Current location:	back at the ranch
Current mood:	cheerful
Current music:	1.FM electronica

Oh, so that is where breakfast went...
It was a day that started out like any other...oh, who the hell am I kidding? Today was awesome. At least I can say that NOW.

I am still taking gliding lessons although last week was my last chance at ground crew for a while as all the little children are out of school and somehow need the money more than I do. What! My mommy and daddy aren't paying for my hobbies!

It was gorgeous at the field today. A light north wind and lots of sun. Just a few scattered high and light clouds (no, I do not know all the cloud names yet--just puffy or not puffy). Takeoff was good and I am doing pretty well flying on tow. I still have to make tons of small corrections. Nose up, left wing up slightly, right wing up more, nose down, stay behind the tow plane. All in all pretty good. Then we detach from the tow plane and make a slight right turn while the tow plane goes left. It is a little bumpier at 3000 feet than I am used to, but not too bad. I go into a steep right hand turn and here is where it gets interesting. I apply a little too much right stick, our airspeed slows a bit too much, and we are nose heavy. So she starts to pull nose down as we are going into a high banked turn without enough speed. This is sort of bad. So, I pull back on the stick thinking that I'll get the nose back up...wrong. This only exacerbates the situation and we are thrown into a very tight downward spiral. I am looking straight down the nose at the ground while we are spinning all too quickly...whoa!

Joe gets on the controls and pulls her back out to level flight. Whew! You have to use the opposite rudder to come out of the spin, THEN try to flatten the flight by bringing the nose back in line. In what I can only guess is about four to ten seconds...we have lost 800 feet of altitude! Talk about your lump in your throat. I was shaking like a leaf after we came out of that one.

A couple of minutes later, after my heart rate returns to something resembling human, I take the controls again as we head towards the airport. My turns after this are sloppy and I am being overly cautious. At this point, I still haven't figured out how I even got into the spin in the first place. We get back down to the runway and I finally feel able to catch my breath.

The guys on the ground come up saying "that was great!" I sure didn't think so. They explain that for your tests you have to show how to get into and out of a spin like that. Joe asks if I want to go up again. I decide that "yeah, but I need a few minutes to calm down." They all seem to think that I just tried to learn high performance maneuvers a little ahead of the normal pace. "You have to learn to do it sometime." "Yeah, but I wasn't planning on that being today!" Now, a couple of hours later, I just sort of look back on it and smile..."damn, that was wicked."

The next flight was a little sloppy in the turns but otherwise uneventful. I figured that I had better get back up on that horse. Inside, I was still pretty shaken.

Last week I had to fly the glider while a yellow jacket kept landing on me. Joe kept saying "you want me to hit it?" I just thought that leaving it alone would be better. Still, the damn thing landed on me before I was even off tow and I had to deal with him the entire flight and landing. I did a pretty good landing though...AND didn't get stung. Their response "Oh, that happens very rarely." Of course the bug would decide to come around to my glider on the exact day and time that I am out flying.

Surely tomorrow will be a little easier. I've already gotten all the hard obstacles out of the way...right?! Hmmm, maybe I'll re-read the flight training book again tonight.

BTW...breakfast actually stayed down, but I am not sure for how much longer that would have lasted ;-)