End of Watch

I'll be going to bed early tonight, getting up at 6-ish, driving an hour to Frankfort, and being wheels-up in the 340 by 8 am.  I am going to try to go non-stop to Marco Island, Florida tomorrow.  It's right at the edge of my range, so I'm going to have to power back to 60-65% power to get there, and I'll still have some things in play.  Right now I've got 50 kt tailwinds to help push me there.  It's VFR so I won't have to have enough to shoot an approach and go elsewhere and have reserves.  So...IF it stays VFR, and IF the tailwind stays as strong as it's forecast (which won't help on the way home!) and IF Florida doesn't re-route me around a bunch (which is in doubt), then I'll be able to make it non-stop the 900 miles down to Marco Island.  The trip home is going to be painful.  Hefty headwinds, and can't even be full of fuel because of the load onboard.  So two fuel stops at least, powered back to a slower speed to extend the range, and it'll take us 6 hours or better to get back.  *sigh*  Gonna be a long day.

I had one student today, and we were able to get up for an hour and do crosswind takeoffs and landings.  The winds were about 40° off at around 11 knots, which isn't much, but the runway was covered with compact snow and patchy ice.  Couldn't hold the brakes to do the runup, so I did a rolling run-up.  It's a student pilot pre-solo working on landings, and we HAD to land straight in the crosswind or go sledding across the runway, so I had to help on a couple of them that I wouldn't have had to touch if it was a dry runway.  But it was good practice for him for an hour, and I got to go sliding across the runway a couple of times for the fun of it, so... ;)

Really, I didn't even want to go today.  I was looking for an excuse to cancel. It's cold, the runway is slick-ish, I hadn't been outside all day, not even to lunch, so an object at rest wants to stay at rest, and I didn't want to get up, get out, go freeze, go fly around the pattern for an hour.  But once I got out there, it was good to go and get it done for the kid, who is trying to solo as soon as he can, and has had one set back after the other, mostly medically, also with work, and now his instructor (Jerry) has been gone for over a month.  So...it was good to get him up.

Kaylee called tonight and we talked for an hour.  She's having a hard time getting up in the mornings for her classes, having a hard time focusing on her homework.  She says she'll set a timer for an hour to work on something and find herself staring into space.  She's always taken longer than what I considered normal to DO stuff.  I can clean her room in 45 minutes, it takes her an entire weekend.  She'd take all night to do her homework I coulda had done in a couple hours.  It's painful to watch.  I think it's in part the generation of kids who grew up on phones and computers who always have data in front of them, who never get bored, who never had to focus or think about stuff, and their brains don't know how.  She says this semester she's having a harder time than ever before, but I know winter doesn't help with motivation, especially for early morning stuff.  It doesn't for ME, either.  Seriously.  I may have to find a way to wake her butt up early in the morning so she'll get to class.  I can't help with the homework though...  She mostly seems in good spirits, seems to mostly have her head on okay.  She needs to watch getting behind at school when she only has 12 credit hours this semester, but other than that I think she's not doing too badly.

The view out the window today.

You can see the snowplow pulled off on one of the taxiways to get out of my way so I could land.