Archive for May, 2004

It’s storming. The OKC TAF doesn’t look good for the morning–600ft ceiling at 4am, and only 1200ft at 10am… overcast, mist, etc. Right now there temperature’s 10 degrees with a dewpoint of 8 degrees, which means low ceilings all morning. I talked to D., and we went ahead and decided to aim for tomorrow afternoon. There’s that possibility of a window of higher ceilings before the wind picks up after it gets a little warmer. We’ll see. I’m not going to get too excited.

I’ve been experimenting with classic Italian cooking the past couple of days, serving Joanna multi-course meals. She seems to like them. Yesterday we had Tagliatelli with Bolognese sauce (the dish which after many perversions became American spaghetti, but doesn’t taste anything like it) and pan roasted rosemary chicken. A REAL bolognese sauce is milk/wine based and the only herb in it is nutmeg. Yes, that’s nutmeg. I expected it to be, boring at best and possibly interesting though unappealing. Considering it has to be cooked for a minimum of 4 hours in various stages, it’s odd that I embarked upon it at all. I diligently followed the recipe as best as I could (like I have things like an earthenware pot) and the end result was quite shocking. It tasted completely unlike what I expected. I also handmade the tagliatelli with nothing more than a rolling pin and knife…. This was something of an adventure, but it’s not as bad as you might think. Fresh, handmade pasta puts even homemade pasta machine pasta to shame. And that was just the pasta dish.

Tonight we had potato and onion soup followed by sirloin steak cooked in a tomato-onion-olive sauce. Joanna even liked the olives. I’ve been trying to find a source for real, canned, Italian tomatoes, but it looks like I have to order a whole pallet. I’ve also been searching for the sort of olive oil that I grew to love while I was in Italy– it’s got a darkish greenish hue, is unfiltered, actually taste like olives… Most olive oil here is so filtered and processed and light that it doesn’t taste like olive oil. I found some at Sam’s which is more full-bodied than most, but it’s not great. Good olive oil even online looks to be very expensive. So my brief foray into gorumet cooking looks like it’s going to be hampered by lack of availability of high quality ingredients. Like Parmesan cheese. I have no idea where to find good cheese. The only non-grated stuff in the grocery store is all dried out and missing the crust. But then, it’s fairly cheap and good Parmesian-Reggiano when I’ve found it is REALLY expensive.

Joanna did bring me some Vidalia onions from Mobile which has been nice, even though they’re rather scrawny and some are a little wilted. I can’t even get the Texas Sweet onions here I used to find in Dallas… though I did find some Chilean onions that were okay.

Joanna’s making brownies for some sort of work-luncheon tomorrow. (The recipe on the back of the Hershey’s coco tin is pretty good…)

Well, my grandmother passed away Tuesday night.

I’m now completely out of grandparents.

It’s ridiculous. All I need to solo is a 3,000 foot ceiling, 5 miles visibility, and less than 18 knots of wind including gust factor. And it seems like it’s never going to happen. It’s either cloudy or windy. This morning it was cloudy AND windy for a change. The winds aren’t supposed to get below 20 knots until tomorrow NIGHT. They’re howling right now, and it’s after midnight.

I went up and did some maneuvers today, since I hadn’t flown in 5 days. I’m quite comfortable in the airplane, even while getting rocked around a good bit today. We probably should have worked on landings, since my stalls, steep turns and slow flight is all doing quite well. I’ve gotten to where I can fly at 40 knots in gusty conditions just fine. Not perfect, I waiver between 40-50 knots instead of holding it right at 40. Today D. kept saying, “Man, you’re awfully close to a stall.” “Well, that’s the definition of minimum controllable airspeed– the speed at which any increase in angle of attack or decrease in airspeed results in a stall…” “And yes, you’re there.” Course, he has me fly at MCA and track a river, which is bloody well impossible, because I can’t SEE the river when I’m up at 30 degrees, and can’t think straight with the stall horn going eeeEEEEeeeEEEEEeeeEEE…. “Mike, I can’t SEE the river, this is impossible!” “I know, that’s why I have you do it.”

My stalls are good. I don’t tend to maintain coordination perfectly, particularly in power-on banked stalls, but I can react to a wing dropping off just fine, and I can recover in less than 100ft in a power-off stall and not lose any altitude in a power on stall.

Quick power on stalls still weird me out a bit. I find myself bracing for the inevitable yet unpredictable break. I haven’t gotten used to the feeling of the plane just snapping to some weird attitude with the ground taking up my whole field of view while I consciously have to fight the temptation to apply opposite aileron. I’m not really scared per se, it just feels a little like bracing yourself for a shot with a hypodermic needle. It’s gonna hurt, but you don’t know EXACTLY when or where or how much.

My steep turns are okay. I can maintain altitude within 100ft although not as smoothly as I’d like. Mike covered up the Altimeter, and I found that actually helped me maintain altitude. Kept me from staring at the bloody thing in anticipation of it pronouncing failure.

My landings still suck. They’re safe enough, but I need practice. I have a hard time seeing the needed wind correction. I keep thinking I’m straight when I’m not, and keep trying to hold the centerline with the rudder pedals instead of the ailerons. I did three landings today… I was a little side-loaded on the first two, but got the vertical part right. For the third, I finally got the wind correction right just before I plopped down on the runway (although rather upwind of centerline), unfortunately I wound up a little high and slow and simply dropped the plane from about 8 feet for a rather nice bounce. I just need lots of practice.

KOUN 111731Z AUTO 17018G22KT 10SM SCT029 27/18 A2988

Finally, almost a nice-ish day with just a scattered layer of clouds at 2,900ft…. but now that the clouds have lifted a bit, the winds have picked up to 18 knots gusting to 22, well above what I can solo in. They’ll probably get stronger as the pressure drops and thunderstorms roll in this afternoon.

Yesterday morning, I got up at 6:30am, got all ready to go, then decided I should get a weather briefing. After doing that, I realized I could have just opened the bloody window and looked outside. Ceiling at 900 feet, overcast. Oh, and of course the winds were nice calm in the morning, only 8 knots at the surface. But they were 50 knots at 3,000 feet, all thanks to that nice early morning temperature inversion so common in places like Oklahoma. The wind difference was bad enough that there were low level wind shear advisories out. A 50 knot wind shear isn’t something I’d generally chose to fly in, and certainly not on my first solo. I called D. who hadn’t yet checked the weather. “It’s cloudy?” he asked. “Yeah. 1000 feet.” “Oh… I’ll call you later today.” That was yesterday, and I haven’t heard from him yet. I would call him, but there’s not really any point. After things warmed up and the overcast layer lifted and the temperature inversion dissipated, the surface winds picked up to 30 knots. The weather forecasts look crappy for the rest of the week with convective activity likely.

So I may never solo. I’m not really able to do anything to further my flight training at the moment. Maybe I’ll take the private written test and get that over with. I haven’t yet, because I need to practice some of the problems that require plotting things–but all of the online test-practice stuff (including the ones at the flight school) just have the figures on-screen. Which works fine unless you need to lay a plotter over it. You can’t really hold a plotter up to a CRT… I was going to buy one of the test prep books, but they’re like $30, and D. said he’d just let me borrow his, since he said he’d hate to see me buy it just for a few questions. But he hasn’t remembered to retrieve it from his apartment yet.

And, apparently, I can’t go any further in the flight training until I solo. I can’t start working on cross-country stuff until I’ve passed my check-ride, and I can’t take the check-ride until I’ve soloed, and I can’t solo until the weather gets better…

I’ve been surfing the web a bit. The number of people compelled to keep what they call blogs astounds me. I’m not really sure I understand the phenomenon. There’s a lot of bloggers out there that have real blogs which might be of interest to the random passer-by because they point to current sites of interest (what a blog is supposed to do). Then there’s people with journals (much like this one) that call them blogs. As it is, I’m not really certain why this journal still exists, much less the hundreds of thousands of others. I created this one so people could follow our trip across the states. There seems to be continued interest in our current activities, so I’ve kept it up… I guess my feelings about them are nicely summarized by someone’s slashdot sig line I ran across yesterday. It said, “weblogs suck. here’s mine: [link]”

I called this afternoon to wish my mother a happy birthday. Ben answered the phone, and I asked if Mom were asleep. “Oh, you haven’t heard,” he said. “Mamama seems to have had another stroke.” She was sitting at the table eating Chinese after church when she slumped over. She’s at the hospital now, not really responding to anything but seems to be sleeping.

I’m glad I got to see her last weekend when I was back in Mobile for Ben’s graduation and Ian’s dedication.