Achieving your dreams
A was asked to attend M’s “career day” at preschool and talk about being a pilot. I hope I can manage a day off to go see it. It just means so much more to us for him to actually be considered a pilot since it’s been just a dream for so long…
Also, A will be spending a day flying people around in a rented plane a few days before our wedding. All our relatives are so excited to actually be able to fly with him now. Again, because it’s been just a dream for so long and they have been listening to him talk about it for so long.
A had more time off than expected for Thanksgiving, which was a blessing for us all.
Plugging away
Really there hasn’t been anything exciting to report. Things are just plugging along for the most part. No funny stories, no gripes, not much of anything. I guess that’s good because it means we are making headway on our goal of getting into the airlines.
A had a student bust a checkride for the first time today. I’m pretty proud that he made it through 20 students before lucky #21 came along. That’s a great record to have and shows that he is a pretty good instructor. He’s got the most consistant passes that anyone at his school can remember.
A has Thanksgiving off. Probably going to be the last time for many years to come. It’s not a big deal to me, I can see my family anytime and they can cook a turkey anytime. It means more to me to have 3 consecutive days off with A. We can’t manage that just anytime. Our plans are to visit the zoo and then hit Cracker Barrel for dinner.
I’m annoyed at the school for how they assigned the days off though. They could have done a better job with that. They assigned everyone a 3 day block starting tues, wed or thurs. I’m not how they assigned everyone, but A got tues-thurs off, while I had thurs-sat off. If they had let them bid by seniority, A would have gotten thurs-sat off. I guess for most of the guys, who are single, it doesn’t matter much what days they have off. But for us, with a family, it means a lot. As it turns out, schedules changed, students shifted and it turned out not to be an issue. Days off got pushed back to wed-fri, then thurs-sat for A. Since his student busted today and went home a day early, I’m not sure where we currently stand. Such is life. We have our honeymoon coming up in 2 weeks and I’m sure I’ll get enough of him then.
There was a discussion on Jetcareers that got under my skin, but this time I stayed out of it. It’s just not in me to get into an e-argument with someone about something inconsequential. The gist of it was this- someone asked at which locations did instructors get the most hours. Nobody was giving any concrete info and we had recently tallied up A’s log book to get a perspective on this ourselves. So I posted and said “as an add on instructor at CRG, he’s averaging 65/month flight time. Plus there’s about 1.5 hours on the ground for every hour of flight.” So a few days later, someone else, who according to another post left the school in 2004, posted that if he was only getting 65/month, he must be really lazy and not working hard enough and when he was there they were getting 100/month. Umm, ok, perhaps things have changed since 2004? Perhaps he could have just stated how many hours he got when he was there 2 years ago without taking a dig at anyone else? I mean really, unless he called and spoke to the chief instructor about the student/instructor ratio, called the office in PV and confirmed the incoming student numbers, and spoke with other instructors at CRG to verify that there actually more hours available and this guy really was slacking off, he really doesn’t have a leg to stand on now does he? The fact of the matter is, A is there 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week, always has 1-2 students that he is training and is now a senior instructor. If he were slacking off, perhaps someone would have said something to him by now? And he probably wouldn’t have been the only instructor that they trotted out for the grand opening at the new location in Daytona if he weren’t one of the best. At least, that’s my opinon.
Happy Holidays!
Breathe, sleep, live aviation
This made me chuckle, esp. because it seems to happen with an increasing frequency.
Last night when we were sleeping I bumped into A. Obviously he was dreaming about flying because as soon as I touched him, his hand flew up in the air (as if to adjust dials and gagues)and he started mumbling “what the hell are you doing?”.
He says he dreams about nothing but flying (hmmm, so much for scoring romantic points by saying he dreams only of me…) ever since we got here. I guess the total immersion aspect of his school really can’t be denied. I’m sure it’s going to be a while yet before he dreams of anything else.
It goes both ways
Just to point out that A does appreciate and reciprocate to my constant giving and accomodations to his schedule, I thought I would include this.
The other day it started raining here about an hour before I was due to leave work. Any rain within the 2 hours prior to my leaving sends traffic into a tailspin, leaving me rushed to get M from school and just frazzled in general. It’s like every 10 minutes of rain directly equals 1 accident on my drive home. Anyhoo, I was stressing out about it, as usual, and called A to inform him of my headache. He took the time to leave work, get M from school and wait with him until I arrived home, and then went back to work to finish up. Yes, it meant that he had to stay later for the day, but also meant a less stressed out Someday. The give and take goes both ways in our relationship and for that I am grateful.