Sweatbox

Ah, July, how we love thee.  😒

Kaylee had a tough day.  First thing this morning we went to the eye doctor, Dr. Wild.  He's our friend-ish, and the medical doctor to get your 3rd class medical, which she needs for flying, as well as the eye doctor.  Well, Kaylee has color deficiencies, so I scheduled this appointment with him to test her for it, to see if she'd pass the color blindness test or not (Steve passed it for years, barely).  So we went in there, and the lady checked her regular vision too, and she's still 20/20, and I don't know how.  But both near and far vision are 20/20, and that's good.  Then they pull out the color blindness charts with numbers.  She got 7 out of 15 on one eye and 8 out of 15 on the other eye.  You can only miss five, so no, that was a no pass.  The nurse was flipping from one to the next and Kaylee would laugh and say "I got nothin'."  Mike sort of hadn't believed me about her color deficiencies, said "It's highly unusual for females to have this.  7% of men have it, but almost no females."  He asked me if she'd ever been formally diagnosed, etc.  I said no, but it's not hard to know these days of the internet.  :)  Anyway, so he concurred that she had inherited her dad's color vision, which means I must be a carrier of the gene too for her to get it.  They wanted to test her eye pressure too, but she has PTSD from the cornea scratch and the doctor in Ohio who traumatized her.  So they got numbing drops in her eyes, but she could *not* keep her eyes open long enough for them to test the pressure of her eyes.  They finally gave up.  She was not thrilled with this development.

To make her day better, she also had a dental appointment.  It was supposed to be for a "sealant".  She went by herself this time.  She gets in there, and they find a cavity, and there are needles involved, two of them, and she is MAD and scared.  She said "I was told there would be no needles!"  They said "Who said that?!"  Me.  It was just supposed to be sealant!  She didn't want to drive home, she didn't want to stay there, she was mad.  She said this was not a good day!  But I told her it's kind of a good day, because she found out her eyes are still 20/20 and that she can't pass the color blind part of the medical but she will be able to get her 3rd class medical anyway.  She had to do a "lantern test", where they shine white, red and green lights at her, and she has to identify which is which.  If she can pass that, she can get her medical, and she just has to get one medical, and then she can go with Basic Med from then on.  And it's good they catch a cavity before it becomes a real problem, and can fix it, because keeping all your teeth and having no pain is a good thing. So all in all, it was a good day, just not an overly fun one for Kaylee who feels about doctors and dentists like I do.  :/

The rest of my day was flying stuff.  I left the eye doctor place and went to Glenndale for the Flying Squirrels.  I had two boys today.  One named Maximus, and he is a very large boy with big eyes and a lot of fear.  At one point I was saying something to him, and he said "I might look calm on the outside, but on the inside I AM FREAKING OUT RIGHT NOW."  Lol  I think we had fun though, and I helped him with a few things, noticeably, in one flight.  The second fella, I was his 4th flight.  But it was like he hadn't been allowed to do anything.  He hadn't preflighted, so I had him do that.  He kept asking me how to taxi, and usually by lesson 2 they're doing more on that.  He'd stop and say "Should I add power now?" when we're stopped.  Well, yes, that seems appropriate.  And when I talked him through a take-off, he got super excited and said he'd never done that before.  I have all my guys do everything they can on their own from the first flight, so I'm not sure why he was 4 lessons into it and hadn't done a takeoff.  I ought to ask the other CFIs he'd flown with.  Or maybe they talked him through but had to help more than I did.  Anyway.  His turns were awful, too, so I fixed that pretty well I think, and we did some other stuff.  It was a good couple of lessons.

Last flight of the day was in the C-421, and it has air conditioning.  That'll make life easier.  We went to Warsaw and shot an approach, flew around, and I put it into a steep turn nice and slow to get a feel for where the bottom would drop out.  John had asked a question about getting slow, dangerous speeds in a steep turn, like turning base to final, etc., so I demonstrated it for him.  It was a good flight also.

Kaylee has spent a few hours out here chatting with us tonight, about everything in life, and that's always enjoyable.  How many 17 year olds want to spend hours talking to their parents, right?  :)

Headed to bed, as tomorrow on the nice 4th of July holiday, I have a flyover with Larry J in his T-6 and mine down by Noblesville, and I've got a guy coming from Ft. Wayne at 8:30 am to do T-6 training all day.  He must not have fun family events to go to.  So I'll be working all day tomorrow, aiming for safely, of course...