Alive

It's been a rather busy several days of some things. I completed my online Cirrus transition training, and my first date with the instructor is Wednesday, just an overview of stuff on the ground, plane preflight, cockpit stuff, etc.  That training took forever, but the plane has a lot of interesting features, including auto land. It'll fully land itself, hit the brakes and shut off while talking on the radio to the frequency. It automatically switches fuel tanks too, every 5 gallons. On its own. The avionics are fancy and complicated and new, so that'll be what takes as much time as anything to figure out.

Today I took the 340 over to OH to pick up a guy who was dropping off the Cherokee Six for annual. A wall of unforecast low clouds was in between us and the airport. Morgan was with me, flying, and I'm watching the weather, and listen to our airport which says it's fine, and she says "Do you want me to just keep going"? and I'm like...yes but then Nope, I don't like this. I can't see through it, we're already at pattern altitude, can't go any lower, and the clouds seem to go all the way down. So I took the controls and turned around, then found an area where I could go behind it. Meanwhile, the other guy just went straight in to the airport. There's no way he didn't hit that, he's not an IFR pilot so he probably just had the autopilot on, he wouldn't admit it, and he's lucky the airport itself was okay.  Not a good judgement call.

On the way out, he asked how we were going to get home and at what altitude, and I said I filed IFR for 4000', so...legally. 

Tonight we're packing to go to Gunnison for the weekend. We won't be back until Sunday evening with a busy day Sunday. But we'll get to spend a couple days in Colorado, which will be lovely.

I have been having trouble sleeping the last half of a night. I wish there was something I could take to help me sleep from 3 am on that wouldn't leave me gorked out the next day. *sigh*

Will try to catch up more later. Just letting folks know I'm still alive out here.