Quick week

Wow, this week has just flown by! (haha, no pun intended...) I had the flight on Monday and then a sim on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday was the last of my transition sims and was run like a 'checkride profile'. That went pretty well, and then yesterday was my second to last emergency procedures sim with Rob as a sandbag. I always enjoy those because I know everything that could concievably go wrong will, so there's no stress because it can't get any worse! But really we did quite well at handling everything, I was proud of us. At one point we were down to just the standby battery which means I had only a couple of tiny standby instruments to fly off of, no trim, no engine readouts except for the left side engine temp, it was nuts! But we did it and landed safely.

Today we were supposed to fly but the weather's been ugly the past couple of days. Coming out of the gym after we were let off today there was even frozen sludge accumulated on my car. So anyways we had to pick the best of a lot of bad places (as far as weather's concerned) today, and we ended up picking Jackson because it had the best cloud levels. Well, 2 and a half hours later after all of our planning, we had the morning formal brief with all the IPs in there, and on the NOTAM slides it turns out that Jackson's runway is now covered in a half-inch of sludge and has only a 'fair' braking rating for the runways. And then a few slides later is our callsign listed as going to Jackson...Oops. So the IP we were flying with calls out during the 'questions' portion of the brief "uhhh...am I really going to Jackson??" And I had to call out that no, we were going to have to replan the mission now. So after all of that work we weren't even going to where we'd spent all the time planning for and had to change plans in 10 minutes. In the end we didn't even flying because the weather was awful and we could barely even make our climb minimums. On top of all of that, our squadron mission planning room has around 15 computers for our preplanning use, but out of those only about 6 actually work! So that's REALLY frustrating when you're trying to get things done. Oh well.

Tomorrow Rob and I will try to fly again. This will be the first one in the second block of transition for me. It's really not looking like I'll be able to check before Christmas, sadly, but we'll see. 6 rides to go.

Tomorrow night we're planning on inviting the class over to our place to chill out. Rob recently bought a fire pit he'll bring over and we'll get a fire going out on the back porch, and Stew and i will have the BBQ fired up. We might have some people bring guitar hero, maybe throw on a movie (or both, we have enough tvs!). Should be a good time. Then Saturday I have choir cantata practice and then Stew and I will go to Tupelo to do some shopping. Still need to pick up some Christmas presents...