for the flight to Tennessee, and the earlier we left the better off we'd be. So of course we weren't actually ready to go when I got home, so we had to do a bunch of stuff, and it took us awhile to be out the door. Once we got out the door, we got to move one airplane out of the way, top off the airplane we were taking, load it up, I finally get us up to the run-up area only to realize I'd left my iPad sitting in the hangar. Doh. Turn around, taxi back, shut off one engine, fetch iPad, start back up, taxi back out, and let's do this thing!

The trip down is one of those trips you can't really be 100% sure will work or not. DUATS was talking icing from the surface to 12,000', and another layer above that, cloud tops at 20,000', there was an area of snow showers and another area of moderate rain with sleet behind it. But the ADDS website was saying there wasn't any ice below 7000'...as long as we got out of there in time. But I'm looking at radar, and I wasn't so sure. But everywhere you looked around, the ceilings and visibilities were okay, all the PIREPS of icing were above 8000', and the ADDS website is pretty accurate on icing. So I filed low, 6000', to be above some layers and below others, and we went. It went like a charm. We picked up a touch of ice climbing out, but when we broke out we were in between layers where we mostly stayed, and nothing was an issue until we got to the Nashville area. The area of moderate precip was right where we were going, and by now it was dark, and raining pretty good, and the ILS was out of service down there, so I plugged in the GPS approach instead. It wasn't low IFR, but the rain makes a difference. I was just setting up for the approach when a "low thrust" alarm went off on my right engine, which got my attention for a second there, but ended up not being an impending engine failure after all, which was nice of it. ;) By the time we landed, I was tired and glad to be down for the day. Nothing was all that harrowing or anything, I had just stayed busy ever since I woke up, and I was just ready to relax. In fact, it's only 10 pm, and I'm the first one in bed tonight. Usually I'm the last man standing around here. I must be getting old...

Thursday Again Already

This morning the road crews had done a good job clearing off the main roads, so Mom and Ernie loaded up and headed home to take care of their cats and get back to life.  The three of us met up with the usual suspects at lunch, and then started getting ready for our next trip.  The airport guys got the ramp, taxiways and runways shoveled off, and then after lunch blew off the "driveway" in front of the hangars.  D had to shovel out in front of the 172RG's hangar to get the door open, but then we were on our way to finally pick up the C-340 in Aurora (Chicago is close enough).  The weather wasn't good enough to go IFR-there was a lot of moderate icing reported from 2500' - 5200', right where we'd be going.  So we went under the clouds instead.  Had good visibility, pretty low ceilings for parts of the route, but doable. It led to a good discussion about limits and lower level flying and how you could tell what you were looking at as far as the weather around you, etc.  Of course, on the way home, I had synthetic vision, which shows you the tall power lines, towers, all that good stuff right on the screen.  Also of course, I kept my eyes outside anyway. ;)  It's kind of neat seeing a tower then looking in and seeing it on the screen right in front of you too, not on the "terrain" page as an "X", but portrayed as an actual tower on the main screen.  Cool, man.

Well, I have some laundry, dishes and packing to do before tomorrow.  I'd like to take the time to write about something more interesting now and then, but by the time I sit down at the end of the day, my creativity is often gone, I'm watching TV while I write out what we did for the day, I don't have anything interesting that's happened, or I don't want to type out something I wouldn't want the world to read should they stumble upon this page. It's not even usually because I'd have anything "bad" to say, but rather because I'm...let's go with "shy"...about some of it, whether I need to be or not.  I can write better when I pretend that nobody is reading it.  I AM pretty safe on that front here, but not always.  :)  So that usually leaves me with "Yep, this is what we did today."  Kind of boring...maybe I'll try to work on that randomly and sporadically.  Except for tonight, while I'm watching "Elementary" and thinking more about packing.  ;)

Christmas

We stayed up until 2 a.m. on Christmas Eve watching Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, so when morning came everybody, even (especially) the littlest one was still pretty tired.  But once we started rolling on the presents, she seemed to wake up and energize pretty quickly.  ;)

After the Great Present Exchange we had a big ole brunch that was closer to lunch but better.  Bacon, cheesy eggs, pancakes and syrup, strawberries and bananas, biscuits and sausage gravy... hungry yet?  It was good.  It also filled us up pretty much for the rest of the day.  Our Christmas dinner was leftovers from the last couple of days and we still have plenty to eat around here!

The snow is coming, and we're under a Winter Blizzard Warning for the first time in five years.  They are referencing the great blizzard of 1978, but I don't know that we're going to get anything that exciting up here.  Forecasters, depending on the channel you watch, are calling for anywhere from 2-4" where we are, up to 6-12".  Well, there is a lot of difference between 2" of snow and 12" of snow.  One's a yawn, and one's a problem, and they can't seem to be able to figure out which one we're looking at.  Watching the list of closings at the bottom of the screen is interesting though.  I can't remember ever seeing something that said "Town of Noblesville: Closed" before.  There are several towns listed that just say they are closed.  Not gov't offices or town libraries or churches, which are listed too, but the whole darned town.  Huh.

I'm wondering how Thursday is going to go.  In the morning we're supposed to go to Pennsylvania, and in the afternoon I'm supposed to go to Illinois. As always, guess we'll see how it goes.

I hope everyone out there had a good Christmas.  We've enjoyed ours, and now are just waiting to see what kind of weather we have coming...

The Eve

Merry Christmas Eve!  Kaylee, Mom and I made Christmas cookies today.  That took a couple of hours to accomplish, which is fine when you're having a lazy day.  I made one store run for salad fixings and breakfast stuff for tomorrow morning, and then we had a nice dinner of fillet and all the side dishes including stuffed mushrooms.  All the boys took a nap today, while us girls did our own thing.  My prediction of not going flying today certainly came true, as it was an icy day to go fly.  When I called the maintenance guy and told him I wasn't coming today, he said he didn't blame me, he wouldn't take the airplane right out of an annual into inclement weather either, and he was the one who worked on it.  He asked if that sounded bad, and I said no, just prudent.  ;)

We're playing Wii and Xbox games tonight before hitting bed for Christmas tomorrow...g'night all!

Vacation...

Day One.  I'd call it "Staycation", but I really hate that term.  We slept in this morning, had breakfast almost at lunch time, had lunch late, and had a nice dinner of chicken, steak, veggies and rolls, with fresh pecan pie and ice cream for dessert.  Kaylee and Grandma played a shooting nerf game a lot of the day, and played Kinect Sports for awhile too.  We watched a little football, Steve and Ernie went man-shopping for a few hours, and after dinner we all watched MIB 3, which the grown-ups all liked, and the kid tolerated okay.  I still have some more presents to wrap and get under the tree, but I think we're pretty much ready.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to fly over to Illinois to pick up the 340, but looking at the forecast...well, we'll see, but I'm betting not, at least not at the time we were planning on.

On to one more movie and some late hot chocolate and maybe present wrapping...

The End and the Beginning

Man it was cold this morning.  The first time I thought to look at the temperature it was around 14 degrees.  I put on my wool socks and boots and dressed as warmly as I could, had a little breakfast and went out to the airport to pull out the T6 and fly to Kentucky.  The back roads on the way to the airport were icy, and later I found out there was a thin sheet of ice over the ramp, taxiways and runway too, both Kokomo and Sheridan.  I didn't make it to Kentucky.  It was okay though.  Even if I had gotten to the airport, gotten the Cheyenne out and gotten the T-6 out, the ramp was slick enough that I would have likely had a lot of trouble getting the Cheyenne put back away.  That's happened before-if you can't get traction on the ramp to get rolling, you can't move, and there wasn't even really snow to "grab", it was just a thin smooth ice layer. At the time there was also a 14 knot 50 degree crosswind, which doesn't sound like much--unless you don't have any traction and you're in an airplane that requires a lot of foot action to keep going straight and you really don't want to be sliding along and suddenly have it 'grab' somewhere.  I texted the other guys and let them know what had gone wrong with the day...  Later on the day got nice, the sun warmed up the ground and melted off the ice layer, and the winds died down quickly to almost nothing.  It would have been a beautiful day to fly once it warmed up.  But things work out for the best sometimes and I had plenty of other things I needed to do, and I saved myself 2 hours round trip in fuel plus however many hours of formation flying fuel. That's a lot of money...  I tried really hard to finish this formation card by the end of this year, and if we could have gotten a checkride scheduled any time in the last 2 months I'd have made it.  That'll have to be good enough.  I'll finish up in the Spring, hopefully, one way or another.

We spent the rest of the day with piles of boxes and cleaning supplies spread around until finally we got everything put up, away, cleaned up, decluttered, and lookin' good.  Now I don't want anybody to mess it up for awhile so I can enjoy it.  ;)

Kaylee started looking for her grandparents around 4 pm, standing outside waiting to see them pull into the driveway.  Then she got cold, so she watched by the front window.  Then she read for awhile, couldn't stand it any more and went back outside.  Rinse and repeat until they arrived around 6 p.m.  She wasn't eager at all, huh?  As soon as they got here, we threw them back into the car and drove them out to Indian Hills for a full bore John Dale dinner, and had a nice evening in a warm hangar with too much good food.

The prep time is over, no flights are scheduled, the holidays have begun, and it's time to kick back and relax and enjoy. :)

The Shortest Day

It's the first official day of winter, the shortest day of the year, and the day the Mayan "calendar" ended.  On the good news front, from now on winter is officially dying, the sun will start staying out longer, and the world did not end on cue. My cousin said "I hope Jesus comes back Dec. 22nd and is all like 'BAM, succccka's, bet you weren't prepared for this!'"  I said I appreciated the irony, but I had stuff I really wanted to do before the world ended.  Someone else came along and said that they didn't care what they got to do on earth if Jesus was coming back.  Well, that's how you make the rest of us look bad.  ;)  I decided not to say something about being in heaven for an eternity, thus never missing out on anything there, but that I'd still like to do a few things here first if I could.  I'm fairly confident that God understands.

It was really blustery, cold and nasty out there today.  No flying, of course.  A lot of people around lost power last night, many of them not getting it back until this afternoon.  Glenndale was without power too, and just a lot of people around town.  Our power flickered several times but never went completely down.  Considering how many around us were down, we got pretty lucky.  Because Glenndale's power was out we met at Dale's church to eat Friday lunch instead.  I picked up some fried chicken and took it out there, and it was a nice place to meet up for the day.

Kaylee and I went around and ran a few more errands after lunch, picking up some Christmas gifts, before coming home and starting a wrap-a-thon.  I don't have any of hers wrapped up yet, but we got just about everybody else's done tonight.  :)  I started picking up the house and getting things in order.  Mom & Ernie will be here tomorrow afternoon, and I'll be gone all day, so it'll be up to Steve and Kaylee to finish up the job around here tomorrow, so I tried to get done what all I could.

We couldn't go get our gun permits today either--the power outage affected the police station and/or the fingerprinting system.  They're now closed until Thursday, so I rescheduled for then.  Steve's going in the morning and I'll go in the afternoon after I get back from a trip, and then we were originally going to go to Tennessee on Thursday.  We'll see, we haven't figured out if we may delay that by a day or two, or go ahead Thursday late afternoon, or spend New Year's here, or what we'll end up doing yet...

I sort of hate that I have to go to bed early on a Friday night, and SURE don't like getting up in the dark and temps in the 18 degree range and putzing around pulling out and rearranging planes outside and probably fixing a tug belt on my back on the the frozen concrete which I usually have to do at least once now. Complaining about taking a T-6 to go do formation flying seems very, very wrong, and I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but man, that's cold.

It's really ironic that as I finished typing that above paragraph, Kaylee said "No offense mom, but you're not really very normal.  I mean, you're going to go fly a warbird tomorrow to Kentucky with other airplanes and not everybody can say that.  I think that's pretty cool."  So I guess now I can't complain out loud that it's going to be bitter cold and dark and difficult, now can I!  ;)

Runaround

What a nasty weather day.  Our winter storm-ish has arrived.  We've had high winds, low clouds, driving rain, sleet, and finally snow, all in one day.  The day we needed to be out and about and doing stuff in preparation for the holidays, of course.  ;)

Let's see.  This morning we got four new tires put on the Explorer, so I'm as winter ready as possible. After lunch things became a little less productive.  We still got a lot done, but man, it made us work for it.  We went to a bank to get money orders, only to find out they don't do those any more.  So we go to a gas station, which does, get what we need, and go to the police station in order to get our conceal carry permits that we'd applied for on-line last month.  We had 30 days to get it done, and we're about 6 days out from that.  When we get there, the officer tells us that the website is wrong, we have to make an appointment with the fingerprinting place ahead of time, and the amount of money they told us to make the money orders are made out for is wrong too.  I love wasting my time.  But the interesting side note here is that Steve had to actually go online and set up two 15-minute window appointments for tomorrow to go back and get it done, because they are Swamped with conceal carry permits.  Their normal average per day works out to 3 per day.  Right now they're doing over 30 permits per day, every day.  Wow.  Wouldn't want to be a bad guy trying to open fire in a movie theater in Kokomo, folks.

From there we went back to pick up my Explorer which was now done, and went our separate ways to divide and conquer.  My first two stops didn't have anything that I needed.  The one good thing was I stopped for gas, and all around town it was going up to $3.25 and I got it for $2.72 still.  Steve waited to get gas for just about an hour after I did, and as he pulled in the sign said $2.86, and when he got up to the pump, it had changed to $3.25.  No kidding.   Everything else I did did not work well.  The roads are packed out with traffic, it took forever to get anywhere, and the stores are overloaded and under stocked.  It took me all day to get to and get accomplished only about 80% of what I needed to accomplish.  One store didn't have what I was going to get Kaylee, in her size. Three stores didn't have something she wanted for tomorrow.  And so forth.  What a pain!  Steve took Kaylee shopping for the guy stuff and for my present, and I think they had much more success.  :)  We finally all met back up for dinner out together, watching it spit snow out the windows.

Our Christmas lights have gone out; we're not sure why yet, but we've had high winds, rain, sleet, etc., so something may have tripped.  Steve will probably look into that tomorrow.  I was supposed to pick up an airplane plus have two lessons tomorrow, but nothing's going to be flying tomorrow.  I'm guessing Kaylee's school will have a delay, too.  I'm sure she won't mind.  ;)

Winter Wonderland

We got our "Winter Wonderland" lights up just in time for Christmas and a wave of potential weather moving in tomorrow night and Friday.  Our first "Winter Weather Advisory" has been issued, and considering we made it through to 12/20 before it happened, that's not bad for winter in Indiana.

I had two flights back to back in the white Champ; I'd hoped it was fixed so that the guy could hand prop the airplane with me in the back seat and it would stay running, but after four starts and stops it became obvious it was not going to happen.  So I had to do it while he kept it running with the primer until it stayed "lit".  The good news was, I was able to do it.  I was a little more awkward with it, but it worked.  A couple of weeks ago I couldn't even lift my arms up that way, let alone put pressure on them.  The bad news was that it quit on us after landing so I had to do it again, and then the next person I flew with had a bum shoulder, so when it quit on us once after landing I had to do it a third time...and I felt that one.  But hey, I got some exercise in.  ;)  Speaking of, the PT I talk with has been pleased with my progress and said I should start adding in some weight bearing and flexibility exercises.  So, believe it or not, I have been.  I told you--the weakness has to go.

My third flight for the day was canceled, so I was able to get to the store and fix our Emergency Status, which included the fact that our last roll of TP was actually on the dispenser.  If that's not an emergency, nothing is.  :o  ;)

One Winter Wonderland, satisfying even Ms. Kay:

One moving deer by the fountain

 

The pathway in the garden

 

Kay in the garden

 

Trees and bushes and windows, oh my!

The tree inside. So, do you think we have enough lights around here yet?  ;)

Tuesday's Tidbits

Twas the First Day of Preparation.  A little house cleaning, a little shopping, a little more shopping with the kiddo, a little more straightening up, a few more lights up outside, a lot of trash taken out, empty Christmas boxes back to the garage, three bank runs, two post office stops and a partridge in a pear tree.  :)

We're getting close to me posting photos of the finished product outside.  It's looking good!  When Kaylee and I got back from the store, Steve was up on a ladder in front of the house workin' it.  I brought home dinner, we all took a break for a minute, then went back to work.  But now I'm done.  I haven't been sleeping well; can't fall asleep and I'm waking up early and unable to get back to sleep. I've been running on high energy anyway, but I feel the sleepiness starting to sink in, and hopefully tonight I'll finally spin down and conk out.  :)

I'm supposed to fly all day tomorrow, then I'll have Thursday to finish up my shopping and stuff, and then I'm busy again on Friday with flights.  Saturday morning bright and early, if the weather is nice enough, I may fly the T-6 in a last formation thing until Spring.  Maybe.  Not sure I need to any more, when I could just wait for Spring and finish then.  I'll have to knock the rust off then anyway.  The only two reasons I'd go ahead and go now is that for one, every flight is experience gained, and for the other, I think they set this one up pretty much for me in the first place... I don't know, will play that one by ear a little bit.

Three more days and Kaylee keeps straight A's for this quarter.  She slumped to an A minus in math after she was bumped up to advanced math, but she's recovering nicely.

Well, I'm going to watch some good TV shows and relax, getting ready for a busy rest of the week and hopefully a good night's sleep!

And, to end on, I truly enjoyed this movie, and this clip sure made me chuckle.  "This guy wants a scary ride."  Heh.  Hehehehe.  Yep.

Scatter

So Dec. 17 marks the 109th anniversary of the day that the Wright brothers achieved controlled, powered flight, in 1903.  I kind of wonder about the "controlled" part of that sentence, but hey, we'll go with it!  :)  I marked the anniversary of first flight by being grounded for rain and clouds.

I saw this article on Facebook, and thought it was really organized, informed, thorough, etc.  http://www.activeresponsetraining.net/parents-guide.  I like that several of the things it brought up, we told Kaylee, including the part where if she hears gunfire, and she has the time/room, to try to get OUT, not get trapped in an area with no escape where you just have to sit and wait and hope for the best.  She is, unsurprisingly, a lot like both Steve and I, and she needs to know stuff.  She doesn't want patted on the head and told things will be fine so don't worry little girl.  She needs to know.  She needs to know how and why and when and what to do, in every scenario possible, and then she can move on and be fine.  She's more upset by people trying to protect her and not take her seriously than she is by hearing scary things.  That's not for every kid--but it is for HER.  So, she asked us.  What do I do if this, or this, or this.  And we tried to answer her as best we could.  The one that kind of made me swallow a little was when she said "And if I can't get out, and he breaks into our room, and starts shooting, and I drop on the floor and pretend to be dead, behind something if I can, should I lie on my stomach so that it might be harder for him to hit me in the heart and I might have a better chance of surviving?"  What a surreal conversation to have to have with an 11 year old girl.  Afterwards she's been fine.  No fear of going back to school, none of us has made a big deal of it. I'm no more worried about her today than I was last week. Schools are far safer than bicycles or airplanes or cars or walking down the street or eating uncut grapes.  The school sent out a thing to all the parents letting us know they'd be going over their "invasion drills", that they are already experts at them but it's always good to practice.  Then they said "We love your kids-they're OUR kids-and we will keep them safe."  Which I thought was sweet.

This quote came in yesterday, and I appreciated it for its overall truth, and the fact that it was said by a man born in 1601 and holds equally true today, as all real wisdom will over time.
 

"Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were easy; in the one case that confidence may not fall asleep, in the other that it may not be dismayed."
– Baltasar Gracián y Morales

For those of you who prefer the plain English version, he is saying to treat easy tasks as if they were hard so that you don't get overconfident, and treat hard tasks as if they were easy so that you don't psych yourself out and fail before you even begin.  I can certainly think of occasions where I learned both of the above lessons, personally...

According to the Mayan calendar we have four days left to live.  I think it's interesting that we don't hear more about that.  There are a lot of people out there happy to latch on to an End of the World Theory, some a lot more hairbrained than this one.  Maybe it was all the talk of how they didn't have Leap Years and such back then so their calendar has already run out.  Or maybe nobody wants to "do" the end of the world right before Christmas. Me, I have things to do, and I refuse to let the end of the world get in the way.  ;)

I'm holding off on taking pictures of our outside lights, because the kids aren't done yet.  As soon as all the lights are up and finalized, I'll take photos for posterity, cause I doubt they go back up again next year.  Now Kaylee knows how much work they are too.  ;)  But they do look lovely back in the garden, and Kaylee did get her Winter Wonderland...

Lights, Camera, Action

Well, lights, anyway.   Steve and Kaylee headed outsidee around 10:30 this morning and worked on putting up our outdoor lights until almost 3 p.m.  After a little break we started working on the inside, decorating the tree and such.  I didn't take any photos yet, but I will tomorrow when the sun goes down so you can see our Winter Wonderland.  :)  I started doing a bit of cleaning up today too in the house, and just ordered in a pizza for dinner.  We're not totally done or ready, but we got some good progress made!

I'll put all the pictures up on my website eventually, but here are a few from our tree-hunting expedition.

Daddy & Kaylee Looking.....

 

THIS.  This is the one.

 

What is that look??  ;)

 

Oh, now she'll smile and look pleasant.  ;)

 

The traditional post-tree-picking hot chocolate.

 

The two of us just goofing off...

Oh Christmas Tree

Today was the day.  I didn't really sleep last night, so I just checked the weather around 7 a.m. and texted my student that we were out of luck on the weather for any flying.  My guy with a checkride coming up Monday postponed it for after the holidays, so that took the pressure off there.  It rained a little throughout the morning, then cleared off, so around 2 or so we went out to "Cruise In Trees" to pick out a family tree.  Kaylee is big into tradition right now, so we go to the same place, and it's always dreary the day we go too, usually rainy, and we get hot chocolate while we're there, and I take pictures, and then we go to Omeletti's restaurant afterwards for breakfast, no matter what time it is.  So that's exactly what we did.  She had trouble deciding between two trees, then finally she apologized and said goodbye to the tree she didn't choose, and hugged the one she did, and we were off and running.

We got back home a few hours later, and got the tree up on the stand in the living room.  This is the first real tree we've ever had that didn't have serious leaning/standing issues.  The last two years we had to tie our tree straight up so it wouldn't fall over on us, taking string and wrapping around the trunk and attaching it to the window knob.  This year the tree stood firm and tall and steady in there.  Success!

That gave us about 40 minutes or so to get ready for the airport Christmas party, which was lovely, as always. Several of my new students came and had a good time, which was great, and I have two more folks who took my email address on a napkin, who want to get going too.  Both ladies, interestingly enough.  I already currently have three female students.  Very unusual...  One of the upcoming ones is already an ANG Apache helicopter pilot who needs her fixed wing certificate by Spring so she can legally compete in an aerobatics competition as PIC with a safety pilot in the back seat.  Pretty neat.  :)  We got to say hello and spend time with lots of folks; this year I went smarter and wore less attractive shoes that were at least comfortable, which was a good thing as we didn't sit down once all evening.  They'd have had to carry me out if I had worn heels.  :D

Guess I'd better get some rest, as tomorrow is The Big Decorating Day around here.   It needs to begin to look a bit more like Christmas in this place!  And oh yeah, I need to get presents some time too.  Kaylee's getting harder to buy for...

I'll put up pictures tomorrow.  Tonight, I'm sleepy!

Friday Finds Us Again...

I woke up with a clear head this morning.  All right....!

Had one flight this morning in the Champ, and then I got out of the plane to send them off on a second solo, and on their first landing, the engine quit after they landed.  Well, that kind of put a damper on the whole solo thing.  I took the plane out next, and I did my best to make the engine quit.  Threw in the throttle from idle, no carb heat, high on final and slipping all the way down with the power at idle, drastic and rapid throttle changes, but no matter what I did, it would not quit.  I'd have felt better if it had. I hate not knowing why something does something it does not normally do.  I don't like some mysteries.  But as best as I can tell, it's fine.  *sigh*

Lunch was busy today, packed out with lots of people and lots of fly-in traffic too, which is awesome for mid-December.  At the end of the lunch hour, Dennis arrived in the PT-26, and I went up with him and did some flying and takeoffs and landings.  Short field, regular, wheel and 3-point.  That airplane's pretty hard to botch up a landing on.  Of course I said that about the Citabria too.  But it is.  The only things it could use is 1) more power and 2) rudder trim.  Other than that, it's a nice trainer airplane.  More forgiving than the Cub. Actually, all that forward visibility almost messes me up-the sight picture is like a nose dragger.  It was a beautiful day to go fly.  Light winds, blue skies, 45 degrees or so; I left the canopy open and enjoyed the breeze.  Got back down and found a half dozen people sitting inside observing--I'm just surprised none of them came out with score cards.  ;)

Kaylee and I have a little tradition, when I pick her up from school.  She usually asks me to go to some place clear on the other side of town for a treat, and if I'm not running right back out to the airport, I'll oblige.  We have a nice time on the 30 minute drives there and then home, talk, sometimes about serious stuff, sometimes about goofy stuff, but just...talk.  It's nice.  I enjoy it.

I'm more an internalizer than an externalizer, for both good and bad things.  For example, sticking with good things, when I got the geneticist call that Kaylee was a healthy baby girl, I was at the office with Steve. There was another guy in there that Steve was talking to, so I couldn't tell him yet. For a little while I was the only person in the world who knew that I was carrying a healthy baby girl, and it was like a shiny little gift inside that was all the more special because only I knew it. I remember telling Steve when that guy finally left, and then we told our parents, and eventually the "world".  Telling the world is also fun, but for awhile, like I said, it was this shiny gift box inside that wasn't unwrapped and handled by a bunch of people, it wasn't tainted by reactions or owned by others too, it was just our special thing. I loved that feeling, that quiet joyfulness. You walk around smiling to yourself until you're ready or able to open the box and share.   Of course, sometimes most people don't actually care about what's in the box, either, kind of taking the air out of your balloon when you do open it (to mix metaphors in the middle), but that's a different story altogether.  ;)

I got done flying today, and the first thing I saw on Facebook was "I've never seen a President cry before.  What an awful day."  I wondered, what on earth did I miss?  Well, of coure I missed that 20 children were murdered in school, shot, along with six adults.  Today, elsewhere, 22 children were attacked in school, with a knife. This is a messed up world.  I can't strongly enough state that I wish the people who took all those lives and then their own would just start with their own...

Tomorrow I have a conflict of interest.  I have a kid who needs a Christmas tree, whose Christmas tree place is only open Saturday and part of Sunday.  I have a student who hasn't been able to fly in weeks who scheduled me for Saturday for the whole morning.  I have another student who scheduled a checkride for Monday who isn't quite ready yet and needs to fly.  I have a Christmas party to go to in the evening.  And it's supposed to rain tomorrow, which will potentially affect all but the party...so tomorrow is completely in flux.  We shall see!

Used Up

I had a whole long post made up, then decided I wasn't ready for that after all.  What that means is that I used up all my available brain power for the day for no visible results.  That on top of the algebraic equations and word problems I was helping Kaylee with, and I'm ready to kick back and stare at the TV and yawn and drool for the rest of the night while Kaylee reads her book and Steve goes off and brings home the bacon (er, 100LL) on a computer job.  ;)

I only had one flight today, which only lasted for .7 (and I was still tired by the end of it, which is pathetic, but hey, I'm getting better each day).  Our lunch hour took over 2 hours.  For some reason the restaurant was packed out, and apparently they decided we needed seated and served last.  Good thing none of us had flights right after lunch or we'd have had to leave after an hour of waiting.

My stretching and arm exercises are going well, and I've regained a decent amount of range of motion and strength over the last week. Still more to go, but getting there.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to fly the PT-26 after lunch; we'll see if weather or his schedule cancels us again--we've been trying to fly for months now, and every time we're scheduled, one of those two things cancels us. It's almost a jinx by now.  :)  We shall see.

The Texas Aviation Association Foundation has asked pilots to participate in the PLEDGE program.  This is an acronym to remind pilots not to crash.  PLEDGE is short for "Peek into each gas tank, Look at weather, Do not stall, Ground hurts (no buzzing), Exclaim (shout 'Gumps') on approach."  The slogan is "I PLEDGE not to Crunch it or Die When I Fly".  Well gee, because up until now, most pilots didn't really care if they crunched it or died when they...flied.  ;)  And "Do not stall".  Really?  You think people are doing that intentionally, will be flying along over their head and say "Oh wait, I pledged not to stall, but otherwise I would have."  I know, they're trying to cover the top accidents in General Aviation and remind pilots of those accidents in the hopes more will avoid them.  I do hope it's effective for the non-sarcastic group of pilots out there...

I canNOT believe it's Friday already.  This whole week went screaming by.  It's nuts.  I have a lot to do coming up fast and not a lot of time in which to do it.  :O  But for tonight, it's time to reeeellllaaax...

Twofer

I didn't wake up feeling so well-I'd had to take some medicine to breathe and get to sleep last night.  So I took it easy all morning, drank my water, slept off and on, took my vitamins, my morning flight canceled on their own, and my afternoon flight didn't want to fly with me after I warned them I might be contagious.  So instead it was the day to go back to Ohio.  Nathan and I left after lunch, he being more brave and willing to risk my potential contagion. He's been trapped in an airplane with my germs more than once.  lol  It was a severe clear, smooth, easy VFR day.  On the way home I just put on the autopilot, turned up the tunes, and cruised home. My head was starting to hurt from my sinuses and the pressure changes, but not bad.  It was just hard to believe that I'd just started my day, and by the time we got back the sun was pretty much down and it was the end of the day in a blink.  I was supposed to fly tomorrow morning early, but I rescheduled that one--I'm okay once I get going, through evening, but early mornings when all that gunk is in your head/lungs before you get really moving, bleh.

12/12/12 was a pretty special day, actually.  I'll have to explain another time.  For now I'm tired and Kaylee wants to cuddle, and my big girl words don't seem to be working properly anyway.  :)

Long and Overly Detailed...

Woke up early this morning, took Kaylee to the school bus, then went out to Kokomo to take the Aerostar over to Ohio.  My chase plane wasn't ice equipped at all, and I didn't want much on me, either, so we looked it over together and came up with a plan..  Originally he was going to leave half an hour before I did so we'd get there about the same time, but that didn't pan out.  I ended up taking off first, IFR, and he was looking to scoot under everything VFR.  But I got on top of the clouds at 4000' and there wasn't a bit of ice in it, and severe clear above, so I called him up and told him, and he picked up his IFR and came on up too.  We texted back and forth in the air some too, and when I got to Akron I was given the ILS 19.  The ice was around 5-6000' if you got into the clouds, but we were out of the clouds almost the whole flight, and down lower where we were in them there wasn't any ice.  So it worked out well.

(Sunrise over the clouds)

It was really pretty up on top of the clouds, and it was a nice flight over.

(In between layers, prop phenom)

It's funny, someone asked me if I was feeling good enough yet for a flight, and I said yes; no fever, no medications, light cough, slightly stuffy, I'm not at 100% but I'm fine for a basic flight like this.  If I waited for 100% I'd probably never go.  ;)  But after I got home, that made me kind of laugh to think about.  I called it a "basic" flight, and it was, but that's all pretty relative.  I'm not bragging with this, but you could make this flight sound more intensive than it was.  "There I was, in an airplane I don't have a lot of time in, taking off and flying IFR, working around ice and a snow shower or two, then hand flying an ILS in an airplane without *gasp* synthetic vision..."  But there was an ice out both above and below, which I took.  The ILS broke out at 800' with 7 miles visibility, which is nice VFR pattern altitude.  Before I took off, I took out a checklist and reviewed power settings and numbers and buttons, and in most airplanes, you get the power setting right for an approach, the rest comes together just fine.  This is no exception.  I could have let the autopilot even do it, but I don't fly steam gauge approaches as often any more, so I wanted to keep current.  It was really just a normal, basic, non-event flight.  And that's kind of nice.  You don't always stay current in this stuff, and I wish you could bottle it up and release it when you needed it.  :)

(I like the view of the plane in the spinner)

 

When I landed, there was a guy on a tug waiting for me, and as soon as I shut down the engines, he was hooked up and towing me into the hangar.  Before I even got out of the plane they had pulled up scaffolding and carpeting and I practically couldn't get out of their way fast enough--it was like a NASCAR pit crew.  Come to find out they thought I was going to wait there on the plane. I told them they could stand down a bit, that it was going to be there a few days, but until then, they were all over it, man.

I got home about 30 minutes late for lunch, but I just texted my order over while I was about 4000' in the air, and my ETE, and had a nice burger waiting for me when I got there.  I was kind of worn down after that, so I laid down for about 30 minutes before going back out for my last flight of the day, a checkride prep flight for 1.3.  Got home and cooked enchiladas and now I'm about ready for bed.  My nose is stuffing up and I'm sneezing some here, but at least I feel pretty good.  Sleepy after a busy day, but good.

This morning the CAF's L-2 was in the way of the Aerostar, but it's lightweight, and Cusick had gotten the main wheel put back on it at 6 a.m. before my flight.  I had Trey help me move it out, because I'm still trying to be kind to my arms/back here.  But it was so lightweight, that I waved him off and told him to go takeoff, that I could get the Aerostar out and the L-2 back in myself fine.  And then the L-2's tailwheel wouldn't straighten out backwards, so I couldn't push the plane in.  I couldn't get it to break loose for anything, so I had to pick up the whole tail and push/carry the plane all the way back to the hangar.  Bent over, lifting, carrying and pushing was not being kind to my back/arms, but I didn't have a choice any more, as I was the only one there.  Dumb thing.  ;)  I AM better though, and it's a good thing, because I'd not have been able to do that a week ago at all.

Kaylee's got her science fair project figured out for this year (oh yay, science fair), and we'll be digging into that after Christmas.  This year's been a lot different on homework--I haven't had to really force much or drag her into it.  She sometimes huffs a little when she starts it, but she's been an efficient homework machine this year to go with her great grades.  You go girl!

Monday Monday

The Mamas and the Papas just ran through my head there...

Kaylee was particularly cranky waking up this morning, and I wasn't too happy either.  Neither of us felt great, but she's younger and more robust and by the time she headed off to school she was doing okay.  I stayed home, slept in a little more, drank some water, took a vitamin, and did my best to behave so I could avoid total illness meltdown.  So far so good, we're stuck at "slightly puny", not "sick".  We can handle that.  ;)

My two flights were canceled for a couple of reasons, so I worked on other stuff at home and made a run to Sam's Club.  Ironically we needed bulk kitty wet and dry food and kitty litter, which are very large, very heavy bags, but I was able to handle them all but the 41 lb litter bag, which is waiting in the backseat of the Suburban for Steve to get.   A really large, unkempt, greasy fellow was in line behind me at Sam's.  He said "Can I use your Sam's Club card?"  I found myself a bit at a loss for a second, and right then his wife waved him over from another line where she was unloading a ton of stuff onto the belt, having found someone else's card to use.  I thought maybe they just forgot it at home, but then the cashier said they come in all the time, refuse to buy their own membership, and mooch off of everybody else, and the cashiers can't tell other people not to let them use their card.  That's pretty lame.  Why don't they get stopped at the front door where you're supposed to show your card, particularly if the store already knows they aren't paying club members?  It's $35 for the year.  If they can afford the hundreds of dollars worth of stuff they were getting, and they come in all the time, they can afford the $35/year, so to do otherwise is to just try to cheat the system.  I don't like cheats.

Kaylee is doing decently-sized real algebraic equations now.  They'd been working on little ones since what, 4th grade or so, but now they're getting more complicated, throwing in squares and negative integers and all that good stuff in the equations.  She's still doing well with it--I can't tell you how glad I am that she's having a better math understanding and background than I had.  Math was my Achilles heel for everything I loved until that Calculus teacher made it all make perfect sense somehow.  She's going to be better at it than I am, and that pleases me.  :)

Steve and Kaylee are going to make our backyard into a "Winter Wonderland" with lights and such.  They went to the store today to look into lights, and the ones she liked were $50 for 10'.  We need about 50' of lights.  Yeah, no. (There's math for you, kiddo. ;)) So, we are currently regrouping and reassessing the plan and what we really need for it...and we're going to leave that thing up until March too, man.  Hey, it's in our own fenced in back yard.  That much effort goes into it two weeks before Christmas, we're going to enjoy it a little longer.  ;)

Sunday Stuff

Well, I lost my Saturday, and Steve lost his Sunday.  He was the one who woke up with a bad headache this morning, and he tried to medicate it (which he doesn't do much) and sleep it off until about 3 p.m. or so.  He's feeling a bit better now, but not a lot.  So, thanks to our fierce headaches, we won't be able to get our Christmas tree until about a week and a half before Christmas now, since they're only open on weekends.  Kaylee wouldn't be sure which is worse--waiting so long to get a tree or not following the tradition of going to This Place to get one.  But it'll happen, just not as soon as she'd have liked.

I couldn't believe I slept all day yesterday, then went back to bed around 1 a.m. and slept through until 9 a.m. again.  I did wake up with a scratchy throat, talking like a frog man, and lightly coughing, but I feel okay.  Apparently we all needed a big ole rest break.  Even Kaylee has slept a lot this weekend. Her poor sinuses are all stuffed up right now, and even with an allergy pill and some Vicks Vapor Rub on her nose, she still can't breathe when she lays down at night.  Poor kid.  I hate it when she gets like that, because there's not a thing I can do to help her. 

Steve and Kaylee brought all our Christmas boxes in from the garage while I had to run out to Kokomo to do a little ground time with someone.  She's got lights up in her room, Christmas music going in the house, and feeling a bit more Christmassy and cheered up about not having a tree up yet.  Me, I just bought my first Christmas present today.  There are what, two weeks left before Christmas?  Yowza.

Bob Costa just talked about how for the second week in a row we had a tragedy in the NFL; this time a Cowboy drove drunk and killed his friend and teammate in a wreck.  I was waiting for Bob to say "And we need to outlaw alcohol, because it's too easy to get your hands on alcohol, and if he hadn't been able to get to alcohol so easily, Jerry would still be alive today."  But apparently Bob thinks only guns kill people and should be outlawed.  Bob, you're a tool.

On the "I must whine" front, I've been having trouble even getting doors locked in planes and hangars and such.  Tonight I almost couldn't get something shut at all.  Being overweight hasn't bothered me as much as it should, but being weak?  I can't stand that.  I've started being very dedicated about my stretching range of motion exercises.  I've been told by more than one professional now that this is a 6-12 month long recovery issue, and if I don't keep working at it, I could lose function or take years to recover.  So I keep stretching and stretching and making it go where it doesn't want to go, which hurts by the way, but aiming for hopefully the lower end of that recovery time.  I've never been physically weak in my life; even when I was skinny, I was very, even unusually strong, so this is, well, I hate this.  The weakness must go.

Enjoyed the Colts game today again, got some good food for this week, and other than everybody getting sick over the weekend, the rainy, foggy, overcast days weren't too shabby for a break.

And...late tonight I came down with a low-grade fever, about 100F.  I could feel it in my skin and eyes.  Ugh, I don't have time for this. That just honks me off!  C'mon... *sigh*

Lost Saturday

The last 15 hours or so have been pretty unpleasant ones around here.  I woke up around 4 a.m. with a mi---mighty big headache.  I got up and took something, went back to bed, and it just kept getting worse, which is unusual.  Took something else, bigger, went back to bed, still no help. My two flights for today were fortunately canceled by bad weather anyway.  I stayed in bed until noon or so, and couldn't break it. Got up and tried to eat something, which decided it didn't want to stay put either.  Took an official med for it, stayed in bed until 3, still bad.  Tried some caffeine and a double dose of the official med, back to bed until 5, finally it started to break, but I was still really sick.  It's after 9 pm now and I'm just now starting to feel back to normal. I lost my whole Saturday, which just makes me angry.  We were going to go get our Christmas tree today if I didn't have to fly, so Kaylee's not happy either.  Of course she woke up not feeling well too.  Headache, really sore throat, plugged up ears.  She took a massive bath, for hours, during which time I tried to shower to feel more human and had no hot water, ;), and she came out feeling better.  Now she's all peppy, at least.  :)   Me, I'm working on it.

Poor Steve was on his own today, and we'd had plans to have a few folks over for a nice dinner, too.  I'd bought the whole fillet, and needed to run to the store today to get all stuff for the side dishes. I ended up not being able to stay vertical for more than about 15 minutes without getting ill, so he found some green beans in our freezer and had one of the guys bring some rolls and wine with him, and the dinner went on as planned.  Mostly.  I just stayed out of the way, since I look like a walking zombie.  ;)  By the time it was done, after 6, I even ate some, and thankfully it decided to sit well, and it was deeee-licious!  He got the fillet a perfect medium-rare...and we have leftovers to enjoy for a few days too.

Just saw a commercial that cracked me and Kaylee up.  It said "Now a social game can get even more social!  Out now, Words with Friends as a board game!  Have your friends over and play in person!"  I looked at the TV and said "That game's been around for decades--it's called SCRABBLE!"  Kaylee said "So they took a board game and made it to play on the computer, and now they're making a big deal of taking the computer game and putting it back on a board.  THERE'S an idea."  Yup...

Here's a blog entry that I couldn't stop laughing at as I read.  It's about body functions, so if those disturb you, don't read.  :)

On a horrible note, there is a video I saw called "Giant Toilet Spider".  A guy goes into a public restroom and lifts the toilet seat, one of those that doesn't sit flush on the seat, but has posts to hold it up a little, and underneath scuttles this HUGE, fast, black spider.   It's probably the worst thing I've seen in awhile.  As if I didn't have ENOUGH problems...  You're going to think it's fake, so here you go, if this works, and if it does, blow it up full size, and you're WELCOME.

Friday Festivities

As expected, the rain wiped out my schedule today, but as usual other life things filled it up anyway.  The only thing that slowed me down was morning.  The night before I took a "good" pain pill, a strong one, because I haven't been able to sleep real well for awhile now with my arms hurting.  Can't roll over right, if I lay on one of them (and I am not a flat back sleeper) they ache and burn after a short while of having any weight or pressure on them, and then it's hard to roll over, etc., and Tylenol/Advil wasn't cutting it.  So I took a pain pill before I went to bed last night, and man I had the best night's sleep in...ages.  The only problem was, I couldn't get myself going in the morning.  I was so HARD asleep that I could not kick it in gear until practically lunch time.  I made up for it after lunch though.  I went out to MBros for an errand, to the bank, then the post office to stamp up and mail off our monthly billing, then picked up Kaylee from the bus.  Took her right to Staples where I picked up some business cards and returned some labels, then over to Sam's Club where I picked up a whole fillet for Steve to cook up for some friends coming over.  Kaylee and I got home, then about an hour later we all went out to eat dinner.  We finished a little early, so we drove through the "We Care" lights display on the north end of town.  They do a great job, it was really beautiful!  I took a few photos, but it doesn't really do it justice.  I should have tried a panoramic shot from my iPhone. They even had a dragon of lights connected to a real torch that would blow flame every time he raised his head.  Awesome, man.  The line stalled out at one point as cars ahead of us were stopping and chatting with the "free samples of kettle corn" people.  At this point we were going to be late, so Steve started getting a little very Un-Christmasy Road Rage going.  Finally we were on our way, and we made it to a friend's house just in time for a surprise Glenndale birthday party for Judy.  This is the big 7-0, but that's pretty hard to believe!  I'd guess a good decade younger.  :)  That was nice, I enjoyed hanging out...

It's beginning to look a lot like Chrismtas...  :)

Freely

Kaylee had a good day, nothing exciting, but no big homework and no problems, which in kid land equals a good day!  I took her home then went flying again, and Steve sent me this photo of her on the recliner chair with two cats curled up by her while she read a book.  Such a rough life, huh?  ;)

Got to solo a young lady, L, today in the blue Champ.  We'd flown earlier that morning, but it just wasn't "there".  We were scheduled to fly again several times over the next few days, but the weather forecast is calling for rain until about next Tuesday, and she just needed to get back in the groove.  I was picking Kaylee up from school, and for once I didn't have anything scheduled for the afternoon, and it was a nice, calm afternoon, and I kept feeling this push to call her up and go again. I ignored it for awhile, but I just really felt like we should go again.  She was free, so we did, and she did really well, so I got kicked out of the airplane and she flew until the runway lights were actually almost needed.  Soloes are fun.  :)

News of the Day

When I first heard that "William and Kate" were expecting a baby, I smiled and thought "oh, that's nice."  And then the bombardment began. She's not even out of the first trimester yet, but they came out with composites of what the baby could look like as a boy and a girl, they came up with a list of names, they went into the impact this could have on the fashion industry depending on what she chooses to wear, they covered hyperemesis, they've hit very aspect of it, every news channel, every faux news show like ET, everywhere you look I am bombarded by William & Kate's baby.  For heaven's sake, they are British royalty, why does America suddenly go frenzied on this stuff?  I'm not going to be able to watch TV for awhile when this kid is finally born.  And I cannot imagine BEING them, having to live with the constant microscope of Every Little Thing.  I don't like my privacy being compromised, and I really, really wouldn't like everything I do, say, wear, everywhere I go, being picked through, looked at, conclusions drawn, analyzed, and put forth back out there to the world as if the speculation has a right to be made and is often assumed to just be correct, without them even knowing all the aspects of it.  I would never, ever make it as British royalty.  ;)

Kaylee came home from school today and said "Well, I have news, I'm not sure if it's good or bad."  Uh oh.  Then she told me that her teacher had kicked her out of math class today, and sent her off with the Advanced Math class.  Kaylee says she doesn't want harder math.  And she's had all A's all year, so she doesn't want this to make her slip in math.  I told her, if you have trouble, bring your book home and we can catch you back up to where they are.  So the little bugger looks at me and says "Well, Mom, do you think you'll even know how to do it now?"  HEY.  I've had college Trig, a couple semesters of Physics, Calculus, and...and okay, no, I'm not actually sure that I'll know how to do it without looking it up again.  But still.  I bet I can figure it out eventually.

So on this pilot board there's a guy who, let's say "put himself out there" by posting a video of himself dressed up as a "furry".  This is where grown men and women put on animal costumes, take on a persona, etc.  If you saw a CSI episode about furries, which I did and was distinctly disturbed by, apparently that's not the norm.  So anyway.  This pilot makes videos of himself dressed up as a giant dog and posted them.  I can't say why exactly I find that creepy, other than the fact that a guy is dressing up like a giant dog and going in public to do stuff, but this is still America and I don't have to "get" it, as long as he's not hurting anybody and it makes him happy.  But I'm watching one of these strange videos, and Kaylee walks in behind me and says "WHAT are you WATCHING?"  I said "It's a guy who dresses up like a big dog and goes out in public and interacts with people as a character."  She walked away muttering "That's just messed up."  I started laughing, and told her I was going to tell him she said that.  She was horrified.  "You can't tell him that, it'll hurt his feelings!"  I said "The guy dresses up like an animal and goes in public.  He apparently wants the attention.  I doubt you'd be the one to offend him."  But she still didn't want me to post that, so I didn't.  Yet. We had the "live and let live" conversation, but I was kind of glad she didn't say "Oooh, I want to do that too!" Go ahead and call me a stick in the mud, I don't mind, but I would be really uninterested in going out in public with my daughter (or anybody else) as a Furry.  Although, a big animal head and paw sticking out of the T-6...nah...  ;)

Today was beautiful.  I flew at 8:30 at Kokomo, again at 10 at Glennale, break for lunch, back to Kokomo at 1:30, and then one more at 3:30.  Smooth skies, warm sunshine, light winds, and in one day I did basically a Flight Review flight, a pre-solo tailwheel landing flight, an instrument lesson, and private checkride prep.  Four different things in one day, even got home before dark this time.  Oh, and I even got to have fun with Ty.  I heard him make a radio call in the Luscombe, that he was departing the area to the south.  So I got on the radio and said nothing but "You need an escort?"  It was really quiet for a minute, then the guy in the plane with him (Mark) said "How much does she cost?"  I came back with "About 40 gallons an hour."  Silence for another second and then Ty came on and said "WHERE ARE YOU."  I said "Oh, Kokomo."  He said "Are we safe??"  I didn't say another word.  I was in the 172, with a primary student, so yes, he was safe, but he didn't need to know that.  A girl has to get her fun in on the day somehow.  Made me smile for a good 10 minutes.  Totally worth the excessive and unnecessary public radio chatter.  ;)

Tales

Hey, I know you're all on the edge of your seats here, but my back/arms is/are better today, not 100%, but much better, and just being able to pull a shirt over my head or buckle my seat belt again makes me feel downright chipper.  ;)

There's another accident that got under my skin.  Here's the bottom line: Ten family/friends fly to Florida in two different airplanes. Sunday they leave Florida at the same time, headed for the same destination, Greensburg, Indiana. Weather is IFR, but not bad. And then the weather worsens a bit, and Greensburg falls to 1/4 mile and patchy fog. Airplane #1 with six people on board diverts to Columbus, Indiana, which has an ILS, is only 17 miles away, and has better reported weather. Airplane #2 with four people on board decides to go for Greensburg, which has only non-precision VOR and GPS approaches (and a NOTAM that some of the lights weren't working). Airplane #1 lands safely and everyone gets home a little late, but gets home. Airplane #2 ends up with wreckage scattered over 3 acres of land, killing off two sets of parents, leaving four daughters and two sons as orphans. Right before Christmas, though there's no good time to be orphaned. By all accounts the pilot was a smart, kind, good man, new to the airplane,and a fairly new instrument pilot.  He'd only been flying that plane for a month, only had his instrument rating for a year or so. Did he descend down into trees because he was just too far behind the new plane and didn't realize he was busting minimums? Did he try to go under the minimums on purpose because it was his home base and he "knew" it so well? It was reported he may have tried a circling approach, at night, below minimums. Whatever happened, it wasn't a stall out on go-around--he drove into the ground.  Two pilots, same way same day, same conditions, two choices, two consequences.  If this accident doesn't end up in some safety seminars somewhere someday, I will be really surprised, because I don't know how you can better portray pilot judgment and decision making than taking two planes on the same trip making two different decisions and having these results...

Having no flights today let me finish up a lot of what I had left to do, so I'm feeling pretty good about that.  It's not often I have two full days off in a row during the week, and I took advantage of them.  Tomorrow looks like it'll be packed solid with flights and the weather looks good, so giddy-up.

We almost had a crisis.  I couldn't find Deenie the Elf.  Normally I keep her in a specific spot, but she just wasn't there.  I searched every place in the house I could have hidden her.  I imagined the day Kaylee asked about her and I had to say she didn't come back this year aka I couldn't find her.  Yikes. Eventually I found her right where she always used to be, just better hidden.  It's not that Kaylee believes in the elf magic any more, but she is big on tradition and Deenie is a big Christmas tradition around here.  Deenie has been sitting on her bed since this afternoon, but Kaylee hasn't been in her room all evening.  When she finally goes to bed she'll spot her. I kind of look forward to that.  :)

I saw this and loved it.  You're absolutely right sir, you ARE ahead of me.  You go.

Monday Morning

I got Kaylee's bowl of cereal poured and was rubbing her back and telling her to get up, when Steve came walking in and said "Two hour school delay!  Fog!"  From the motionless lump under the covers came a quiet but somehow still exuberant "Yessssssssssssssss".  So we all went back to bed, and Happy Monday.  ;)

The weather killed off my flights, which worked out just fine because I had a lot of things to do, and I still do.  I could use another day or two, and I may get it--tomorrow has a 70% chance of rain, supposedly.  I could list what all I did, but it would bore both of us...suffice it to say it was productive.

I'm still hurting, though it's better.  Thinking of hunting down a chiropractor.  Maybe.  If I do, I want one that cracks, not one that thumps.  The cracking is most of the fun. I'm sure Steve would like to come with me and listen to all that cracking.  ;)

Kaylee had a good day of shortened school, minimal homework, and has been reading all evening.  She's re-reading her Warrior cat books again, waiting for the next one to come out several months from now.  I don't know how many times she's read those, but she loves them, and keeps on reading and enjoying them each time.  Best $5 a pop we've probably ever spent...

Weekend Update

Weekend Update with Saturday Night Live is much more entertaining than this.  I don't really have anything; it's just been a weekend to catch up on a few things, relax a little, do some house work, Steve's working on projects, Kaylee enjoyed going to play at a friend's house for a few hours, I stopped to pick up a few things we needed and had a flight today, etc.  This was a photo flight today, just someone taking a picture of their family homes towards a Christmas present. At one point I opened the window for their camera, and my finger hooked on the latch, the wind caught the window and blew it open and yanked my arm backwards and out the window.  I saw stars for a minute-my arm can't go that way right now.  Well, actually, I stand corrected, because apparently it can...

I'm sitting here watching the Colts lose, guess I'll update my logbook again and get a few more things done before Monday strikes back.

P.S. The Colts just scored a winning touchdown with 0 seconds left on the clock.  That was fantastic, and I enjoyed it a great deal.  ;)