With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

Too Much News

2012 October 13 07:55

Let me explain...no, there is too much. Let me sum up. :-D

Since it was recently the 25th anniversary of the release of the movie The Princess Bride, that's a particularly apt quote, aside from the fact that it's absolutely true right now for me. Two months since I've blogged. Holy cow.

I'll have other posts to bring things up to speed, but I'll start with this post with flying stuff. I got my complex endorsement in my log book, so I'm now qualified to fly stuff with retractable landing gear. I've updated the table on my pilot skill matrix web page, although the text is stale. Basically stuff that's green is what I have now, stuff that's yellow I'm actively working on, and stuff that's cyan (light blue) are things I might get someday. I got the complex rating at a flying club in Michigan in a Mooney F with manual gear; that was pretty sweet. I'll blog more about that some day. It was en route to Oshkosh for the big air show.

I did a bunch of flying late August through early September. This included flying my month commute to Illinois; that was fun. I got to take some friends flying. Then over Labor Day weekend, I flew myself and my wife to Missouri. The remains of hurricane Isaac made the return flight interesting for weather reasons. I got to flex my instrument rating. I got like an hour and a half real instrument time on that trip, including an approach into Bowling Green Kentucky in real live actual instrument conditions. My confidence in my ability to fly IFR increased by an order of magnitude that day. Good times.

So here's a graph of my flying time, as of late September. Since this is October, and technically fourth quarter, the last column should be red now, but honestly, I don't feel like re-rendering the graph.

I've now downloaded the latest images from my phone, so more pictures forthcoming.