All the latest news (that's fit to print)

So I'm what you would call a horrible blogger. It's been a month since I made a post, and that's just sad. I guess since people suggested that I not rant on so much about political topics that I just have nothing to say. Haha.

In airplane news, my plane is down for it's annual inspection, which means they rip it apart and give it a look over. It's an FAA requirement. Needless to say, since this is my first inspection as the actual owner of the plane, they were able to find a whole slew of things that should be fixed. The engine and such were all in good shape, which is pretty much most of what is required by the FAA, but there's a whole bunch of stuff that really needed to be fixed and was probably just not done since the last owner had no intention of flying the plane anymore.

That, and add another year of wear and tear to it - not that I flew it that much but I think I racked up a little bit north of 50 hours in the plane this last year, and I haven't been up in it in 2 months. I actually ended up doing this inspection a month early since I had a landing gear issue I needed fixed anyway.

So, one of the issues they discovered (or I should say, confirmed) is that the wing skin had broken away from the underlying support strut where you step on the wing to get in the plane. Basically this meant you could push on the skin right by the door and it would pop in and out. I had it looked at during the year and was told it wasnt' really a safety issue, but should be fixed, so I waited until now to do it.

The reason I waited is because of one of the pictures you see here. Yes, that it my right wing, clearly seperated from the rest of the plane. It's a big project. I don't know how much of it is tied up in actual sheet metal work, and how much of it is getting the wing on and off, but I suspect it's more of the latter. 24 hours of labor time in just this wing project. Ouch.

As you can see from some of these other pictures (sorry about the cell-phone camera quality), the whole plane is pretty much ripped apart. The interior shows the very sport military green primer that they use to help keep all the interior metal from rusting. Right now it looks more like some WW2 bomber than my little Piper Archer. haha. (oh but what the WW2 bomber pilots would have given for a Garmin 396 portable GPS system!)

I'm hoping to take Kaitlyn over to the maintenance hangar before they put this back together so she can get a look at all the parts, and she'll certainly be amused by the missing wing. She helped me wash the plane the other day and we spent some time inside learning about all the controls and instruments, so I think she'll like it. Hailey loves planes but I'm not sure if she'd be into all this quite yet, and it might be a bit dangerous to let the 2-year-old wander the maintenance hangar. (there's a gummy bear in your air intake? sorry about that!).

To ramble on a bit more - we ended our last soccer season by forefeiting all of our playoff games due to lack of players. In the last game, I was the only one (!!!) to show up on time. I did play all the games though, as we scraped together teams from players there for other games.

We just started a new session 2 weeks ago. We won the first game and lost last night in a game that we probably should have won. We let two goals in in the last 5 min and lost 5-4, although I'm not going to take too much of the blame on either of the goals. Really, I played one of my top games since starting again, and even saved a penalty kick. Somehow, the other team always had two girls standing on my side of the field at all times, which led to a whole bunch of 2 of them vs. just me situations (our defense hasn't really come around yet). I think they only scored on one of those though, and I made a serious number of saves.

This team also seemed a little too aggressive for this kind of league too. Not really aggressive in a skilled-soccer kind of way - more aggressive in an out-of-control disturbing kind of way. Maybe they feel like they have a lot of pride riding on the adult co-ed recreational indoor soccer games - haha. But hey, I had fun and our team really did play pretty well until the end.

I've got more stories but I'm tired of typing. Halloween is tomorrow so that's sure to liven things up even more.