Not a lousy post

Today at work was no better than yesterday, nor do I expect tomorrow will improve matter (though it will be cut short!).

But I did make progress on something else today! I have a doctor's appointment! Yaay!

Okay, so, not really a big deal. I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow, but she's a psychologist, not really a regular doctor. No, the doctor's appointment I'm excited about is on Monday, with an FAA flight doctor. I'm getting a flight physical! Huzzah!

This means I'll be able to fly again! Well, civilian. I still can't and won't be able to fly military aircraft, but I have this private pilot's license with multi-engine commercial and instrument ratings and I haven't exercised the darned thing since 2001. Seriously. Can you imagine? If you had a pilot's license, wouldn't you use it more than once every five years? I mean, really. I feel like such a schmuck.

Granted, I had a job flying for most of the last few years, but really since last summer the writing's been on the wall about them not letting me fly any more, and I really should have started using the license last year.

I set a goal for myself, that I'd fly to a wedding I'm planning to attend in April, so I have to get back in the saddle and confident before then. But today I discovered another goal, with a much tighter timeline. I want to get my CFI (certified flight instructor) certificate, and one of my coworkers can help me do that. But he's leaving MacDill for Hurlburt at the end of April, to join the spec ops world. I'm jealous. I wonder how his wife feels? I don't have a wife yet; why can't I get a cool job that my wife would hate? Anyway, I want to get the CFI with him before he leaves--or at any rate I want to be pretty far along.

This'll be about three flights this month plus a checkride and oral exam, and I'm going to need to do a lot of studying. It's been a long time since I read through the civilian flight regs.

That's just to get a single-engine add-on to my commercial certificate (I can't fly a single-engine plane commercially, only a multi-engine. I can fly a single engine noncommercially. Don't worry if this doesn't make sense to you. It doesn't make sense, period. But that's the way it goes.
Anyway, after the single-engine commercial add-on, then we start on actual CFIC training, which will be about 10-12 hours of flight time plus more ground instruction.
This means it'll be a busy couple of months. I don't have to get the CFI by the wedding, but it might be nice to try.

So this is going to occupy whatever spare time I might have for the next couple months. Of course if I keep working 7-6 every day there won't be any spare time at all. So let's all hope work slows down a bit!