For those of you who may be wondering, I finished my flight training on 11/20/08.

 The checkride was somewhat intense, as may be expected because examiners deliberately make them so. The examiner ended the checkride after only two landings and I had been expecting a lot more. Because of that and the examiner's carefully practiced sourness throughout the flight I didn't know whether I had passed or not until we were taxiing back to the ramp. (The first landing was a perfect greaser, maybe thats why we didn't do more...)

 It was snowing in the morning and conditions were IFR when I got to the airport, so I was expecting my checkride to get postponed (for the fourth or fifth time). Conditions on the checkride were marginal VFR...had my checkride not already been postponed numerous times I doubt if we would have flown. I would not have been suprised if we would've had to get special VFR clearance to return to Lancaster but visibility kindly stayed just high enough. Ceilings were too low to fly the planned altitudes however.

So..long story short I passed. My instructor told me that the examiner told him that I did really well, which came as a complete surprise to me. I thought he wanted to push me out of the plane and fly the thing back himself.

The picture below was taken the following Sunday, after my girlfriend and I returned from buzzing her house :)

"any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

~George Orwell

 I flew my first solo cross country tonight, from Lancaster to Selinsgrove. It was a very smooth and uneventful little trip, which was nice. Selinsgrove is a cool little airport to fly into, with the final approach being down a valley. I had considered flying up over Lewisburg and Mifflinburg while I was out there, but it's probably fortunate that I didn't because I got back to Lancaster just as the sun was going down. With one lonely night landing to my credit, that could've been a little tense. In a bizzare little side note, I added up my receipts and discovered that it cost me exactly $1,818.18 to go from my first solo to my first cross country. Hard to believe that I'm almost finished with my training. I don't know what the heck I'm going to do when I'm done...get an instrument rating I guess. Or sit around and stair listlessly out the window. Nah, screw that...I'll get the instrument rating.

 Thanks to all of you who commented on my last post, please accept my sincere apologies for being such a bum and not getting back to you!

Have fun, ya'all

My instuctor finally sent some pics from my first solo. As you may be able to tell, I was slightly pumped about it all.

 So the other night we had a doozy of a thunderstorm. I was sitting in my lazy boy trying to read and listening to the thunder, finally I gave up trying to read and just sat there laughing. I don't know why, but I find a really intense thunderstorm very funny. At home I would sit out on the porch and enjoy the show, but I can't really do that where I live now. So I just sat there and laughed.  I thought of going to the fire station, but decided not to unless my pager went off. And it promptly did.

 By the time I got to the station engine 1 and the ladder truck were already out, and before we responded with the hose truck everybody got recalled. However, as we were cleaning stuff up the next call came in and this time I left on the engine.

 The fire was a little barn sitting back in the woods, there was barely enough room to get anything in at all. We dropped a 5" line about half way in, and they set up a dump station at the end of the lane. We got our two engines in to the scene, everything else sat at the end of the lane a 1/4 mile away. Since I had dropped the supply line I was walking in alongside engine 2 when this amish kid came running up and asked if he could borrow my flashlight. No problem. A couple seconds later he comes running back and asked if he could borrow an SCBA or oxygen pack as he called it to get some vehicles out of the bottom of the barn. Uh...let me thi..NO! It was pretty funny.

 Between the hot weather, the hot fire and the pouring rain, it became a rather grueling incident. Two of our guys didn't pass the rehab checks and got trucked off to the hospital.

 When we finally got the fire knocked out, about half of the roof was hanging by sheet metal alone. The entire truss system was burned completely away. There was an aluminum extension ladder hanging on the back wall. It was melted into a nice S shape. Quite interesting.

Note: This incident took place Tuesday night, but I didn't finish writing the story until today. Thursday night we had another interesting call, in which some dude on a bike decided to take out a train. It didn't work out so well, but thats another story.