Yawn

My first student was at noon today.  I went next door this morning to take care of Ann, and she was fine until I walked in, then decided her stomach hurt and went into the bathroom and stayed there.  Eventually I had to leave, so I made her breakfast, coffee, milk, and meds, set it all out with a note on it, and I left.  I heard later she did end up taking them, so that's good.  Tonight I went over at 6:45 pm and her lights were all out, she had locked the screen door so I couldn't easily get in, and when I did get in, she hadn't taken her dinner meds that Steve gave her.  So I gave her all those plus her bedtime pill.  She didn't argue with me this time.  Yesterday she argued with Patsy, the lady that comes to help some evenings, and refused to take her meds with her. When she argues with me, I just force it anyway.  Patsy is too nice and won't.  I'm treating her like a stubborn child who just needs to do what I say because I now know best.  *sigh*

My noon student is a teenager who seems to have no ability for flying whatsoever.  He has a lot of time now and still can't take off, climb out, hold an airspeed, level off within several hundred feet.  He really likes flying, but he really doesn't have the aptitude.  It remains to be seen if he'll be able to learn it or not within the time frame that his parents are willing to spend the money to do.  He can't do more than two things at once.  So climbing out is holding a heading, holding in right rudder, and holding a pitch attitude or airspeed.  He'll give me two of those three, but never all three at once.  He won't level off or roll out or do anything without being told.  So I wrote down all the steps to level off, climb, descend, take off, and told him to study them, memorize them, and then next time we flew I wanted him to do those things without me telling him what to do.  If he can't...he doesn't have a ton of time left to start making progress before his parents will pull the plug on the money, and I don't blame them.  They want this for him because he has physical issues, isn't a "popular" kid, and he really likes the flying thing.  But they don't have the money to just throw away, either...

After that I took the Aerostar up five different times to try to work on the strut.  The left strut is way too high, right one is too low.  So I'd land on the left main to try to bring it down, I would, and then on the taxi in, the left wing would raise up again.  Spencer and Jon would take out air, I'd run it around again.  It got to be kind of fun, so I started messing with the Aerostar on landing.  I "killed" both engines with gear and full flaps down, and my descent rate was like 2500-2700 fpm, pointing down aggressively to keep my speed up.  So then I did half flaps, and then no flaps.  I'll tell you what, if you lose both engines in that airplane, keep the flaps up and you're still in for a ride down to the ground with a very high rate of descent/sink rate, and you'd better time the level off properly.  It gave me more insight into the fatal Aerostar accident here where he was misfueled and both engines quit.  It's not what we train for.  We train for single engine ops, not no engine ops.  No engines is just...aggressive.  It was a good exercise.  I'm glad I did it.

Steve's cousin Jeff P is here tonight.  We went to dinner at Marble tonight and enjoyed a good steak and some good Malbec.  I brought some chocolate cake home to enjoy later.  Don't need that on my waistline.  Gonna enjoy about half of it tonight and the other half tomorrow.  Enjoy it twice, spread out the calories.