Surprise....

Well, this was a productive and interesting one for me, at least for the last half of the day.

After lunch I went to Palmer's Jewelers to pick up Kaylee's birthstone ring that had been repaired. She was really excited to have it back finally. It looks great! While I was there, I walked up to the coffee shop up the street and picked up a French Vanilla Latte. I'm ordering, and the girl behind the counter says "Not to be weird, but I'm Brennan's girlfriend" and I was like "Abby!" Brennan is a kid who works for us at the airport, really good kid, one of our favorites, and probably looking to be the next one we bring up for the corporate stuff. He's an excellent young pilot, another Spencer or Morgan. Anyway, small world.

Steve hits me up right around lunch and says "This is a big ask. But we don't have anyone to do our IMC Club for the EAA Chapter meeting tonight. Would you be willing to get up and talk about flying IFR in your capacity as a corporate pilot?" A) I LOVE public speaking B) I Love public speaking in front of a bunch of people I know and C) I Love *unprepared* public speaking last minute. Right?! Couldn't have hit me with this this a week ago?! 

So after lunch I hit the post office where once again I had a package waiting that the smart locker didn't send a code to me for, so it wasn't so smart, and I had to stand in line again. I deposited some checks, I threw out some old paperwork, paid some bills, did some laundry, brought the trash bins back on our side of the fence, took out the trash from the kitchen, and then once I ran out of ways to procrastinate, I sat down to write out what I could talk about for 15 minutes. Fortunately one thing I actually know about is my own job, IFR flying, and corporate stuff. So I spent about an hour writing out basically a speech, including an opening line to get attention. Not "Hi I'm Laura and I'm here to talk to you about" stuff.  And then I took a break. Re-read it. And then read through it out loud and timed it to make sure it fit in the time frame. And then kept re-reading and talking out loud to try to remember everything I wanted to say in an organized manner. And then wrote up a bullet-point outline and printed it out so I could carry that with me, a way to remember what was "next" that I wanted to talk about, since I didn't have enough time to completely memorize everything. And then went to the airport, and I was first up on the agenda.

I ended up talking about 15 minutes on corporate IFR flying in my world, what it entails, decisions, tricks, things to watch out for that they don't teach you when getting your rating most of the time, yadda yadda. I told a couple of short stories of 'getting it done', how you have to adapt and go to Plan B or C or F sometimes. I did have a couple guys come up and say they were more interested in that "real world" end of things than the normal lessons that the EAA does for the "IMC Club" each month, so that was nice, even if it was just thrown at me and a last-minute 'presentation' without any videos, photos, or props to make it more entertaining.

Later in the meeting, Jerry was up to do the VMC part of it, but the internet failed, and he got stuck because his presentation was all online. So Steve asked me about the Cirrus, and I gave another little talk about the Cirrus this time. It all worked out pretty well in the end. We had sloppy joes and chips and I headed out for home, glad to have that over with.

Tomorrow I was supposed to pick up the Conquest in OH and take it to MI, but it won't be ready until next week, so instead I get to hopefully take up the C-45 for the first time in 5.5 months. I have to go up first myself and do 3 takeoffs and landings to be passenger-carrying current. Then I need to have JP come up, and give him his currency checkride for the CAF, so then he can turn around and do MY CAF currency checkride, as his is expired and mine expires in 2 weeks. Somewhere in there, Morgan will go get current too. 

The problem is that first the airplane paperwork has to be signed off, and that's Nathan's job, and he didn't get it to us tonight like Steve was expecting. That means Nick can't get the paperwork uploaded to the CAF website, which means we can't fly it until those two things get done. So we're on "wait" status again. I sure hope it gets it to us early tomorrow, but he doesn't usually do anything early, so...we'll see. I've got JP waiting for a text for me on when to come up too, and tomorrow is the day to get it done. If not, we're behind. Saturday I run up the T-6 for the first time in six months, and then hopefully it'll be put together and flown this week. I have a guy to checkout in it next weekend, and I haven't flown it in six months. So...I need to get that up and running and get current in it, too. Looking forward to it and nervous about the instructing part of it at the same time. :)

We're supposed to take our cars in for an insurance quote on fixing the hail dents soon. Both me and Steve. Supposedly they do some infrared scanning thing to identify any dents even if they're not super visible, and go in and fix them all. So that's lovely.

Kaylee got home from work tonight very upset. She was driving up to a crosswalk. A woman was starting to walk across the street, jay-walking, not at the crosswalk, so Kaylee slowed down to let her. Then she stopped and turned around basically towards where she came from, so Kaylee went ahead and went up to the crosswalk/stop sign. The woman aggressively walks right at her door, angrily, and then hits the back of Kaylee's car with her purse with a chain on it. Throws her arms up like she's mad, and then walks towards her own car. Kaylee is really confused. Goes, turns the corner and sits in a gas station parking area. The lady in the car comes around the corner, comes right up to her, take a PHOTO of Kaylee sitting in her car, goes around and takes a photo of the back of her car, waves her arms angrily. Kaylee puts her hands up like "What?!" but the lady just drives off. Kaylee goes up to a police car that's in the lot and tells him what happened, but of course he was like "if there's no damage to your car (we can't see any), it's not illegal of her to take photos and there's not much we can do, but we'll keep an eye out for her". Kaylee got upset and cried all the way home. I don't know why you'd get that upset about it, but she started freaking out and wondering if she did something wrong or if the lady could dox her or find her with the photos. We had to remind her that it's a rental car, with a Rhode Island license plate, that her photo alone isn't really going to give some angry 50 year old lady a way to find her. And that she didn't do anything wrong. When somebody road raged on me similarly to that, I just thought it was kind of funny that they got that unhinged over nothing. I wish Kaylee didn't let it unravel her that much. I told her..."F that lady, why are you letting her take up so much space in your head?! She Doesn't Matter!!" *sigh* Maybe when she gets older she'll find her Gen X Mother's genes somewhere...

Oh. I got an email from a T-6 pilot and new-ish instructor, a guy named Ben whose callsign is "EVIL" even though he's not Evil, but he flew the F-15 Eagle. He's actually a very nice man. He helped me at a formation clinic years ago when I had a hydraulic failure, and led my flight into Oshkosh with the nasty direct crosswinds and no working hydraulics. Anyway, he contacted me and said that he was going to be presenting at Oshkosh for the T-6 forum this year, sent over his list of topics he was going to cover, asked for my input on it, and then asked if I was willing to collaborate with him on the presentation. So this is pretty funny to me. I spend *years* going every single year and being ignored, turned down from flying with them, and nobody says a word to me. I went every year just to prove to them that I Am Still Here. Then recently I start knowing and being spoken to by several of the guys there. Then last year I'm asked questions in the forum in public. Now this year asked to actually collaborate and "teach" in it. I really have a good bit of imposter syndrome going on with this one. I don't want to get up there and talk. Most of the guys in there have been flying T-6s longer than I have, some of them longer than I've been flying period, which is 35 years now. Many of them are better aerobatic pilots than I am, many are their own mechanics, too. I have been flying T-6s now for like 950 hours and 18 years now...and I'm still almost the new kid. In some areas I still sometimes almost wish I had the confidence of a mediocre man. Ben is a newer T-6 pilot than I am, but nobody has a problem listening to him talk that I know of, and he doesn't seem to have a problem presenting, even though he is asking me for advice. I feel like the old timers in there will roll their internal eyes at us. I also believe that I am a good T-6 instructor. I have checked out or am in the process of checking out about 45 people in T-6s in the last 18 years, with several more in the pipe for this year, I have felt like they ended up good, safe T-6 pilots, none has had an incident or accident so far (oh Lord I need some wood to knock on), and I've gotten excellent feedback from them on my instruction. And I still prefer to be in the back of the room listening to other people talk rather than be up front and scrutinized. I prefer to be underestimated in some things, because when you succeed then, it's a lot more fun, with less risk. Being the target, observed, with very high expectations, well, you can only be on a pedestal for so long before being a human happens and you make a mistake, which some people will be gleeful about while others are disappointed, and both of those outcomes suck. Only your true, few, real friends will be neither of those. All that to say, I can't say I can make Oshkosh again this year, but I do hope to change that one of these years, if I can get the Ethan work thing in some balance. So I told him I couldn't promise to help this year, but I was willing to have the conversation for a future year. In other words, I agreed to maybe do this, because...there's no reason I shouldn't. But I'm super, really, very uncomfortable doing so. There is so much division in the T-6 community about certain procedures, and they draw lines in the sand. Putting yourself out there immediately determines your 'side', and there are respected people on both sides. Like I said. I like being in the background better. But that's not always the best place to be. So, we'll see. I'm willing to push past my own comfort zone sometimes, and this seems like the right thing to do, to get back into the warbird world, a world that started slipping away from me after the last two years of trying to make enough money to survive lawsuits and other things, and ending up buried in trip flying with almost no days able to be scheduled off for anything from dental appointments to warbird flying. Time to try to get some of that back. I'm not done yet.