Should I already know this?!
I used to track my headaches to try to figure out what was causing them, in the hopes I could avoid them in the future. And from that exercise I learned how many things were in my control – food consumption, caffeine, dehydration, lighting/noise/fragrance levels (at home) – and what wasn’t – stress, sleep, hormonal changes, muscle tension, and barometric pressure aka atmospheric pressure.
And folks, that is what we are here to talk about today – the weight of the air.
When I was tracking headaches, I would go to our handy dandy weather app and click on the pressure icon. Sure enough, on headache days, I often saw a huge change in pressure from previous days.
“A ha!” I’d think, “I definitely have a pressure headache.” And I actually added that to something I tried to get more into my control – basically by pregaming for big pressure changes with lots of water and maybe some Tylenol the night before or morning of predicted pressure change.
But all that time, I did NOT really understand what atmospheric pressure was. I knew the ups and downs could be triggers, but didn’t understand what the ups and downs meant, or why it was going up and down at all. I surmised I got the headaches from the variation of pressure on my body but, again, WhAt Is ThIs?
Should I already know this? Did everyone learn this in school? Seriously. Is this common knowledge?
For all my unknowing, I was never curious enough to look it up and understand it and save it to memory.
Until recently.
Because guess what has a huge effect on flying? Atmospheric pressure. (Duh, right?)
I won’t bore you with the details! Promise!
It’s just that it’s all coming together, and I wanted to share that.
I understood it was important to have the altimeter (altitude of an aircraft above sea level) set to the most current reading (shared by the tower or a weather report) so we don’t hit other pilots or terrain. I understood density altitude (the pressure altitude based on the current air temperature) greatly affects the performance of the plane.
But I didn’t have a grasp on the basics. Cold air heavier. Warm air lighter. Because science. Changes all the time due to uneven heating of earth. Just like the super freaking basics people probably learn in what, GRADE SCHOOL?
Steven and I sometimes talk about the subjects we’d retake if we were going through school again. Like the K-12 stuff. History would be much more interesting. Ooo, geography too! Physics would be more applicable. Things don’t stick for me until I have a personal reference point, and apparently headaches weren’t enough.
Next up to tackle: gyroscopic forces.
Repetitive dreams
I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been having so many dreams about trying to get somewhere and I can’t, and/or trying to do something, but I can’t.
WhAt DoEs It MeAn?!
Well, the AI overview from Google is not promising!
Dreaming about trying to get somewhere, but not being able to reach your destination, often signifies feelings of being stuck, having unclear goals, or facing obstacles in your waking life that are preventing you from achieving your desired outcome; it can represent anxiety about not making progress towards a goal or feeling lost in your direction.
Google AI Overview
Dreaming about trying to do something but being unable to often signifies feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or a sense of being overwhelmed in a particular area of your waking life, where you might feel powerless to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle; the specific action in the dream can provide clues about what aspect of your life is causing this stress.
Google AI Overview
Apparently, I’m anxious. Tell me something I don’t know, internet.
To the AI Overview’s credit, it did provide an action plan!
Will I be following it? No.
Do you ever google to see what your dreams might mean? I normally wouldn’t but that I keep having so many made me do it!
No related photo, but here is a picture of how I woke up from my last nap:
I’m hearing what you’re saying here…
Aren’t we all just meandering life looking to connect with people who have similar interests to us, so we can share our passions?
Maybe?
I just say that intro because I am going to talk about flying – but don’t leave yet! – I am going to make it broad. I promise. No flying details! Don’t go!
Let’s see how short we can make this story – during the pandemic I did a presentation at work on the garage we were building (we refer to it as Dragonstone). The presentation was open to the entire region and people were so freaking bored that many attended.
I ended the call on a high*, feeling very cool and proud of all we had done to build it (we did it all ourselves except concrete, brickwork, gutters, and floor sealant).
TO THIS DAY, many people still associate me with building a garage. That’s how they approach me conversationally – they ask if we finished it, for an update, etc. (It’s virtually finished – we just need to insulate it before we can set up the radiant floor heating.)
So I’m at the holiday party in December. At the portion of the party where we’ve moved to a bar. A coworker approaches me and asks about the garage.
I tell him the spiel above – virtually complete! – but that we spend a lot of our free time flying now, that Steven got his private pilot license.
You would NOT believe how excited he was to hear this. Turns out he did his private pilot training all the way up until he was about to solo, then stopped.
So we talked for a bit, sharing stories, and he was incredibly enthusiastic, our voices raising to hear each other over the noise of the bar.
Then at some point he said “Kim, I’m hearing what you’re saying here” and pointed to his head, “but I’m feeling what you’re saying here” then held his hand over his heart.
Now, if that isn’t the nicest compliment I’ve had in a long time. I believed him. I could tell by how he was acting that he was really did feel that way.
Was he three sheets to the wind**? I mean… yes, 100% definitely, but you can’t fake that enthusiasm and connection, no matter what is fueling it.
So! I hope you all find your people that you can connect that enthusiastically about the things you are passionate about! It feels so good when you do.
*That high immediately became a low low when I ended it and saw I had a message from a higher-up telling me to call them – I found out then I didn’t advance in promotion I thought was made for me (it was truly a blessing in disguise – I am not meant for supervisory work).
**I was not drinking that night but had a headache that made me feel lightheaded and drunk. Yay…
New year firsts
Stephany gave me a One Line a Day five-year memory book in December 2023, and I spent last year filling it out. Now, as I add entries for this year, I get to compare them to last year’s and reflect on how things compare. It’s been fun! This is one of my all-time fave gifts and I love it so much I bought a couple of them to gift this year (and plan to do more in the future!).
So far this year is off to a better start. I wasn’t sick on January 1 like last year and the January 9 work problem I said “better be f*cking resolved next year” is (but it took until last summer! eek!)!
Mostly, I am noticing I started last year with a lot of “first xyz of the year” entries:
- First El Famous visit of the year (on Jan 2 last year… and this year)
- First WWM class of the year (on Jan 3 last year… and this year)
- First INR visit of the year
- First in-office work day
- And so on
Have you done anything this year that made you stop and think, “This is my first time doing that this year”? What was it?
Random Thoughts Thursday 481
- I’m just finished Mullane’s Guide to Learning to Fly: Deep Dives into Select Topics for Today’s Student Pilot and really enjoyed it. It helped me grasp some tricky concepts and gave me a much broader perspective on general aviation (GA). But WHOA my brain was mellllllting while reading it (and still?)! And it isn’t even a textbook – it’s anecdotal and conversational – but it’s packed with so much information. If this little book was melting my brain, I can’t even imagine what Steven went through with actual aviation textbooks. Damn. The more I learn about GA the more impressed I am with Steven’s understanding of it!
- So. I’m reading that book and it gets into magnetic headings. I won’t bore you with all that but I was talking to Steven about this and DID YOU KNOW that the magnetic north and south poles can swap locations?! It’s called a magnetic reversal. Apparently the last one was 42,000 years ago and it took place over 1,000 years. This information blew my mind but maybe it’s common knowledge.
- Our fortune cookies have really been trying to get us to reconnect with old friends! First Steven, now me:
- I am going to count that ^ as my current mani pic too. All my nails are that glitter.
- I received a package from Katja in Germany last night and this was legit my face when I saw my very own vegan Santa! How did I forget about all the amazing vegan chocolate in Germany?! What a great surprise!
- My bank sent me a credit card with an entirely new number and what a pita it’s been to change my billing info for subscriptions. One place didn’t have the option to change it at all, and two had the option to change it but it doesn’t work. So odd. Do you want my money… or no?
- That small town magazine that ran my photo without credit corrected it online and is running a correction in the next issue. Woo hoo!
Cold turkey & 3 goals for January
I’m someone who generally avoids fake sugars because they don’t taste good to me and make me feel crummy. But this summer, I was offered an Alani (fake sugar energy drink) that didn’t leave me feeling like garbage and I liked the taste! So I started buying them occasionally. And before I knew it I was having one every morning – a little ritual I really looked forward to, my special treat to kick off the day.
But damn they’re pricey! Plus, I started feeling like maybe my body was getting hooked on them, and I kind of wondered about the long-term effects of all those chemicals – not to mention the maybe potential strain on my heart???
So I quit them this year. Cold turkey. A bad way to do it (hello, headaches!) but the way I chose to. If I have one in the future, it will be a (non-daily) special treat.
Kind of like I do with Starbucks now. I’m not a monster! I’m still having caffeine from time to time.
But I want to get back to how I was before and not having liquid caffeine daily. And maybe this will also save a bit of money (although that one Starbucks drink is basically the same cost as 3 Alani drinks so… yeah).
We’ll see how it goes!
Everyone shared their monthly goals at the gym Monday. I forgot we do that and had to come up with one quickly! I said “use my walking pad at my desk every day I work from home.” I want to move my body more during the day – it makes me feel good.
Then two more goals naturally fell into place this week. So here we go:
3 Goals for Jan 2025
- Use walking pad on work at home days
- Don’t multitask during meetings
- Pause before sending ranty texts to Steven
That last one – with literally everyone else in my life I ask if they have the headspace for me to vent before I do (well, most of the time, sorry, Stephany). But I send Steven rants about inconsequential shit all. the. time. Cause he’s my person. The one I am most safe to be my whiny self with. But I need to pause more before I do that (and I have been and it feels good). And the pausing helps me let things go anyway (and when I don’t let them go I just rant later in person! Living with me is a joy.).
Check the dishwasher
Steven gave me this pretty flower necklace for Christmas.
Last week, after a lunchtime run and a quick shower/getting dressed, I put it on and headed to the kitchen to make a salad for lunch before a call. I finished one bag of butter lettuce, opened another, and tossed the empty bag in the trash. Then I opened a container of carrots and added some to the salad. As I grabbed a few pepper slices to cut, I looked down and noticed something long and shiny hanging from my neck…
… and realized I actually hadn’t clasped the necklace closed.
I grasped at it hoping, somehow, that the flower charm was still on it.
Nope.
Ensue panic.
I had put it on in my office, walked all around the kitchen, gotten a million containers out of the fridge, put tiny pieces of salad together, thrown some of it out… IT COULD BE ANYWHERE.
And in true Kim fashion I had just the right amount of time to make a salad and eat it before my call, not time to also search for a missing charm. But the charm took priority.
I started in the office, running my hands over the floor to see if I felt it. Nope – but found some cat toys!
There is so much random junk on the shelves by my desk (okay, let’s be honest, and around it) that I skipped checking through all that for the time being cause that would be a PROJECT.
I crawled along the kitchen floor, running my hands over it to try to feel the charm (did I mention it’s not very big?). No luck, I just found some food bits that I cleaned up.
I looked in the fridge. I felt my hands all over the counters to see if I felt it (our counters are this ugly dark granite that makes it really hard to see things on). I got into the garbage and looked through the lettuce I threw away. I looked through the garbage. I looked through my salad.
This was not promising. But it had to be somewhere between the office and kitchen, right? I didn’t go downstairs with it on, did I?
I was losing my mind and panicking more and more.
I was about to give up, forget the salad, and get on my call, when I looked over at the open dishwasher. We don’t use heated dry, and when the dishwasher cycle is done, we pull the door down, pull the shelves out (and shake out the annoying things with lips and put them on the counter on drying mats), and let everything air dry. Yes, there are always dishes drying out in our kitchen unless we have guests over, in which I pretend I put them away promptly when the dishwasher is done.
So the bottom shelf of the dishwasher is pulled out with plates/etc. drying (I had already put away the top shelf – I have a strange process), and I push it in and guess what I see, sitting in the middle of the dishwasher door.
The charm.
Phew.
I put it back on the chain, and put it away until I could focus on actually clasping it, finished making my salad, and ate part of it before my call then didn’t finish the rest.
But at least I found it.
This damn Plane Spotter’s Guide
This Plane Spotter’s Guide was in Steven’s stocking at Christmas.
Santa asked me (yes we chat) what I thought of it the next day and being my true bitchy self, I said (something like) “I don’t think we’ll use it. It has a bunch of old ass airplanes in it we’re only going to see at an airshow, in a museum, or flying over my house on the way to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, in which case I’ll just look up what kind of plane it is on Flightradar24. I need to learn models of Cessna, Piper, Beechcraft, Cirrus, Diamond, etc. That is mostly what I see flying.”
What is it about the mother/daughter relationship that makes me so brutally honest? Yikes, Kim.
So needless to say, I haven’t looked at this book since Christmas.
But.
BUT.
Maybe Santa was on to something. I can’t say if this is from personal experience, maybe it’s hypothetical, but there COULD be instances where instead of air traffic control (ATC) saying “watch for traffic” they say “turn when you’re past Bristol” and you have no idea WHAT THE HECK that means cause what is Bristol?
WELL GUESS WHAT! It turns out Bristol is one of those old ass airplanes and there are two of them in this book! So maybe this book is useful? MAYBE?!
If, in a hypothetical situation, one had opened a book like this prior to flying and seen some old plane names, then encountered ATC saying “Bristol”** instead of “traffic” while flying, would they have known what the heck was going on and NOT been shocked to see traffic on final approach when they thought tower hadn’t mentioned it?!
Sigh. This probably doesn’t make any sense but I had to get it out of my system.
I have to say, flying sure does give me A LOT of stories to tell. Thank you to Val, Bobbi, and Mom who’ve all had to listen to this maybe hypothetical Bristol (more likely Bristell** after some research) story.
*Confusingly it’s a town north of our airport but not in its airspace
**(Or maybe ATC meant a BRM Aero Bristell NG 5 (piston-single)? Which is a newer plane and definitely not in this book… Hmm, if only there was a way to check…)
First flight of 2025!
Our first flight of the year is in the books! (Okay, not technically – Steven hasn’t put it in his log book yet ha ha pilot humor)
And we had a new passenger – Troy!
Since it was so cold out (10F when we left, 15F when we got back a few hours later), we got to preflight in the hangar, woo hoo!
We booked the plane early (6:30-10:30) to give ourselves enough time to fly, borrow the club car, get breakfast, and come back on time. We flew to the same place we took Dad – Watertown, WI – and went to the same restaurant.
We had beautiful clear skies for flying. We encountered no other traffic (visually or on radio) on the way in, probably because it was so early. I’m glad it was so quiet – the plane WiFi was not working (but did on the way back) so I didn’t have any live info on ForeFlight to see traffic there. Good practice for me not to use it!
The quiet radios gave us the perfect chance to chat without worrying about missing anything. Plus, the flight there was longer than the return, giving us even more time to talk.
Anyway.
We landed right before 8:00, got the club car right away (I had called to request it the day before) and were sitting down with hot drinks by 8:20. More chatting and eating, then we drove back a little after 9:00 to preflight and fly back.
At breakfast Troy asked us about scheduling the plane and if it’s annoying to have it back at a certain time. I said it’s definitely taught us to be more flexible and Steven immediately said “but it’s still annoying.” Ha. It will be nice when we have our own plane and don’t have to watch the clock as much for that reason.
Our flight back was faster – we had an almost 30 mph tailwind and hit a ground speed of 139 kn (160 mph).
There was a lot more going on on the radios on the way back, and I was glad the WiFi was working again so I could reference ForeFlight from time to time.
And we landed and that was that!
Okay that was not ALL of the flight. I left out a lot of details to try to make this short (and to not embarrass ourselves).
We love taking passengers up with us and we’re so glad Troy worked it into his busy day of watching his son play like a million basketball games. Sharing this passion is one of my favorite things – pointing out landmarks, explaining the process, and watching people’s reactions to seeing Steven fly and realizing just how skilled he is. And it’s always a bonus when they tell us we make a great team (thanks for that, Troy!!!!).
Random Thoughts Thursday 480
- I meant to share the front of our holiday card last RTT and forgot! Here it is (I shared the back here)! Happy New Year!
- I’m doing a Crucial Conversations training at work this week and it’s resonating with me so much that I dreamt about it last night.
- Steven really likes highland cow artwork and we picked some out for him to put up at his office and at home on Monday. I couldn’t believe how many there were to choose from!
- I decided to make all of my YouTube videos private this weekend, and during the process, I saw that Steven did a discovery flight (the first flight you do in private pilot training) in 2012. I had forgotten about this, so yay for this blog serving its purpose of documenting my life. A few comments:
- At the end of the post I wrote “We did not sign up for additional lessons for Steven (yet?), but would like to someday! It would be awesome to fly to Guttenberg, IA, in the summers, to see my family!” It’s very rewarding to see that and know we can do that now (12 years later).
- This comment on the post cracked me up “Kim, as a private pilot with and instrument rating, I highly recommend running as fast as you can away from flying lessons. It is a really fast way to blow a lot of money and accomplish nothing. A flight here and there is fun, but getting a licence is not all it’s cracked up to be. Email me back or ask Pete how great (not) it is. Sorry to be a downer, but I’m sure you would like honesty.” I wonder what that was all about, especially the accomplishing nothing comment. Was their training not going well? Was it not the right time in their life to pay for lessons with other financial responsibilities? Was this person not realistic or knowledgeable about the amount of time it would take and how much it would cost? So many questions. Yet I don’t remember who they are (I do know the Pete they referenced though).
- Steven has flown a low wing plane. And I’ve ridden in one. Huh. Sometimes we look at buying a low wing (vs the high wing style we fly now) and I’m always thinking “I wonder what that’s like” Apparently some part of our brain knows.
Hi! I’m Kim, a 40-something-year-old living in northeastern Illinois with my husband Steven, and our cats, Khaleesi, Apollo, Starbuck, and Eddard aka Ned. My current main hobbies are running, painting rocks, flying, reading, and eating. I follow a vegan lifestyle and work in an account management role. I write about a variety of topics and consider this a “life” blog – a place I can share anything that’s on my mind. Please visit the “About” page to get a better idea of who I am! 🙂
