Tuesday was a very busy day, but one of the results was a successfully completed flight review. My hour of ground was actually kind of fun. Harold had a couple of quizzes for me that I did pretty well on and we reviewed some of the FAR/AIM that I haven’t looked at recently. Then we went out for some air work. Temp was 22°C, altimeter 30.03, wind at the surface was reported as 070@06, but was closer to a 90° crosswind as we got going and about 100 feet up it was probably closer to 20 knots. We did the GPS27 approach and circle to land on runway 9, then actually ended up spending most of the hour on crosswind landings (which is not a bad way to spend an hour). One thing I discovered is that I’m much more comfortable landing (or taking off) with a crosswind from the right than I am with one from the left, so it was good practice with this one coming from the left. Ended up with exactly the required 1.0 on the Hobbs, so I’ve jumped through that hoop for the FAA and I’m good for another two years.
Tuesday was also Erin’s 22nd birthday and my parents had called the previous week to say they were bringing my nephew up to visit Cincinnati, so we all went to see the Reds play at Great American Ballpark. It was a pretty good game, but not the outcome I would have preferred. Joey Votto hit a 3-run homer in the bottom of the 9th to tie the game, but then Arthur Rhodes had his first bad outing really of the season and gave up 3 runs without retiring a batter in the top of the 10th, so the Reds lost to the Phillies (I suppose my baby sister was probably happy about that). Oh, well. So, all-in-all, a mostly enjoyable day. We did the traditional birthday meal at a (new) Japanese steakhouse on Wednesday instead and that was also nice.
On Wednesday, I finally (after 6 years) got my online logbook working the way I had envisioned it from the beginning, so it now pulls from the database dynamically rather than just showing static pages that I had to manually update everytime I updated the database. Unfortunately, I haven’t configured the widget at the left here to do so yet, maybe next year.