Dichroic Reflections

slightly weepy

I hadn't really been sad at all about failing my checkride or deciding to quit flying today. I left work, and since Rudder is off at a meeting, treated myself to a visit to the library (for audiobooks for the drive to JournalCon) and to sushi. I was feeling pretty good.... until I got home, unloaded my car from the day, and had to put my flight bag and all my flying books away for the last time. That phrase alone is guaranteed to get me dripping tears even if it's about something silly, let alone something I've put a year of my life into. The books had been sitting out in the livng room since I'd been needing them for constant reference. Now they are on a bookshelf with all the other books Rudder and I had amassed over our flying years, in the office where I won't see them much. The last time. If I ever do this again, it's likely to be far enough off that I'll need updated books, so this really is the last time.

There were two things to cheer me up, however: my credit card bill, which was paid off when I started and now has thousands in flight-induced debt on it, and which I can now return to its former status over the next few months, and the cat food bowl. nlike my credit bill, the cat food bowl was empty. I free-feed the cats, filling the bowl each morning and letting them chow on it through the day; by evening there's usually some food left. Today it was empty enough, and the water dish low enough, to let me know I had forgotten to feed them this morning.

They're hardly starving. They've got a fuzzy gut apiece they could well afford to lose, there were a few pieces of food left, and if they ever got really desperate, they could knock over the open cat food bag by the bowl. Still, I'd been feeding them every morning since the older cat and I began living together 16 years ago. If I'm distracted enough to forget something that routine, then I have no business trying to fly an airplane in instrument conditions, and quitting is the right decision.