Rain cloud of frustration

I really need to work on controlling my adrenaline. After an attempt at calming myself down last night before bed and silently praying that I wouldn't wake up at 5:45, I woke up at 4:45 and 6:45 instead (which just might be worse).

Not only does such high adrenaline rushes mess with your sleep cycles, but also results in me either being over the moon with happiness after a flight or slipping down into a brooding cloud of frustration. I am happy to report that I'm only mildly in a bad mood after today's flight. Gonna have to go out and do something so that doesn't erupt into a worse mood.

It wasn't really a bad day at all. NONE of the days where I'm grumpy after a flight were really, truly bad flights. Mainly, I'm not where I want to be nor am where I used to be and that seems to frustrate me the most.

I had three secret goals before today's flight, which would hopefully result in a 4th if I managed to complete all of them: 1) Handle the radios. Didn't happen.  2) Control altitude better because I always have a problem drifting up or down - .5 because I did get better at it, but didn't maintain it perfectly  3) perfect landing - done! Textbook perfect anyways... not mythologically perfect.

The goal was to complete all three of those which would make Merlin exclaim "good job!" or "whoa, how did you do that?".  Which he DID say "good job" on the landing...

Grr... writing about this is only making me more frustrated! If anything, it taught me that I need to review more... MUCH more. I'm already studying at maximum and I'm not sure how I could possibly study any more. One possibility I was looking into was studying more efficiently if I couldn't study more. Cuz I'll admit it - sometimes I run FB while studying or have A.D.D. moments where I pop between book reading, video watching and test taking. Maybe if I shut off FB completely and zoned in on one medium at a time, it would help.

One of the things I memorized before I left was the engine-out emergency procedure before I left:

A - airpeed, pitch nose up and glide at 70 kts
B - best field nearby to land in
C - checklist - PMMFC: fuel primer, magnetos, mixture, fuel selector and carb heat
D - declare emergency, 7700 on transponder
E - egress, prepare for crash landing

Didn't get to use it though. And stupid radios were hurting my ears with static and the other pilots in the area talking over one another (it screeches when they do that. Ow!)

Maybe I shouldn't have so many goals ahead of time, so if I don't reach them, then I won't be disappointed after... Maybe just be better than the last time up and have one goal? I don't know...

Anyways, like I said - it was a good day. We took off this morning and Da Vinci was with me. It was my first time flying with a friend, so I was a bit nervously excited. I went through the pre-flight with her (and realized after a few things I forgot - oops!), but Merlin had already completed the pre-flight before we arrived. It was pretty fun to show her things and point out stuff. Merlin had to correct me a little, but I think I did pretty well over all. We got into the plane and she flew first. I sat in the back and watched everything he did.

We landed at a non-towered airport (with rocking chairs out front), loved on a dog that was inside the FBO, talked to a few people briefly, saw the planes outside and went back. Then we headed back and I flew. The airport we landed at was up in the mountains, so we got to go pretty high altitude-wise and weather wasn't all that great, but since Merlin has an IFR rating, we were able to go. So both of those were pretty neat. We only went up once to 5,000ft when I was at the flight school.

The G1000 is just spastic though! I was in the DA20 so much that I still have the analog instruments imprinted in my head. When you ask me to name the 6 pack of instruments, I close my eyes and picture the DA-20. It's still a little disorienting in the DA-40 still. At least I did know them a little bit better than the first time, so that's good I guess.

We did try to see how far we could glide on the way back and we were at 6,500ft to start with, so we glided for a looooong time. Merlin was going to calculate it to see just how far it was. Just proves that if you are high enough up and your engine quits, that it's nothing to panic about and you can glide for quite awhile before needing to take action.


Was thinking of going out for a run to burn some of this bad mood off, but another spike in adrenaline just might amplify my grumpiness. I think I may opt for a nap instead. Naps cancel out bad moods, right?