Flying~Soaring through Dreams: September 2008

The 3-month waiting has finally came to an end when i cleared my solo flight a few days ago on 16/09/08. Solo flight was only authorized when the instructor was satisfied that i was able to carry out any flight alone safely. That was the 18th hour of my flying since i came here so i was actually lagging behind quite badly already now. I had a fairly good starts with flying lessons before i had an instructor change because he was leaving. That was when things started to go downhill as i was told by the new instructor that i was experiencing a lot of problem and struggling hard to fly the plane, which led to repetition of sorties (flight lessons) over and over again. I was left stumped and seriously demotivated over the next one month period because of this, had nightmares and actually thought that this would be the end of my career if i don't move my ass and fix the mess. Of course, it's easier said than done. I never expect the learning curve to be this steep. Fortunately, i had another instructor change and this time i felt that everything is finally beginning to move towards the right direction again, which eventually led to my first solo. While the first solo itself wasn't perfect, i was pretty satisfied with my flying and is hoping that i would continue to improve (or at least maintaining it) over time. Having said that, here's some snapshot of me and the baby in which i flew through my first solo :)

Oh, we also had a BBQ party last month for no apparent reason. I guess they did just for the heck of it. It was fun and there's lots of food :D mmmm..

The main BBQ pit..err... stove..

Mmmm...carnivores will be really happy when they see this

Obviously,the BBQ pit was not huge enough for everyone, so these peeps opt to cook those meats their own way

And finally, yesterday we had a paintball warfare thanks to whoever that took an initiative to organize this event. There were many newbies among us including me but we have loads of fun fighting against the other course, which apparently was more experienced than us :P The game itself was a blast having 18(3 of which were ladies :))vs 15 firing at each other. As expected, we got thrashed and many times i was caught off guard and shot at point blank (ouch!) because i was too busy talking to another person during the gun-fight. Yeah, i know that wasn't very smart of me. Serve me right eh? Anyway it's because of this that i learnt a valuable lesson from the game; let the gun do the talking, not your mouth. Everyone started off with approximately 200 bullets round, and to be honest, i thought it was a huge amount of bullets. However, half way into game, i realized that those bullets are only sufficient to start getting you into the game. Before you know it, you will run out of bullets and become a free-frag target. Yay! Kudos to Ted for being the last man standing and also the one who took the most hit for nothing :P Mwahaha.. It's pretty painful getting shot alright.. enough to leave marks on your body for days.