Illogic Problem

I dreamed last night that I was in a classroom, but did I have your standard naked at school dream? No. Did I dream then that I had a test but I hadn't studied? No. God forbid something normal should happen around me. I dreamed that I was being asked to do a sheet of logic problems. They were logical in the dream, very simple problems, in the form of stories that you had a solve a little puzzle from. Situations like a description of walking with the sun in your eyes after dinner and having to surmise that you're going west, but simpler than that, with less requirement for basic world knowledge (like where the sun sets) and without the at least half a dozen loopholes in that one. It's possible that there is no such problem set possible in the real world, but there it was in the dream world.

One was a three-parter. It involved some people going boating. The first two parts were perfectly easy, the same fitting together of facts to reach the obvious conclusion as the other problems. (I really regret I can't give you examples, but you know how dreams are). The third part involved working out who was navigating the boat, based on the logical clues given. One of the people on board was said to be a naval officer and pilot, and I remember asking aloud in the class if he was the sort of pilot who flew airplanes or the sort of pilot who navigated ships in harbours and coastal waters. I was told the latter. The boat in the question ran aground. I examined the various parts of the questions and, while the teacher was walking up the classroom aisle watching me, I wrote "FALSE, this is not a logic problem," beside the question. I knew what they wanted, but the information did not lead logically to that conclusion. The correct chain of deduction was supposed to conclude that the pilot was not navigating, because he wouldn't have screwed up. The teacher told me I was wrong. I was aghast, and had only started to enumerate why this was faulty reasoning when I was interrupted and told that I was overthinking it. How can you overthink an exercise in thinking?!

The pilot could have made a navigational error; it doesn't matter how trained, professional or prepared you are; you can make errors. He could have been drunk, fallen asleep, or suffered a medical emergency. The navigation chart could be in error, or the boat's steering mechanism or power source became inoperative. I woke up very irritated with the instruction I was receiving.

Still playing telephone tag with that one potential employer. Apparently he has left the country.

Weathered In

I dreamed last night that I was in a large glass-walled airport terminal. It was a boxy shape, and may have had glass ceilings, too, or at least floor to high ceiling windows, giving an unobstructed view of the tarmac. (One of my colleagues hates that colloquialism. It's almost always concrete. I think heavy airplanes would punch holes into tarmac on a hot day). It's not a hot day in my dream, though. It's snowing, with snowflakes swirling everywhere then heavy rain, visibility not any better. I'm inside, not flying. I see some of my former colleagues, and former students, one I remember in a in a really dirty white shirt, but going flying. I'm not flying. I don't know why I'm there.

I'm starting to feel that I'm never going flying. All I want is an FO job with a good company. A King Air would be great, even a piston twin if you've got good two-crew SOPs and a company culture where your status doesn't depend on how much you can drink or deadlift. I don't want anything I can't do. I don't want a free ride. I just want to fly airplanes in a safe environment where my skills will be appreciated.

I applied to a job like that. I really wanted it. I had ten times the listed experience in each category they asked for, so of course they didn't call me. While sorting out last year's taxes the accountant can't understand why having too much experience is a minus. He knows tax law, though. God knows I don't.

Smuggling

So I'm doing the walkaround on a Boeing 737, but because I'm asleep and this is occurring during a dream, it's a little weird. It's cold outside, but not snowing and the ramp is not slippery. I walk from the front airstairs, clockwise around by the left main gear, by the left engine pod, around the left wingtip (red light) and look at the ailerons and flaps from the rear. I look at the skin along the rear of the fuselage and then somehow I'm inside the airplane, looking at a bulkhead between the rearmost row of seats and a rear galley or perhaps storage area. I'm concentrating on the bulkhead. Instead of being fabric-upholstered like a lot of these things are these days, it has uv-weakened yellowing plastic panelling, like a Cessna 172 in a rental fleet. It's cracked and mended with tape and cotton batting and bulging. I think there also may have been eels swimming in it briefly, but that wasn't anything the dream wanted me to focus on.

I'm a new FO and I have one of those captains who doesn't want to be bothered educating a new hire. He just wants an FO who will do all the mundane tasks for him and will shut up and stay out of the way. For him I am sure that "go do the walkaround" means "go get out of my hair for a few minutes" not "please return with a list of observations about the serviceability of this aircraft, most of which are probably a trivial waste of my time but any one of which could cost me my life or career if I fail to perceive its urgency from your necessarily timid report." Nevertheless we summon maintenance and they determine that the bulkhead is filled with bubble-wrapped machine guns and little plastic horses.

Anyone know if that's covered by the MEL?

They say a dream only lasts a second or so, that it's just a few random neuron firings, and that your subconscious mind fills in all the details that were missing, just the way you can see a few streaks of shadow and light and perceive a face, so that as you awaken you have a "memory" of the events of the dream, even though they didn't happen. This is complicated by the fact that I lay in bed and tried to work with my conscious mind the bits that my subconscious hadn't been too clever about, so all I can tell you is that none of this happened to me in real life.

Easing back into aviation, starting with my dreams. And life is, all things considered, good.

Perspective.

Starts Just Like Work

It still hasn't sunk in that I'm going on an exotic adventure, because for me a vacation starts just like going to work: packing suitcases and getting on an airplane. There are some differences, though. At work I have to be prepared for the arctic and Florida with the same suitcase. This time I only have to pack for three cities, and I know in advance what they will be and what weather to expect, so this should be a snap. But I get to a point where I keep opening and closing the drawers and closets without packing anything. I have a new cultural constraint. I need clothes for thirty to forty degree weather without showing too much skin. I envision long cotton skirts, loose cotton blouses, and those colorful pajama-like outfits the Pakistani women wear. No matter how many times I open and close my closet, I continue not to own these things. I have long black pants, form-fitting work-out clothing, t-shirts, a bit of beach wear, sweaters, and a wide variety of winter clothing. I pack two pairs of long black work pants for the build, a few t-shirts, and a couple of white, short-sleeved, poly-cotton shirts (with tabs for epaulettes). I simply plan to buy more appropriate clothing when I get there.

I use my work packing list to help decide the non-clothing items to take, adding an extra memory card for the camera, an electrical adapter for the various chargers, anti-malarial and severe diarrhea medicine (prescribed by the travel centre that gave me all my inoculations), and a guidebook to Cambodia. I leave my laptop, headset and manuals behind. I'm really not going to work as usual.

I get a ride to the airport late in the evening as the first snow of the year starts to fall. Big flakes swish through the streetlight beams. I hope the airport snowploughs and deicing stations are warmed up and ready to go. I just have a sweatshirt and a light jacket, not wanting to haul anything else through Cambodian heat. I would be woefully unprepared if we had to do an evac on the runway here. No, Aviatrix, you are not going to work. You can stop thinking about these things. Stop thinking about emergency preparedness? Never!

The group leader is taking care of crazy overprepared, anyway. He has us all at the airport something like four hours before the flight. It's a group booking, so the check-in kiosk rejects me, but the girl at the counter has no trouble issuing me a boarding pass and then after I pass through security it's easy to find the large group milling around our gate. Someone hands out the t-shirts and work gloves we've been warned to leave room for in our carry-ons, and we board the flight only about 15 minutes later than scheduled. It's a Boeing 777 if I remember correctly. Despite the size of the aircraft and the number of people who must be on board, the Captain includes a shout-out of our group, going to build houses in Cambodia, in his welcome announcement. I still don't get that I'm doing anything out of the ordinary.

The seatbelts have built-in airbags, but there is no indication on the safety card how they work. I'm already in a foreign country, as English is the second language on the aircraft placards. There's a fancy in-flight entertainment system built into the back of the seat in front of me, with movies in English, Chinese and probably some other languages, too. We're supposed to stay up until at least ten p.m. Cambodian time and then sleep or rest for the rest of the flight, in order to get over jet lag as quickly as possible. Once I've chatted to my neighbours and read enough my dollar thrift-store paperback that I can't concentrate, I turn on the IFE to watch a Hollywood movie. Not being aware that Inception is a mindfuck (sorry, is there a corresponding term without the profanity?) movie, I watch half an hour or so and think my inability to understand exactly what is going on reflects extreme fatigue on my part, rather than deliberate and nested misleading on the part of the filmmaker. I give up and fall asleep about 8:30 p.m. Cambodian time, which is well into dawn back home. I sleep for about four hours and then wake up and watch the rest of the movie. It doesn't get less confusing through inserting a nap break, during which I had actual dreams which may or may not be fully separated from the movie itself, in my head. Also it's normal to have cuts in movie that drop you into new action, so to turn around and say that should be a cue you recognize as a sign of dreaming is pretty mean.

I'm like a nervous airline passenger, in that I imagine that every change in engine sound could be something irregular, except that I'm not nervous about it, aware of other things it is much more likely to be, and confident enough in the ability of a trained triple-seven crew to handle whatever happens. It's really just a way of alleviating boredom. Back to the entertainment system. There's an undernose camera view showing strips of alto cumulus clouds far far below us. I normally fly beneath them. Whether it's an artifact of the camera lens or the altitude I'm not sure, but the picture ahead on the horizon shows the curve of the Earth.

Another movie, this one is called Salt and stars Angelina Jolie as a sexy spy. The opening is copied straight out of a James Bond movie, and is even less believable here, because face it, given Angelina Jolie, waterboarding isn't going to be the evil bad guys' first choice of torture, and James Bond was at least shown to be in terrible physical condition after his ordeal. Angelina turns out to be a Russian sleeper agent, trained since childhood, now working for the CIA. That's interesting, because the denouement has to have her betray her own people, be killed by the Americans, or win, therefore making the American side lose. Any would be unusual for a Hollywood action movie. I never got to see which, because they turned off the IFE in preparation for landing before the end of the highway chase scene. My guess is that she betrayed her own people, presented as her being won over to the superiority of the American way of life, and everyone goes back to trusting her happy happy. I asked one of the other passengers if they had seen the end of the movie, and they had, but didn't remember anything useful about it. I gather it's mostly just a movie about Angelina Jolie and car chases.

As we descend into Hong Kong, a peculiar smell filters into the airplane through the pressurization system, and although the cockpit announcement called it a sunny day, it looks like fog. The air quality is that terrible. It's even worse than Los Angeles. There are mountains out there somewhere, but I just see a few vague shapes. I wouldn't want to land here visually.

Sometimes It's Monday on a Friday

Just before I wake up I have a dream that the front gear collapsed. I jump out though the crew door and survey the damage. Both ends of both propellers are curled under, so there's engine damage to contend with to. I berate myself that if only I had gone out the back door instead of the crew door, it wouldn't have overbalanced. That makes no sense, seeing as I only got out to look, but the whole thing makes no sense. For example, this particular machine doesn't have a crew door. It's an option for cargo flights, but it's not installed on any of our company aircraft. The crew can go out the airstairs door, through the emergency exit beside row two behind the FO, or by kicking out the front window. And my airplane has three-bladed propellers, not two-bladed like the airplane in the dream. And, you know, the real airplane isn't morphing into a whale or whatever else seemed perfectly normal in the dream world. Looks like my subconscious is really worried about that nosewheel tire. Or my brain is just processing back to work stress, and channelling it through an easy target. I'll bet parents have some spectacularly horrible nightmares about things happening to their children.

Back-to-work also includes not having all the luxury of my own kitchen full of food. The hotel only has flavoured yogurt, and I prefer plain, but it's the fruit-on-the-bottom kind, so I eat the white off the top and leave the sugary flavouring at the bottom. And I have a bagel with marmalade. Commercial marmalade might contains gelatin, so this is a bit like eating matzo with bacon, but whatever keeps my engine running. I find out what the job will be and promise to do what I can to get the airplane fuelled before they need it.

It's Good Friday, a public holiday here, and many Canadians take a four day weekend. Given that there were biblical themed children's books (e.g. God Made Outer Space) on the stand at reception that typically contains postcards or tourist brochures, this may not be an easy town to get things done in on Easter weekend. I start with the fuel callout number listed in the CFS, but no one picks up the phone. I leave my name and number then I look around the chart and use Google and the CFS try to find somewhere nearby I can fly to for fuel if no one calls back. There used to be a flying school at this field, but it moved to another airport just last month. I momentarily thought I had found a 24-hour cardlock pump, but it was at an airport with the same name in the states. The obvious one takes cash only, which isn't out of the question, but how am I going to get several times my ATM withdrawal limit of cash on a holiday? Google offers me "The Best <my location> Online Dating Sites." I hate those things that hijack your search terms and offer you a useless page on the subject. I pick another airport close by and then realize that it is across the border in the United States. I try calling the FSS to see if I will luck out and get a briefer with local knowledge, but this FIR is so huge that he can't help. Once upon a time I could have called the FSS on the field and they would have known.

I call back the fuel callout number to give my cell number instead of the hotel number, and to make sure he hasn't been trying to call me. Still no answer. As I listen again to the outgoing message, I realize that the company name is that of the flying school that just moved out. I'm probably calling a phone that is dead in a drawer. I go to the airport to see if there is a different number there. There is, but just as I'm dialing it, the fueller I had given up on appears. The company that ran the flying school is still running the fuel pumps here, and he just left the phone upstairs. Yay!

He's brought a team with him: a two or three year old daughter wearing a purple Tinkerbelle coat, and a shy but energetic dog with silver ear tips. The dog had a very short coat--no winter pelt, even though this area is just creeping out of winter--and I first described it as brown, but it's an interesting colour, maybe a bit grey, also almost purple. She has silver ear tips. I think it's some kind of German hound, a Wehrmeiraner or something. (It's funny, I could always Google things like that and act as if I were already an expert on everything I encounter, but I'd rather be my natural self and let some reader who is expert on dogs tell us the details). The dog drinks from a puddle by the airplane. I cringe, wondering how many toxic substances are in that puddle, from the fuel pumps, deicers, airplanes leaking fluids and the sealed tarmac itself. The dog doesn't drop dead, though. The fuller tows my airplane to the pumps, his daughter riding on the tug and the dog dancing excitedly all around. He fuels, goes in to get the bill, then realizes he has forgotten to copy the number of litres off the pump and comes back out.

It's a few degrees above freezing, but it's windy so seems cold. I thought I put my winter stuff in my flight bag, but there's only one glove and no toque. I go inside with the fueller and pay, then explain that I will need one more load of fuel this weekend, but it can be any time between this evening and Sunday morning, does he have a preference for when I call him out? At first he says anytime is fine, then amends it to "not Sunday morning." He wants to enjoy the Easter egg hunt with his daughter.

I had anticipated fuelling and then going back to the hotel before flying, but I brought my flight bag just in case. And the case comes up. Fly now. I finish my flight preparations, taking off the tents and putting them in the wing lockers, the mission specialist catches the fact that I have the cord hanging out of the locker and that I have left the electrical plug cover open, before I do. It makes me look sloppy. I feel icky about it, and I'm also not certain the engines will start. They really don't like freezing weather overnight. Remember the right one freezing in a couple of hours at Watson Lake? They were tented all night, but that's just to contain their own heat left over from the flight. With no plug in, they weren't producing any heat of their own.

I bribe them, promising them nice fresh oil if they'll just start for me. They are champions! I praise them out loud for their sterling performance. During the run-up I turn on both heaters, but the sun coming in the cockpit windows warms me up so I flick off the front heater. I stick my hand back behind the cockpit partition to test the temperature in the back. The client is on the phone and thinks I'm trying to get his attention. Oops. There are some ground delays related to the computers in the back, then we finally take off, and yes, I manage to do that right. It's just before noon, and I had breakfast at seven. Day in the life. I eat some Arrowroot cookies out of my flight bag. They're soft because they've been there for months and the package is open. It's cold at altitude and I turn on the cockpit heater again. It gets colder. I only had it on for a few minutes on the ground. It is approved for ground operations, with a squat switch linked fan to keep the air moving in the absence of forward motion, but sometimes it overheats while sitting on the ground, and this is one of those times. Oh I'm having such a great day.

I also didn't have a blank OFP form with me. I just came out to fuel, thinking I'd be back to the room before I left. I usually have spares in my flight bag, but it turns out that all the ones on my clipboard are used. I had an old one that had been partially filled out but not actually used, from a day I didn't go to Montana. I reworked that form messily before I left, just to have the weight and balance and a place to fill in the times, not changing everything else because I'm going to recopy it properly when I get back to the hotel. It still says I'm going to Montana, with 100 pounds of baggage instead of a passenger, but I have the correctly worked weight and balance on my computer. It's Good Friday: I'm not going to get ramped today, if anyone ever gets ramped here.

We do the flight and I'm rusty, so waste a bit of time, but the work goes reasonably well until the last half hour when weather conditions don't allow us to finish, so we turn around and go home. There are two runways at destination: a long one and a shorter but still long enough one. There are four airports in the CFS for this town, and they all have two runways. It's a windy area. There's currently still a howling north wind, so I land on the shorter into-wind runway, which despite my landing with lots of runway to spare and not using aggressive braking I find out afterward made the client uneasy. I turn around and taxi in. As I'm parking a voice from the back says, "Hey it's Transport Canada!" You've got to be kidding. I look. It's one guy in a multicoloured toque and a nondescript coat. No, it's not TC. They travel in pairs, with matching jackets and ramp passes. They stick out like sore thumbs at little airports where no one has a ramp pass. It was probably the met observer for the local weather station.

Dinner is yesterday's leftovers nuked in their takeout container in the breakfast room microwave. The styrofoam warps alarmingly. Inside the potatoes are still frozen and the vegetables dehydrated. It's not quite enough for one of only two meals I get to eat today. There's a Tim Horton's next door so I walk over, but once I get there I question whether I am really hungry or just bored and in need of comfort food. I ponder for a while then order two Timbits. That comes to thirty-six cents, which I count out carefully. The server gives my my Timbits in a bag and I thank him and leave the store. When I open the bag I discover I have three Timbits. Do I look so impoverished that a Tim Horton's employee has taken pity on me and snuck me extra food? I eat all three. I really would have preferred vegetables, but there aren't all-night vegetable stores.

I recopy my messy OFP, and prepare new one for the next day. I call the fueller and we agree on a time tomorrow morning.

Another Nightmare

When I'm in a hotel I take care to plug any chargers into visible outlets, and put a post-it note on the desk reminding me they are there, so I don't abandon chargers and batteries all over North America. Last night I couldn't find a place to plug in my camera battery, so I plugged it into the power bar under my own desk.

"Now remember!" warned the voice that looks after these things. "It's under the desk don't forget!" But I didn't make a post-it note because it's my own home.

And then in the middle of the night I woke up thinking "Oh, no! I left my charger and my camera battery under the desk!" I'd had a dream that I was checking into another hotel. Gah. Now you know what my life is about: moving from place to place and hoping I haven't lost anything. I've done pretty well. I think I've lost one piece of clothing and a plastic water bottle in three years of hotel-to-hotel operations. Do other pilots dream of hotels this much?

Savage chickens has a strip about waking up from a dream.

Further to things forgotten, I was going to include in this entry a wrapping up of loose ends from my last assignment, but instead I think I'll make it a challenge to see if anyone remembers a loose end that needs wrapping, and answer that one in a few days.

In honour of the date, today's sim was an IFR flight CYZE-R23-W-CYVV : that is, a short flight from Gore Bay to Wiarton, Ontario, home of Canada's most famous groundhog. I did not see my shadow at any point in the flight, so that must mean winter is almost over. Or that I have realistic scenery turned off.

Sim notes: I tried out the Flight Planner in MSFS, but it didn't recognize NDB airways, so routed me via the Sault Se Marie VOR and V300. I "filed" from CYZE to the YZE beacon, but never went there. As CYZE has no published departure, I took off from runway 11 then at 400' turned to 154 and climbed to 2800 on that heading, in accordance with the published missed approach procedure for runway 11. That's a good way to enter the system from such an airport. In this specific case I can see that that heading leads out over the shore. Then at 2800' on that heading I was, as I had briefed myself, within five degrees of track for R23, so I simply intercepted the airway towards Wiarton and continued the climb to 5000'. I descended to cross the W beacon at 3000' for a racetrack procedure turn into runway 05 at Wiarton. The approach has a tiny turn at the beacon: tracking 058 degrees to, and 056 from. I wonder why.

Responsibility Never Sleeps

As long-time readers know, I have kept my flight instructor rating current so as to have an additional source of income when I'm not off in the wild beyond. So here I am, the week before Christmas, back in a Cessna 150. I'm in the right seat, flying night circuits from a little strip next to a lake. The snow isn't very deep so the ice glistens through in strips where the wind has bared it. There's enough moonlight and other ambient light reflecting off the snow that I can see the shapes of the evergreen trees below us as we climb out from the touch and go. It's odd yet familiar to fly again in the tiny single engine airplane with the toylike controls. I'm not handling the controls, just supervising as the student practises night take-offs and landings.

I experience a moment of "how did I get here?" disconnection. Did I fall asleep? Instructors do a lot, but it's never happened to me. I make sleep a priority, and now more than ever I'm aware of the need to be alert at night with only one engine holding us above the trees. The windshield is fogged up and I reach to wipe it with my coat sleeve--the little Cessna defogger only clears a patch on the left pilot's side--but then I realize that it's not fog obscuring my view, the window has iced over on the outside. A warning flag goes up in my head. Ice? I still can't see forward. As I scan the instruments to ensure the airplane is maintaining altitude on downwind I wonder why the windscreen would ice in cold, clear weather. If there's ice on the window, where else is there ice? "Is the pitot heat on?" I ask.

Or rather start to ask. Before I've finished the question I'm facing a completely different direction and there are branches. Tree branches. The airplane is in a tree. The windshield remains opaque. I still don't have a complete picture of what has happened. Is the engine on? Another blank in memory. We must have secured it. I'm not sure how we got down, have no memory of anything we might have said to one another. There is no fire. I have a mental snapshot image of the end of a building, the peaked eaves of the roof damaged. We must have hit the tree, bent the tree to hit the building and then stayed in the tree as it bounced back. No memory of it. I can see a large clay pot knocked off a ledge of the building and broken in half, but not an image of the airplane.

For some reason the student is still holding the CFS as we walk, apparently unhurt, to where we know there is a payphone. I'm rehearsing in my head telling the aircraft owner what we've done to the plane. "Everyone's okay, but ..." My career, my confidence, my reputation, my ability to be insured as a pilot, my dreams ...

The student dials the payphone, then I take the handset away. "I'm pilot in command," I say. That's a little rude. A flight instructor did that to me years ago after I eagerly followed protocol on the ground after a radio failure. In my hand the phone is ringing and ringing, no answer. I look at the CFS in the student's hand in order to see the protocol, the correct order of everything to be reported in the event of an aviation accident. For some reason this is important to me at this moment. I want to get the last thing in my career right. Then I see from the page that he has looked up a number for the Transportation Safety Bureau, but it's a daytime number. I hang up in order to redial the Nav Canada twenty-four hour number at 1-888-WX-BRIEF but I never do.

The next thing I know I'm lying down. There's no pain. It's like I'm ... oh ... like I just woke up. I just did. I'm in my own bed. The whole thing was a dream. It probably took three seconds and my subconscious just filled in all the details so it seemed to make sense.

Now I admit that that was a freaking cruel way to tell a story to readers who I know feel for me in my ups and downs, but I hope you gasped in horror. I wanted to tell the story so you would feel what it was like. I didn't even have the dreams tag on the blog entry to tip me off that this wasn't really happening. I guess I should have remembered that I don't have any flight students right now, and don't live near a little airstrip next to a frozen lake, and that real life does not just start into the middle of the story, but I have the excuse that I was not paying really close attention on account of being fast asleep.

As nightmares go, it doesn't rival Kafka. No one was hurt. I'm sitting at my desk now laughing as I realize that I am relating a nightmare that was largely about paperwork. The bad part is that I didn't feel any better about it once I had woken up. As I lay awake in my bed, I knew with one hundred percent certainty that nothing had really happened. No real airplane or building had been damaged. No one was even scratched. There was no paperwork to be done. But it didn't matter. I still felt responsible. I was so overwhelmed with guilt to have been so inattentive as to have had an accident. I was pilot in command. I should have realized that there was a risk of pitot icing, should have known all the obstacle heights, should not have fallen asleep. I'm literally lying awake, unable to sleep, beating myself up for an unforgivable lapse in responsible behaviour which occurred while I was in my own bed asleep. I try to tell myself that it wasn't my fault, but that's no excuse. When you are pilot in command, it is always your fault.

As I lie there thinking it over, I gradually realize where the parts of the dream come from. Sitting in a stationary vehicle with the windshield iced over and the engine running is the story of Canada in the winter. You start the car up, turn on the heater and defroster and then wait a bit to loosen the ice a little before you start scraping. Just as first place someone lived fills the role of "house" in a dream, the first airplane I flew became "airplane." And suddenly I realize that in my life the "responsibility" is represented by airplanes.

What do the top of an evergreen tree and the edge of the roof of a house have in common? It's where you put Christmas lights. This is not a dream about airplanes. It's a plain old holiday stress dream about distributing gifts appropriately, doing my year-end paperwork, filing all those utility bills that I haven't even opened, because they are supposed to autopay through my bank account. So I'm not an irresponsible pilot. I'm someone who can't be bothered to do her Christmas shopping and write cheques to charity. That's much better. The relief is so great it takes away all the Christmas stress too.

I fall back asleep and dream I am staying in a hotel room that has a glass elevator and overlooks a hockey rink in which Steven Spielberg is directing a gangster movie. A gangster movie musical. A huge cast of flapper girls and zoot suited guys toting those old-fashioned guns with magazines the size of a medium pizza are high-stepping in unison towards the blue line while making dramatic arm movements. Life is back to normal.

This blog post brought to you courtesy of the NDB RWY 23T into Alert, NWT. The MSFS flight analysis looks bizarre because it maps it onto a grid with 15" squares and at that latitude the graticules are tall, tall rectangles.