Good Grief!

I hate to admit this and trust me, it’s not my idea, but I’m sitting here watching the movie Attack of the Killer Donuts while I’m writing this.  It’s Mike’s idea and I’m just here for the “amazing” ride:

Someone please help me now.  Please.  Make it stop!

Anyway, had an awesome weekend.  Actually, it was a long weekend for me.  I had Thursday off and spent the day cleaning the apartment, updating all of my aviation logbooks and some other long overdue stuff.  It was such a productive day.  Friday, I had an out-of-town appointment so Lil Jan, Mike and I all went.  Appointment went well and afterwards we hit a nearby mall.  It was a really good day and I felt decent – yea!

Yesterday, Mike and I went to his parent’s house for a family BBQ.  Awesome day.  Soon after we got there, we visited one of their cats, Sammy:

The food was amazing.  I had no prob downing one of his father’s burgers:

For dessert, we had yummola cuppy-cakes his mom made.  I’ve seen this done on websites and such for years now and one of Mike’s sister’s did it with her cupcake.  You take the bottom off and put it on top.  Then you get less messy cuppy-cakes with icing in every bite:

We brought birthday pressies for one of his nieces, as it was her birthday a couple weeks ago.  As usual, we don’t do anything normal, so we wrapped one of her pressies in this, including nice Christmas wrapping:

She was actually super excited that it was crackers.  We had to prompt the adorable four year old to open the box.  She was actually quite pleased with the little outfit we had inside.  Tee hee.  Another outfit was scrunched into a paper towel roll.  Good times!

It was nice to sorta sleep in this morning.  I’m so happy that I actually slept last night.  I woke up just before 7 and got to enjoy these scenes – thanks Abby:

Boo’s displays weren’t much better:

Good day today…..well at least up until this movie came on.  Oh darn, it’s ending.

We actually had a spa day for the cats.  Mike woke up to this on his phone:

Ok, the cats hated the baths, ear cleaning and tooth brushing, so it wasn’t very spa-esque, but it had to be done and I get to sleep in the same bed with a pile of super clean cats tonight.

Today’s symptoms: I felt pretty decent today, after sleeping well last night.  Didn’t have to take any wakey-up meds, so that was awesome.  Also didn’t need anything to help with pain.  Sweeeeet!  And by the way, Mike won’t stop saying how fantastic that movie was.  Ugh!

Breakfast in London

Had a few more sleepless nights.  Actually, last week, I had five hours sleep total over three nights.  Ugh!  I finally slept somewhat decently Friday night but woke up still very weak and groggy.  The headache was quite bad too.  Mostly took it easy for that day.  Slept better Saturday night and felt pretty good Sunday.  Yea!  Mike and I headed out to the airport for a flight to London for breakfast.  We hadn’t been there in over a year.   The Tower cleared us onto final for runway 27.  We noticed that the taxiway nearest to that end of the runway was quite close.  I told Mike that I was going to be a rebel and attempt to land short enough to get off on that taxiway.  He said there was no way I could do it.  We went back and forth – me saying I was going to try it and him saying it wasn’t doable.  When we were cleared to land, I made the decision to go for it.

Mike should have learned by now that if he says I can’t do something, I’ll go ahead a do it!  Here is an airport chart showing the layout of the runways and taxiways:

The end of the runway I landed on is up at the top right.  The red line is where my wheels touched down and the blue line is where I was almost at a stop.  Tee hee!  That was awesome.  It was around 500′.  Sweet!  We then taxied over to the Katana Cafe for breakfast.  I can be somewhat picky when ordering food, because I try to be as healthy as possible.  However, for the first time, I gave Mike the reins to order for me.  I even left the table and headed to the little pilot’s room while he was ordering, so it would be a surprise.  I was very happy with what he picked out – a breakfast wrap.  Great choice – yum!

We then headed back out to Vyctor to hit the skies again:

We had to make a pit stop for fuel in St. Thomas, just south of London.  There was none at St. Catharines because they were cleaning the tanks.  It was only a ten minute flight.  The nice thing is it’s the cheapest fuel in Southern Ontario ($1.39 per litre).  It was $1.90 in London.  Needless to say, I squished every drop possible into the wing tanks.  Aviation fuel (100 Low Lead) is blue:

After we took off and leveled off to about 1900′, Vyctor started riding a little rough.  I checked the mags and the right one was very rough.  I leaned out the fuel a couple times, which has worked on the ground when he was rough during start up.  About half way through the hour long flight, things started to smooth out.  I did some more mag checks on the ground and everything seemed fine.  I was still nervous so I phoned my awesome aviation mechanic when I got home.  He suggested I do another run up over the next few days and check the mags again.  Mike and I went to the airport after work today and I’m very happy to report that Vyctor ran great!  Yea!  It looks like I just had a fouled spark plug which is now cleared.  I’m so relieved!

I forgot to mention on Saturday, Jan came by for a visit.  We went to Giant Tiger to get her a new cord for her tablet.  She started snarking at me about some thing so I picked up this and handed it to her:

Mike got me the sleepy one.  Tee hee!  When I got home and told Pinky we didn’t get her a chocolate bar, she did this:

I made it up to all of the kitties with some treats of the cat variety:

I didn’t have any treats for Peanut so I gave a little chin rub instead.  Abby wasn’t too thrilled to see him:

I didn’t realize the flash was on when I took this pic:

Thankfully, I slept fairly well last night except for being up from 4:00 – 5:30.  Paws crossed tonight is even better!

Today’s symptoms: Far more energy than I had last week.  Didn’t feel nearly as weak or achy as last week either.  I’m starting to think that the weakness and extra nerve pain is mainly caused by extended periods of lack of sleep.

My Body Is A Jerk

I’m still dealing with insomnia.  I’m very happy to say it wasn’t bad last weekend and I had a couple of really good days.  On Saturday, Mike and I picked up my Army buddy and we went over to the Casino.  We hit the box office for the tickets for I Tenori, then hit the buffet.  Ken is a Gold Card holder so we get to skip the massive line.  Then the next bonus was our great view:

The scenic circuit around the Falls was constantly filled with helicopters.  We also had the pleasure of great noms too:

The show was very good – better than I even thought it would be.  Afterwards, we hit the slots for a bit.  I was then starting to get fairly fatigued so I let Ken know I would have to take him back to the bus stop in St. Catharines.  We had about 45 minutes to cash out, get to the car then drive to the bus stop at the Fairview Mall.  We were within a couple minutes of the bus arriving once we exited off of the QEW.  At the next stoplight, voila:

Wow, that was close!

The next day, we got to the Airport before 9:00 and flew out to the Edenvale Gathering of the Classics.  We go to this awesome event up near Collingwood almost every year.  It was supposed to be Saturday, but they moved it to the Sunday rain date.  Glad they did because the weather was perfect.  In about an hour, the Edenvale Airport was in sight:

It’s always a lot of fun and a bit of a challenge to fly in to this event, because there are tons of other planes doing the same thing.  They have it very well organized and coordinated though.  We touched down and were marshalled in:

We sprayed ourselves down with sunscreen, put the sun shade up in Vyctor and headed out to the registration hangar (free coffee!)

After chatting with folks and wandering around the other aircraft and classic cars, we got some noms and headed back to Vyc to sit under his cute wing in the shade.

Mike got a burger and we split a poutine.  Yum:

We heard some munching and noticed this little one-legged fella chewing on Mike’s shoe:

We had a good view of the other planes taxiing by….

…and a few tractor loads of folks on a tour of the event.  I made sure to yell “Cutest plane here!” to everyone and got many responses in agreement:

It was so nice to chat with many of the folks walking around and stopping at Vyctor. Great day and flight back.  As we flew by, I gave a little salute to Canadian Forces Base Borden, where I’ve been many times back in my Army days:

I couldn’t believe how fast I fell asleep that night.  I didn’t take anything to help.  I just read for a bit and was petting Abby, who was laying on my chest.  The next thing I knew, I punched myself in the face.  I fell asleep while petting her and my hand fell back and punched me in the nose!  Oh well, at least I slept well that night and felt quite good the next day.  I was quite relieved as I had a few more flights on Monday night.  We had our Recreational Aircraft Association meeting in Welland, so Mike and I flew out.  I then had a couple of aerobatic flights booked with folks from our group.  I took up one right away – he loved it!  Made it through all of the maneuvers with no screaming or up-chucking.  Perfect flight!  My next planned victim decided he would wait for another day as he had eaten quite a bit since he arrived.  Sooooo, I took up someone else who has wanted to go up for some time now.  Awesome flight number two took place and everyone was happy!

What an awesome evening!  I figured I’d crawl into bed completely wiped out, which I was.  Unfortunately, I was unable to repeat the great sleep I had Sunday night.  Monday and Tuesday night were back to full out insomnia.  I had to take a sleeping pill to let me fall asleep, and I was up within two hours each night.  Then I just laid there like a big, blonde blob for most of the night.  Less than three hours of sleep total.  I felt bad yesterday but today was much worse.  I had to lay down four times today, for at least an hour each time.  Super weak and blah.  Like the title of this blog says, my body is a jerk.  I have enough MS symptoms to deal with after having a good night’s sleep – I don’t need insomnia making everything worse.  I see my GP tomorrow and I don’t know what the heck I’ll do if she can’t help me with this issue, which has been going on for two months now.  ***Sigh***

Today’s symptoms: As I just mentioned, today was not good.  I don’t know if the Restless Leg Syndrome I’ve been dealing with since around the same time the insomnia started is the cause.  When I went to see my neurologist about the insomnia a few weeks ago, he said we would just wait and see how the MRI (my fourteenth!) turns out on September 4th.  Ugh.

Guelph for Lunch

Oops – I wrote this yesterday and forgot to post it….

Mike and I enjoyed Ribfest at Montebello Park yesterday.  We’ve never been before.  Kinda silly since it’s less than a ten minute walk.  We could smell it half way there.

Mike got half a rack of ribs from Horn Dawgs and I got half a pound of pulled pork.  We split a piece of corn bread.  Dang, everything was delicious:

We are going back tomorrow to try another vendor.  Great day – glad the weather worked out.  Fortunately it was nice again today so we flew to Guelph for brekkie/lunch.  The restaurant at the airport is amazing.  It’s always full.  We were the only ones that flew in today.  Mike took a video and posted it to Facebook live as we came in to land:  https://www.facebook.com/elizabeth.murphy.77715/videos/10159310778900372/

Poor Mike gets a tad tense when we have to fly low over tress.  Tee hee!  We were so happy that there was a table available, since we usually have to wait.  We’ve only ever had breakfast there, so we decided to try something from their lunch menu.  Yum:

Little Vyctor looked so cute parked outside of the restaurant:

The flight back was interesting.  Lots of little small clouds along the route, until we were almost at the St. Catharines Airport.  We got a little nervous when we came upon a rather large cumulonimbus cloud, very close to the airport:

Mike checked the radar and there it was:

We had time to quickly fly over Ribfest and snag a pic:

We quickly scooched over to the downwind leg of runway 24, beating the storm:

Glad to touch down!  I’m sure this helicopter was happy to miss the storm too:

Now we’re back home and just chilling.  I just noticed that the shirt I ordered from Amazon has been shipped.  Tee hee – I’m such a dork:

How can I not get a shirt to honour my beautiful children?  Abby was impressed and screamed with excitement:

Boo was more interested in her toy:

Today’s symptoms:  I feel pretty good considering how much I did yesterday.  I did have to take a wake-up pill earlier, which has helped.  Very little nerve pain today – sweeeeeet!