Last night Kaylee and I were sitting in our respective houses, when I heard a loud BOOM/Thwack. I jumped up and looked outside, and saw a big fire glow and smoke. My phone rang right then, and it was Kaylee, who was also outside and hadn't seen me come out. She said "It looks like a house blew up", and she wanted to run over there and make sure people were okay. So I got my phone out to call, while we ran through the alley and through a neighbor's yard, but then heard sirens already, so I put the phone away. We get there, and across the street is a white truck completely engulfed in high flames. It had obviously been on fire for awhile, and long enough for the fire department to make it there right after it finally exploded. They broke out the vehicle windows and put the fire hose on it, and we noticed they didn't have a lot of urgency, nor an ambulance or anything there, so the assumption was nobody was in the vehicle. Thank goodness. I still wonder how that thing caught on fire like that and blew up sitting parked on the side of the road though.
We went back in. She texted me later that it had bothered her and reminded her of the plane crash at Glenndale. I told her I understood why, but the reality is that the only thing those two events have in common is that there was a big fire, and nobody was harmed in the making of this fire. Steve, in the meantime, was sitting on the couch when we got back in--he hadn't heard a thing. He was in the bathroom on the pot when it happened and never knew. Lol
First thing this morning, I was up early to take Kaylee's car down to Tipton to get her oil changed. She was supposed to do it with Steve this morning, but she got called back in to work for an emergency session with a client at 8 am. So instead of Steve doing it, since I had the day off, I did it so he could do other things, and she took my car to work instead. I took my iPad down there and worked on stuff while they did the oil, then they did her alignment which was out of whack, and I made it back home around 11 am-ish.
The rest of today was busy doing organizational stuff for the most part. Scheduling, a lot of scheduling. I spend a LOT of my time doing that and staying organized, but that's a good thing, that I have so much to keep organized. :)
Tonight Steve and I drove down with Morgan to the CAF meeting. It was actually good that I went. The meeting itself isn't super exciting, but seeing all the people can be a good thing and keep me in the loop. I was able to communicate about BOB and past and upcoming things. I had one guy I checked out in the BT-13 a couple years ago come up to me and tell me I was right about something I'd tried to help tweak in on him on takeoffs and landings. He said he'd recently started doing it more "my way" again, and he said "You were right, that works a lot smoother and better, and I just wanted to let you know". I appreciated that! Had the other BT-13 CFI say he needed his checkride, so we're going to set that up, and that will help me as much as it will him. That kind of stuff. I have some homework to do before the next meeting on a couple of things, but it was all good. It's honestly kind of nice to get back into the swing. I was so far out of the swing that they've been doing all these rides events completely without me, and that hasn't happened in a decade now. Until now. It made me want to get back more involved, and looking forward to having a back up pilot so I CAN.
Tomorrow I go to Florida to pick up Kevin. Thursday I take the Cheyenne to PA for its 3-month-long annual (literally), and then get home in time to take the Meridian and Andy to Virginia. Saturday a fly-over of Timber House in the C-45, then taking it down to Indy International at the Fed Ex hub for a Fed Ex event day, as a thank you to them for their support in giving us $10,000 to be able to give veterans "free" rides on the airplane throughout the year. Sunday we leave at 6 am from Frankfort to fly to Bend, Oregon, Steve coming with me and Ethan, to go see the Epic factory, get a tour, and do a test flight afterwards, coming home later that night or first thing in the morning. Ethan is seriously considering buying an Epic and selling the Conquest, serious enough to go out there and look at them in person.
Which reminds me. A lot of things were going wrong for awhile here. It's not all "fine" yet, and there are definitely some things still up in the air and problematic, but you know, one thing at a time. There's a lot of upheaval and uncertainty right now, but things SEEM to be settling in to being okay. Not there yet, but working on it, and hopefully will be. It seems to be one thing in life I've learned as I've gotten older, that all the times I was very stressed out about something even big, in the end, things have tended to work out for the good.
Blow this up and you can see how bad the back of my iPhone is. It's no worse today than it was before it fell out of an airplane almost a mile in the air. ;)
One fully engulfed white truck on the street behind us, after the firefighters already started putting it out. It was a Big Explosion.
The giant cake ball Morgan made for Steve's birthday. ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment