ET's Info-Stew

I had planned to use today's scheduled flight time to continue preparation for my bi-annual flight review which I have scheduled for Wednesday. But after yesterday's flight I felt the practice would be overkill, so I decided to just cancel the flight. When I said this to Jenny she said that maybe the two of us could go up together. So I went through the task of coming of with and planning a flight. I decided to take somewhat of an ambitious approach and fly north up to the Greeley airport (KGXY).

We woke up this morning a little later than we wanted, about 11am, with the knowledge of needing to get started on Stage 2 (wood-prep) of the deck project. The paint free deck actually looked pretty good so Jenny is starting to reconsider whether we should paint at all. Paint or no paint, we still needed to do Stage 2, and we needed to finish before 3pm or I'd get charged for another day's rental of the power washer.

Today Jenny and I had big hopes for our second major home-improvement project. Living here for over a year now it became clear that our deck needed some love and care. Exposed wood was visible in spots and out deck was clearly absorbing a lot of water. We decided on a project to refinish the deck since we have a long string of days with no rain predictions.

Today I took up Cessna N6346D for 1.8 hours, which puts me at 61.4 hours of total flight time. Flying less than 30 average hours per year over the last 2.5 years is nothing to be proud of. Most casual pilots average 50-100 hours per year. Since leaving California I have only flown five times now, two of those with an instructor. As of today I have 12 days until I must complete my biannual flight review, and I still think I need to do some solo practice a couple more times first. But today was a good start.

It was due time for getting a new car. Of course when I say new I mean newer. I will NEVER buy a brand new car and lose multiple thousands of dollars when I drive it off the lot. Anyway Jenny is going on a business trip in a couple weeks. Then in November we're leaving Jenny's car in California, which would leave just my piece of junk Sentra. We need a more reliable vehicle. I've been looking at Subaru's for a while because they're all-wheel-drive, which makes sense for winter street driving. And to save money I wanted a smaller sedan version, so I found that I wanted the Impreza.

I finally went flying again today for the first time in eight months. I did pattern work with an instructor for over an hour and after kicking off some rust I feel confident about flying again. Interestingly the airspeed indicator didn't work, but the instructor had me continue anyway as a learning experience. I really did get to feel the plane more that way. I was well coordinated most of the time, and on the last landing the instructor told me to "feel the ground effect in the elevator". I did and I greased the landing!

Come December Jenny and I will be taking home a new baby girl! We're adopting and today we just found out the sex. It's a long story that I'll get into more details about later. Picks and details to come soon.

Today is 1234567890 day! At 23:31:30 UTC (3:31:30 pm Mountain time) time-synced UNIX systems will have their clock read this number. This number is a unit of time called "epoch time", the number of seconds since midnight 1/1/1970 (not counting leap seconds). It's a big day for UNIX geeks like me.

Finally, after over eight months, I climbed back into the left seat of a Cessna 172. Tom from Centennial Flyers checked me out in N6346D, a Cessna 172M. We did three circuits in the pattern, the first a touch-and-go, the second a go-around, and the third a power-off emergency simulation to a full stop. Both landings were pretty darn good. But I was a little rusty in some procedures. The go-around took me off guard and I neglected to apply full power, the #1 thing you need to do. The soft-field approach (which preceeded the go-around) wasn't really soft-field technique.

Yep, it gets pretty cold here, apparently. When we open the back door to let Champ go to the bathroom, he looks up at us like "Are you kidding me?" Just a little treat for friends in family in CA.