Yay to our newest private pilot - Jen! The ink is still wet on her ticket. We're going to celebrate by toasting her war stories tonight.

I can't wait to go on my first ride with Jen. It was so surreal the first time I flew with Jose after he got his license. A year prior, I took him flying, we had planned on a nice $100 hamburger, but the weather sucked. Since I had the plane reserved, I wanted to get some practice anyway, though it was not optimal conditions for bringing a non-pilot passenger. I told him that and suggested he join me another time, but he wanted to come anyway. I practiced some touch and gos in some pretty inclimate weather (the ceiling was barely above the pattern and the wind was wipping around from every direction...) and he walked out determined to learn to fly. And a year later, there I was sitting in the right seat next to him while he took me flying. Crazy!

Of course, all of this is making me more eager to get on with finishing my instrument rating. I started in earnest last October, with a goal of finishing in a year. I think I'm still on target to that goal - we've done most of the maneuvers required for the check ride and I think I'm getting pretty good at them. We still have to do our long instrument cross country. And I really need to hit the books. I usually study before each lesson, but I usually only study the flying skills we're going to cover. Which means I have a huge gaping hole in not studying the other practicalities of instrument flying before I can take my written. I definitely need to get on that and get on it soon.

And I need 10 more hours of cross country time myself - which will be good, there are some skills I want to practice during that time, most importantly holding altitude more precisely. I am dead on when it comes to heading or a constant airspeed during an approach... but sometimes I just have these really bad days when no matter how much I fuss with the trim, the plane always seems to be climbing and descending through the sky - though that said, I do pretty well controlling the altitude and staying above the minimums during approaches, its cruise flight when it starts wandering. Maybe that's my problem is the word "controlling" - if the plane is trimmed right, there should be no control involved with staying at a constant altitude. Need to work on that. The altitude limits in the instrument standards are pretty strict - no more than 100 feet above and 0 feet below the designated altitude.

Ok, there's my ramble. Be lucky I didn't subject you to a rant on medical privacy, which has been my topic of the week (specifically how my gym at work requires you to fill out an extensive medical questionnaire before renewing your membership and how I'm the only one who seems to care that doctor-patient confidentiality does not apply to gym-patient confidentialty.)

Here's a victory shot of me during the shuttle's landing on Saturday. Don't I look so patriotic with the flag in the foreground?