Dollar ride and second flight

So it's almost 8 and past my 730 bedtime, but I can't let two days go by without at least a quick blog update. These 0345 wakeups are killing me, though! The only consolation is that the last two morning's I've seen a beautiful full moon on my way to work...

The dollar ride was awesome yesterday! The weather was great, and the sky was crystal clear. We did an area tour of the West areas so that I could see ground reference points for all of those areas. Then we entered a low area and I was able to do some basic maneuvers like climbs, steep turns, and we even pulled a little over 4 G's! All in all it was an awesome ride and definately a good motivator for what's to come! I also got him the dollar soon after the ride, and he seemed to really like it!

Today's ride was the first graded sortie for me, and I'm not sure yet how that turned out because it wasn't submitted yet by the time I left. We've started full standup EPs now too, so any one of us can be in the lime light for these EPs now which are pretty stressful. I felt like today was a good flight overall, and there were definitely some areas I've improved in, mostly in the groundops and checklist work. However, my landing attempts were awful! My area work was actually pretty decent considering it was my first time, and he said my power-on stalls were not bad at all. Then, before we left the area my IP put us through a few of the aerobatic moves we'll be doing later and that was awesome!! It was like a roller coaster without the rails! Then, I pulled off a couple of barrel rolls too, which were sweet! You definitely couldn't do anything like that in the DA-20s at the academy. A good time! I actually started feeling slightly sick today, but I just pushed through and didn't let it interfere with the sortie. The winds and turbulence were pretty rough today, so that may have brought it on, but I've never been sick in a plane before and don't expect it to happen to much more. At least I didn't throw up or have to give up the controls or anything. Those guys who are getting airsick have to jump through some extra hoops with the flight docs and meds and such that I'd rather just avoid dealing with.

Today we got out a little early so about 6 or 7 of us ran out to a little BBQ joint downtime for a meal somewhere between lunch and dinner before coming back here to study for tomorrow. Keith and I both have the same flight tomorrow with our IP so we spent some time going over the generalities together too which was a big help in covering the flight as a whole. Tomorrow I'm hoping to really get in a good number of landings and work on bringing that up to par.

And this guy is off to bed before his EARLY rise again...I'll be glad when this week in over, and thankfully Friday is a safety day followed by Monday off! 2 four day weeks, I like that!