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]”