Even though I had to wake up at 4 am, and even though Hamas was calling for a "Day of Fury", and even though it's Friday the 13th, and even though I woke up to low fog in the morning where I was going and forecasts of thunderstorms in the afternoon when I was coming home, and even though my right engine quit running on me for a bit on the way home, it was actually a pretty good day!
I had to go to bed really early last night because I was getting up at 4 am this morning. Kaylee tried to call after I'd gone to bed but I shut her off. Come to find out, there had been an altercation at where she works. One girl provoked another girl, and the second girl went to attack the first girl, and Kaylee stepped in between them and body blocked the girl from hitting the girl. So instead the girl ended up hitting HER. Well, not punching, but slamming into. Kaylee handled it, got in between the two, body blocked the girl, took the 'hit', separated them, and called for help. She was the only one in the house with the six girls at the time. The girl who got provoked into attacking was previously a non-violent kid, an 8th grader, who burst into tears and apologized to Kaylee later. It's a little hard for me to imagine "little Kaylee" in charge of mentally ill troubled teenagers and handling them, but yet she does...
Ann isn't hardly eating any more, but I still usually get her meds in her. She doesn't walk on her own any more, and usually just makes repetitive noises. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah" or "oh, oh, oh, oh, oh". We usually take two of us to get her into the bed at night and he and another lady get her out of it in the morning and change her diaper. She's probably not super far from not getting out of the bed any more.
Like I said, I woke up at 4 am and got ready to go to N. Carolina. When I got up, it was 1/4 mile and 100' and fog down there, and foggy within almost 100 miles of it. That poses a few problems. 1) This is a mandatory bid meeting so they're going to try to go, not just easily cancel. 2) It's going to take me 2.5 hours to get down there and I have about 3.5 hours of fuel, which means I need to have an alternate very close by that I KNOW I can get into. 3) The closest place I know I can get into isn't within that range, which means when I get halfway there, I'm going to have to judge whether or not I think I can make it in. If yes, I go for it, and I'd better be right. If not, I stop halfway there and they miss their meeting and lose a lot of money on me, the plane, and the project. The forecast says it won't burn off until 9 am. We have to be there by 8. So I warn him, and I go to bed, and wake up to the fog. I spend a lot of time looking. I have a plan. I don't know that we're going to get in there, but...maybe. One of the nearby airports is actually at minimums, so maybe we can get in there. But with a 2.5 hour flight, a lot can change, so you just have to monitor it and go. So we did. As we were coming in, the weather was calling for 300' and 1 mile, which we could do. We get with the tower, and they tell us to expect the visual. Sure enough, in a few miles, poof. There was still some ground fog, but we were able to see the runway and just land visually. The darned Merrell Bubble of Goodness as we call it.
I took a car into town and had a nice breakfast at a diner, and enjoyed watching the fog burn off the rest of the way in the area. Tried to take a nap back at the FBO but 1) I can't sleep well in public and 2) People kept making noise and I really can't sleep to noise. So I stayed awake and was whipped from being up at 4 am.
The trip home we are cruising along and the right engine quits. D richens the mixtures, and nothing else. So I told him to turn the aux fuel pump on. He says "High?" I said no, low for now. Then I switch tanks, nothing happens, switch to the third tank, and after another 3-4 seconds, it comes back up. But the tank wasn't out of fuel. Both engines were running off one tank so it wasn't a contaminant. It was kind of odd and I don't know what caused it. It was crossfeeding, but nobody had touched the fuel selector in several minutes. We used the system on the way down, too, and it was fine. We weren't high enough to for it to be moisture in a line that froze. I have no idea. But the engine fired back up and we finished the trip uneventfully and made it in before the bad weather hit Kokomo. So all in all, it was a successful day.
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