Flying, hearts and happy times

Today I had three flights of about 6 minutes duration each. Very cool. The flying field seems to have grown a bit larger and the trees are now a little lower.

The foot and mouth outbreak makes overflying the surrounding farmland a little more risky as the farmer would be unhappy with people tramping across the fields to effect a recovery. I had only one scary moment when the wind seemed to blow the plane overhead as it approached me with the sun behind it. I recovered but only because I had enough height to recover from the resulting stall. The next fly pass revealed that I had lost a wheel. At this point I handed back control to my instructor who effected a "crash landing" on two of the three wheels. No harm done except that an additional wheel came off in the process. I paid so much attention to the flight controls that the wheels had seemed kind of cosmetic. Ah well we learn from mistakes.

Earlier in the day Annalise and I spent some time at the hospital where she had a ultra-sound of her heart. Now I know hearts, we've all seen them on valentines day cards, and what she had was not in the distinctive heart shape or red colour - it was black and white and rather grainy, almost but not quite like each of our children on their last ultra-sound scan before we met them in person. That the radiologist did not pick up on this alarmed me - she seemed to think everything was normal. We await the doctors opinion as to whether her heart is several sizes to small - like the Grinch.

Tomorrow we, me as the policy holder and Stephen as the dropper, have a telephonic interview with the insurance company over the claim for the broken camera lens.

After this we will likely either walk or drive around the country-side until we find a picturesque pub and them "waste" the lazy afternoon reading the paper or a book and having a drink. Four days of holiday remaining.

Tonight we started the our festival of "five nights, five chefs and five meals". Each member of the family gets 10 pounds to spend in ingredients and prepares a meal of their choice - nutritional constraints apply. We all vote on the best meal at the end of it. Emily produced marinated chicken kebabs with a peanut-butter based sauce and brownies for desert. Yummy. Tomorrow is Sophies turn.