You might be a flight instructor if you get kinda happy when you wake up and the weather is crap. As a student, it was always infuriating. As an instructor, it means a relatively stress-free day.

Unfortunately, since we’ve got a base salary, they can make us stand around and do nothing. Which is what I did until about 2pm, and then got to come home. It was a nice break. I’ll try to remember that when I’m there at 6am on Saturday.

I wonder if I’ll be any good at this job in a few months. I try hard, but sometimes it seems like I’m just not getting though. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be faced with the responsibility of signing a couple students off to solo. Right now, it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to do it in the allotted flights. And I’m not sure if it’s my teaching ability or their learning ability. Probably a combination of both. Still, the idea of signing them off to solo scares me. To state, legally, that I think that some kid, in a matter of 10 flights, is capable of taking off, flying around the pattern and landing, all on his own. That’s a lot of responsibility and risk. Fortunately, it’s somewhat mitigated by the fact that they’ll have to pass a check ride with someone else first.

So, Joanna’s job is now full-time and official. For some reason, this meant I got to cook lamb after work on Monday. But, this is good. She’s not working in a warehouse and maybe we’ll manage to get out of debt sometime in the next 40 years.

Other than the yuppies and the traffic, I like living here. With any luck I’ll never live anywhere souther or easter. From the air you can still see patches of snow on ground, but it’s mostly gone now. The outside air temperature guage in the plane was reading 84F yesterday, which just doesn’t work. Low to mid 40s all day today, which makes up for it. We still haven’t turned on the heater– we seem to do just fine by sucking our neighbor’s warmth.