This day was sort of a disaster. In fact, let me find the good things that came from this day first. One of them was spending two hours shopping for clothes, etc. with Kaylee, who has outgrown her shoes (she wears a bigger shoe size than I do now! HA!) and needed new jeans and so forth. The only reason that was good was because I enjoy spending time with her and she got what she needed and was happy, even though it involved a very tired me spending a lot of time shopping. The second good thing that came from this day was a new pan that Ann got for us--that's a great pan/skillet. :) The house is clean as of today. That's good. Let's see. The fourth and last good thing I can think of that came from this day was that it didn't get any worse. It was bad enough that nothing else went right, and good enough that at least nobody got hurt. Except Steve, I guess.
I couldn't fall asleep last night for anything, so after I got Kaylee up, I was going to go back to sleep for an hour or so, but Steve woke up feeling really bad. So he went back to bed and I got ready, took Kaylee to the bus, and then went ahead and went out to Kokomo. I had a trip to Louisville, Kentucky this morning, but I was an hour early out to the airport because of taking Kaylee. I was slowly getting stuff ready, when my flight plan came through and said I'd be arriving in KY at 9:15 a.m. That wasn't right, I should be arriving at 8:15 a.m. This was a mandatory bid meeting, meaning he HAD to be there by a specific time, or they lose out on a project they spent time working on. Come to find out, Louisville isn't under Central time, it's Eastern, and we were going to be an hour late. This is very bad, and on me. I shot him a text and said we had to leave as soon as he could get here, and why. He booked it on out, we took off VFR out of Kokomo because Chicago's controlling agency is still down and Grissom takes awhile to get your clearance and we didn't want to wait any more, and we did make it to Louisville in time. We were on final for landing. He put the first notch of flaps down, then the second, I glanced over and saw the flaps didn't go down any more. He put in full flaps--nothing. The flaps had failed after about 15-20 degrees. Not great, but not too bad, at least they didn't fail all the way down this time. I wasn't feeling very well. I went up to the pilot's lounge, but their WiFi didn't reach upstairs, and we still can't use our 3G because we are trying not to run out of data minutes for the month since Kaylee made an error. I hung out downstairs for awhile so I could catch up on a few things, and then went upstairs, no computer, no phone, no iPad, no TV, so I walked for awhile. I was trying to get info from Steve on fixing the flaps, but he was in worse shape and had gone back to bed to try to recuperate. Soon it was time for us to head back. Some time was spent working on the flaps. We took off and went home VFR for a few reasons. We ran into a little trouble there. We had an issue with two other things on the airplane on the way home. When we got back to Kokomo, we had a nice crosswind gusting up to 26 knots, on the shorter runway, without our flaps, which wasn't a big deal, except it was fairly gusty. D was landing, but his shoe caught on a plate on the floor of the plane. His shoe ripped the screws out of the plate and the plate bent and ripped halfway out of the floor, and just above the runway in the midst of a nice gust and a sudden slightly unusual attitude, he wasn't able to get to the rudder. This is where being an instructor comes in handy, those last-second...take-overs. You're good, you're good, you're good, you're...WOW NOT GOOD! Heh. By the time I got the plane put away, I was all done with the plane for the day. In fact, I thought it seemed like a good day to stay down from there on out. I had two more students, one brand new in the pattern, neither needing the conditions of the day at the time anyway. So instead I took Kaylee shopping. Two hours later we were home, I fixed a poor dinner, put away everything I'd bought, and have sat in this seat trying not to take a nap ever since.
Meanwhile, Steve's day was no better. He was sick, bad enough sick he couldn't think or leave the house or even work on the computer with any effectiveness. So of course today a major computer customer had a serious problem. He had at least one pretty good-sized problem at every airport to deal with. And then I had a problem I needed his help with. I won't go into all his problems, but his day was particularly rugged too.
The T-6 is back in the hangar with the broken door, and that'll be the end of it until sometime next Spring.
Having been sick means you get tired faster even when you're back on the upswing. It's good to be home!
And Kaylee, Kaylee had a great day, and a great week, and that's the best good thing of all. :)
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