Productive

This morning I started off with a long flight in the Cub.  My legs were a little cramped up after almost 2 hours in the plane, but it was actually kind of fun.  We left the door and window hanging wide open, even though it was a little cool, and did a bunch of three point and wheel takeoffs and landings, with a couple of good solid bounce recoveries. ;)  The Cub did bite me--right on the elbow, cut it open and made me bleed on stuff.  It's right where you rest your elbow on anything, which is annoying! 

I only had one other flight for the day, and it was late in the evening, and I was able to send the guy off on his first solo.  Always great fun.  He was pretty excited, all smiles, and he did great.  He was doing well enough that I hadn't seen him recover from a bounce, and I needed to see him recover properly from a bounce.  So I told him on one of his landings I was going to make him bounce it, which I did (that's harder to do properly than you might think), which still shocked him, but he recovered perfectly.  Another couple great full-stall landings, and I was out of there.  I'm happy for him.  He had a whole audience of aerobatic pilots and the FBO guy all out there watching him, but he didn't know that, fortunately. It's always rewarding to send somebody off on their own and see their sense of self-pride and accomplishment when they come back down having defied gravity on their own and survived.  :)

This morning was trash day.  Across the street and a few houses down from us, somebody put a bag of open trash spilling out all over the place.  The trash guy grabbed the bag, but a ton of trash was still left all over the street.  Every time I passed it today, I thought "Somebody should pick that up."  Finally when I got home tonight around 8:30 pm from my last flight, I figured that somebody was going to have to be me since nobody else was doing it.  So I grabbed a trash bag and went over there and started picking up their trash out of the road, their driveway, sidewalk, etc.  Pretty soon I heard a guy's voice say "I was going to get that tomorrow."  Sure.  A very large man was sitting on the porch watching me pick up his trash.  So I walked up his steps and picked up a bunch more trash that was left on the steps up to his house, too.  I was polite of course, but I don't understand people sometimes.  Why would you be okay with that mess in your yard and all over your property?  He had a million cigarette butts all over too, but I just picked up the ones in the street and sidewalk with the rest of the trash and left the ton of them on his own steps alone.  I'm no neat freak, but c'mon.  People are gross.

The other day I blocked a woman who was trying to get around a line of us cars who had stopped for an oncoming funeral procession, mad because the light was going to turn red on her.  She kept working her way out of line trying to get over and get going, so I pulled back and over in her path so she couldn't get around me.  She didn't appear happy in there.  (You can imagine how much I was bothered by the fact she was unhappy.)  Just sit there, ma'am, and show a little respect.  It's two minutes of your life.  Somebody just lost someone they love, and people in funeral processions do note when people break in the middle of them or otherwise ignore them, and appreciate people who turn on lights or stop in respect.  Common courtesy things are going away.  Common respect things are going away.  Picking up trash, pausing for a funeral procession, getting over if an ambulance is coming, taking a flag down in a storm, holding a door open for someone with stuff in their hands.  Helping out without having to be forced into it.  Participating and volunteering.  Nearly thirty year old "men" and "women" acting like self-centered, ego-centered, selfish little teenagers, years after they should have outgrown it.  Yep, I'm officially getting old and crotchety, because I find some people pretty disappointing.  That's one reason I was grateful to the 13 year old girl who had the guts to come up to me and apologize in person for breaking my iPad.  Somebody out there is still teaching kids personal responsibility and to do the right thing.  :)

Kaylee is signed up for singing lessons with a lady she wanted to have for singing lessons.  She's gotten her paperwork in to participate in tennis, including me having to sign a paper allowing them to do random drug testing on her from now until her senior year of high school (mmmm. not thrilled.)  She's picking out a song to use to try out for a singing thing.  I think she's actually kind of glad to be back in the groove in school--she likes having all this stuff to do, she really does...