Holding pattern - still learning - Checkride sched 02.Mar

Week of 19.Jan.2018

The second scheduled checkride date whooshed by without happening. The week prior to the test was horrid weather so I wasn't able to work on  any flight skills so we cancelled.

Next checkride is for 02.Mar.2018 14:00 in Greenwood. That (should) give me plenty of time to buff up my flight and landing skills.

I think I'm pretty good for the oral. I did a practice oral with another CFI and he was comfortable I'm good to go. I thought he didn't dig too deep; either that or I'm way better prepared than I feel. I'll  continue to study emergency procedures, systems, and airspace.

I went up twice this week. The first flight was really windy above the surface with winds approaching 30 knots as low as 1000' AGL. My emergency engine out/landing went really bad because I failed to account for the winds and got blown way right of the runway. We did an  engine out in the pattern and, landing into the wind, I turned to the runway too late and would have landed short of the runway in the trees or on the runway nav gear...wind apparently matters.

The second flight was a couple of days after I had some 24 hour intestinal bug and I probably should have cancelled. I made a bunch of stupid mistakes (lost control of my altitude in the pattern, struggled on the steep turns, and really sucked at landing even though winds were light and pretty much straight down the runway. I'll take this as an I'M SAFE learning event.

Got the results of my neuro exam back and discussed them with my primary care doc. TL;DR - I'm in  the normal range for pretty much everything so no issues flying.

• I have some deficit with 'story recall' after a time lag; tell me something and I can paraphrase it back but ask me again in 10 minutes and I'll forget a lot of it. Take away: write the important stuff down.  Take away 2: checklists are good.
• Visual recall is above average. They give you a complicated geometric figure to look at and then have you redraw it several times of 10 minutes or so. This kind of makes sense since, as a programmer, I spend a lot of time building charts and pulling meaning out of them. This may be why I enjoy maps so much.
• I have lower than average ability to find a specific shape within a group of images. This probably explains why I can't do puzzles well and might have trouble finding <place> on a map unless the map is oriented in a way that makes it easy for me to find.  I'm not totally sure how this might impact flying.

I have noticed that I'm better able to multi-task today than I was on the day I freaked out last year. I've had a couple of days where the pattern was full, the radio was busy, and winds were high and  managed to deal with most of the tasks acceptably. I do know that if things get away from  me, I get flustered and start making mistakes. I'm probably well advised to exit a situation like that, go away for a bit, then come back when there's less to deal with or I'm re-focused. This is most likely to happen in the pattern so I'll just exit, go a few miles away and turn circles, then come back. Either that or just land and call it a day. Since I'm not ever heading into anything but E and G airspace, this should be sufficient.

Still can't believe how complex this is...