Wow! It has been a long time since I've written here. The holidays and a run to LA for my son's birthday have kept me away from my airplane interests.

I did manage in a flight for about an hour on my return from LA but it wasn't anything to write about. Otherwise I've been working on a wheelpant but not much as I don't have a garage in which to work and it has been on the cool side.

This week however was an exception as I had several days to fool with the airplane and accomplish some things around the hangar. I flew over to Buckeye for some fuel and encountered a 12 knot crosswind on takeoff there. Noo big deal but that little plane was jumping all over while I was waiting for another plane to land. Interestingly, a good tail wind got me 112 MPH at 2300 RPM. Upon arriving at my destination I noted my speed was only 97 MPH, so sure enough the wind upon landing was very light.

My neighbor didn't know of the Bouse Fisherman so I took him up for a nice fly-over. Then mentioning it to another neighbor let to another flight to check it out. This time however there was a considerable crosswind. By the time I turned final I was way to the side of the runway so I went around and flew the downwind much wider the second time. I was high on final but put the plane right on the runway and made a nice landing. My passenger, a pilot himself said "Good Landing!". It was fun. while we were flying we heard several other guys go up but they came right back down because of the wind.

I did get a chance to paint a white stripe on one of my main tires. It doesn't look great as I did not remove the lettering on the tire. I'm going to work on highlighting the lettering in blue and see how that works. I also cleaned the plane in hops of waxing it but didn't get a chance. I'm going down there in a couple of weeks so will have some time then.

In the meantime I have an electronic project to keep me busy, as if that was a problem. My poor mandolin work is suffering. I never belived retirement could be so busy.

Life is good.

Ken