Today's the first day I really felt better better. I spent most of the last week sitting on the couch not doing anything. Except blowing my nose, dozing off, and coughing. Today I scanned in all my receipts from trips I took when I first got sick, billing, all that good stuff. Caught up on email, yadda yadda.
Yesterday I had my first flight in a few days. I was supposed to get up at 3:30 am, get to Marion by 5 am, fly the Meridian to Sarasota, Florida, get back by 2:30, get to Frankfort by 3:30, fly the Conquest to Marco, FL and back, and get home around midnight. I knew I couldn't do it, so I canceled the Meridian, told him I was still sick (and he didn't want to catch it anyway), and took Cameron with me to fly to Marco at 2:30 pm.
It didn't go super smoothly. I flew the leg down and had a bit of trouble shortly after takeoff on climb-out, then it was fine the rest of the way down. The right engine torque gauge dropped to zero somewhere along the way, but the engine was running fine, so I ignored it, and just matched the "throttles" by ear and position. We landed, topped off with gas, and when we went to leave, I had told Cameron it was his leg. He pulls out without waiting for instructions, and doesn't quite do it right, before I can talk he's shoving things forward and rolling and things aren't going well. Finally we get rolling and the plane drifts right and it feels like he's hitting the left brake and I'm like "no brakes" and he says "I'm not" and he says "Should I abort" and finally we abort and roll to the end and get off. We'd called for our clearance and only had a 5 minute window which we were now going to miss. He says he wasn't on the brakes and I said he needed to bring the right engine up more. We didn't have a torque gauge to tell us how much power it was producing but it seemed obvious it needed more. So he picks up the clearance again, annoying the guy, and goes to take off again, and it still doesn't feel right. He aborts. We taxi back. I do a run down the runway, and push the right all the way to the stop and it's not producing full power compared to the left, you can tell. So I abort. Go in, taxi in, and call Ethan over my headset, who calls the Weststar maintenance guy. We call clearance and tell them we have a maintenance problem and our clearance was canceled. I shut down the plane, restart it, and the torque gauge works this time. Maintenance guy says to turn the torque to manual, and then it hits me. If the torque gauge wasn't working, then the computer must not be giving us the power because it thinks we're not getting enough. But now that the gauge is working, I do another test run down the runway, and it works. I abort. Taxi back. Cameron picks up the clearance again, and the annoyed guy clears us for take off. Cameron says I should do it and he'll talk, so I take off, and it works fine. We get in the air and I call off the ground and clearance guy sounds so tired when he says "You're squawking 1200 and you need to call departure, not clearance". Cameron had forgotten to put the squawk in and neither of us had switched frequencies. It was super embarrassing. I just said "Sorry" on the radio and switched over while Cameron plugged in the squawk. We were like...I swear I am a professional. I can't go back there for awhile. I'm hoping I don't get the same controller when I got back in 4 days. The whole day was awkward and difficult for several reasons. Cameron's a good kid but we just don't work smoothly together, for some reason. We have trouble communicating clearly with each other, so everything just feels a little difficult.
Kaylee came over today, and we watched The Sound of Music, because we were talking about it and it had been a long time and we decided it was a good evening for it. We had talked about It's A Wonderful Life, which was on tonight at 8 of course, and I am about to make my mom sad, but I realized why I don't enjoy the movie much. It's depressing. You spend an hour and 45 minutes of the 2 hour 10 minute long movie watching a man's life go downhill. He has dreams and goals and desires, but one at a time every chance he has is taken away from him by a cruel twist of fate. Everyone close to him is happy, successful, rich, famous, his brother, his best friend, etc. They get to travel, to follow their dreams, while he stays behind and scrabbles. Then his stupid drunk uncle bankrupts him and destroys what he had left. Then you get to watch him spiral out of control. The whole thing is SAD and depressing. Sure, at the end he learns his lifetime of sacrifice was "appreciated" by the townspeople and it mattered that he was alive, and the townspeople come together and save his bacon this time. But it's how many minutes of happy conclusion after how long of watching the depressing? If it wasn't for his wife, I'd say he had have come to that bridge a lot sooner. It's no wonder we cry at the end of the movie. It's like..."oh thank God something decent happened to that poor man after all those years!" ;)
Anyway. Tomorrow we're going to cook bacon and pancakes at our house, then go over to Kaylee's house and make eggs, and have brunch and open presents and hang out and rest.
Steve just told me to go to bed because I'm coughing a lot more again. I'm not sleepy though. I'll suck on some cough drops and try to stop that for now...
Marco Sunset
Leaving Florida
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