Over the river and through the woods!

It's COLD here, I mean Norske-get-your-boots-on cold! Yesterday I persuaded the boys to bundle up and go Nordic skiing with me with the wind chill at 20 something below. Exhilarating! As long as you're dressed right the only thing that freezes is your eyelashes (soon to be remedied with ski goggles for everyone at Christmas). It's so cold no one comes out and shovels the sidewalks so you can ski everywhere and telemark down the side streets. Hooray! I'm a giant down-swaddled abominable snow monster while everyone else is huddled inside and I couldn't be happier.

Keep Your SUV Off My Bumper

Ice, ice and more ice. I'm the only person in the office today because between the snowstorm two days ago and the ice storm predicted for today, no one wants to venture out. The roads would be a lot less dangerous if it weren't for giant SUVs whose drivers seem to think they're invincible and don't acknowledge that there's anyone else on the road. A white Sequoia backed full speed out of the school parking lot yesterday, straight into the middle of the street, and would have driven right over my Corolla monster-truck-like if I hadn't honked. There ought to be a special kind of license required to drive one of those things. They seem to have checked their brains at the Roadhog dealership.

Blinders

When you train for instrument flight conditions (i.e., you can't see the ground, or sometimes anything outside the plane), you put on some kind of contraption that blocks your view of everything but the instrument panel in front of you. They can look kind of like lab glasses with portions "fogged" out, or they can resemble an optometrist's torture device. So I take off and fly us to the practice area, then spend an hour or so looking only at the instrument panel and get to take off the blinders just in time to land the plane. A real out of body experience.

The new instructor is a former Navy medical officer who learned to fly because he was spending a lot of time hanging out on aircraft carriers and decided what the hell. What the hell, by the way, is always the right answer. Then the Navy really needed flight instructors so he wound up spending a lot of time at it, including a stint at Miramar (aka Top Gun). Now he's a retired general and just a tic past Martha Stewart on the Perfectionist Scale. As the airport owner told me cheerfully, "He may drive you crazy, but he'll make you a very safe pilot."

The good news is he says I'm going to be a natural at instrument flight. I said "JINX!"

Itinerary

There should have been a flight today, but my windshield was icing up as I drove to the airport so the general and I called it off. For my instrument flight training I have to get checked out on a plane I've never flown, a Piper Warrior, because it has the instrumentation I need.

It's not like driving a different car. Every plane's instruments are placed differently, its balance is different, you have to get used to it. This new plane is a low wing. I've only flown high wing Cessnas, although I've ridden a lot in the passenger seat of my friend's low-wing Mooney.

We're on for a Thursday night flight in the Warrior now. This is after meetings in Ames and Des Moines on Tuesday and Wednesday, and before a weekend over in the river hill country along the Mississippi, skiing with the girls and bitching about the men in our lives. I try not to think about the miles on the odometer.

We Don't Need Roads

Getting back to the Road Scholar theme, if there ever was one. This weekend I have my first official Instrument Flight lesson, with the retired general who considers every flight another day at boot camp. At least he hasn't issued me a helmet with the call name Washout lettered across the brow. Yet. I've been reading the training manual with great enthusiasm. If your day job involved utility regulation, you might find this kind of thing fascinating too. It's so mechanical. It engages a whole different part of my brain. I'm turning into such a gearhead that I had a problem with my car the other day and correctly diagnosed an alternator malfunction. How sexy am I??

Thanksgiving But No Thanks

This Thanksgiving is the first one without my dad. There's plenty I'm thankful for, but I wasn't up for a big family thing. Instead of eating I flew to Wisconsin through a gray haze and came back into a red radiant sunset. There's snow on the ground up there already. We threw some snowballs, drank hot chocolate, admired the ski runs from the air. It's a cold season and I'm cold all the way through. The photo has nothing to do with the Thanksgiving flight, it just makes me feel warm. My boy is the greatest.

Not Enough Time

Bu says I don't spend enough time with him. The irony kills me. I don't spend enough time with anyone, particularly myself, but if I spend quality time with anyone, it's him. He gets the best: all the patience and selflessness I can produce in a given 24 hour period while juggling everything else behind my back. Not enough time. If he only knew.

The Princess and the Soccer Ball

I have bruises, little ones from the impact of a soccer ball, an elbow, a toe. Playing indoor soccer is dangerous, especially when it's with a bunch of hyper-competitive middle-aged men, several of whom are twice my size and have forgotten that shoving other players into the bleachers to get the ball would get them a red card if we had a ref. It just gets me going. It reminds me of playing with the boys as a little girl when we had a bitter German former pro player as a coach. Before games he'd gather us in and mutter through tobacco-stained teeth, "If you can't win, at least you can hurt them."

There were only a few girls in the league and they tended to drop out as years passed and the boys got bigger and started to run over us. But our coach taught us well. I learned how to get the team bully between me and the ref, sucker punch him where the welt wouldn't show and steal the ball. The girls on my team were the only ones who kept playing until we aged out of the league at 12, because our sociopath coach taught us to fight. He thought we had a right to be on the field.

Friday Fill-in-the-Blank Meme

Because I can't write any more testimony about energy efficiency until I rest my brain.

1. My blueprint for success includes swallowing my pride and begging everyone for help.
2. Ghirardelli Twilight Delight 72% Cacao was the last candy I ate.
3. The best facial moisturizer I've ever used is C the Change from Kiss My Face.
4. Sex can be good therapy.
5. I'd like to tell you about the evil plan for the next bad idea adventure.
6. Cussed determination is my strongest characteristic.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to the Lincoln Cafe, tomorrow my plans include painting the house so I can sell it and Sunday, I want to go see Vance Gilbert!

Flyover Land

Photos from an epic trip to Montana to get sworn into the state bar. Modes of transportation included a 1981 Toyota Celica, a Cessna 172, a Dodge sedan, a Cessna 172RG, a Toyota Camry, an old Dodge pickup, a Honda Civic hybrid, and a Dodge Caravan. The other people in the pictures are Josh Foersch, who used to be my flight instructor and now just gets dragged along on manic cross-country flights and deer-feeding outings, and Eldena Bear Don't Walk, who put in a cameo appearance moving my admission to the bar of the Supreme Court of Montana. Aside from them, I'd like to thank the Academy.