What are you doing to yourself?

After a reasonable dump of snow on Friday night, I wasn’t holding out much hope for a flight early on Saturday morning. For those of you unfamiliar with my local climate, a reasonable dump constitutes around 14 inches of the white stuff. I knew that even getting down to the airport was going to be fun.  I hate walking on anything other than dry concrete. Fighting your way through that much snow is a challenge in itself. Luckily most of the sidewalks had been ploughed if not salted.  This means you are walking on a few inches on compact stuff rather than wading through knee deep levels (as I did on my way home from work the night before)

As expected it took me about twice as long as usual to get down there, negotiating snow piles, unploughed roads and so on. I had the first flight of the morning so the flying school wasn’t much better. Bless the dispatch guys though; they’d kept my plane inside the hanger, so I could do my walkround in comfort! The apron itself was a couple of inches of compacted icy stuff. By the time we’d finished our ground brief (quite a long one today) they’d dumped my plane outside to make room in the hanger. As I inched over the frozen apron in my wholly-inadequate-for-the-weather-but-great-for-rudder-control sneakers, I realised that I was actually in the midst of two of my biggest phobias: walking on ice and flying. All I needed was a marionette puppet* to complete the picture.

I couldn’t help thinking “what are you doing to yourself? Normal people don’t spend their Saturday’s like this!”

 

* Phobia number 3 , don’t ask!