Picture of the Day: March 18th to March 24th

March 18th: Let the airplane hunt begin! A few things that have happened over the past few weeks are making me reexamine some of my priorities, and it's becoming more and more clear that it's time to make a few changes. One of those changes may involve buying a second airplane...we'll see how things go! (Update...airplane number 2 will not be this specific one, but I may have something else in the works...we'll see.)

March 19th: Off to Great Falls! Mark's parents, their dog Rudy, and Uncle Robert are visiting for a few days. I was supposed to spend the morning flying with several students, but the fog hung around a little too long and I had to reschedule both flights. The good thing is that for a change, instead of working I could actually go with them! We took the camper, made some sandwiches when we got there, then went for a short hike. We stopped at a winery on the way home for a quick wine tasting, then went out to dinner. It was nice to spend time doing something other than worrying about my work schedule for a change. 

March 20th: So that's why our living room smells like burning. Turns out the wires in our baseboard heaters were nice and crispy. so Mark's dad and Uncle Robert helped us replace the heaters in the living room before they headed back up to NJ.

In other news, I gave the flight school my two weeks' notice today. After talking to the Chief CFI at my location, it's turned into more of a two weeks' notice for normal scheduling, then I'll stay on just to fly with my one student who is getting pretty close to his checkride, then be completely finished after that. I love teaching, but it was getting very hard to give the flight school the time it needed without jeopardizing my full time job, and since they couldn't be flexible about my work schedule not allowing me to make some of the meetings, here we are. I'll miss teaching, but I'm honestly looking forward to the extra free time and have some exciting things planned for the upcoming months. I've been bending my entire personal life around this job for quite some time now. It'll be so refreshing to NOT feel guilty about taking time off to do things that I want to do that don't involve work, or to actually be able to spend time with my friends and family for a change.

March 21st: Back in the air. It was pretty windy today, but my student did really well with the gusty landings.

March 22nd: My orange tree. It keeps dropping leaves, but the leaves left on it are getting bigger and bigger. I just hope the tree makes it...in theory, it should start making oranges next year.

March 23rd: I finally flew my airplane!! I'm not even going to mention on here the last time I flew my plane, but it was long enough ago that I wanted to fly with an instructor before I took it out solo. I got an hour of dual in before I had to put her away and head to work, and I'm hoping to get in a solo flight this coming week. It felt SO good!!   :)

March 24th: Time to get the logbook up to date. Mark had the mid and I had done some swaps and wound up working an 8-4, so he was already asleep by the time I got home. It was just starting to snow, so I grabbed my computer, put on some Hell's Kitchen reruns, grabbed a beer, and went back through my schedule book to update my logbook.