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??