Sit down this is gonna be a long one...

I know that some of you get tired of me going so long between posts... sorry about that, I just don't want to bore most of you by talking about flying. Well this has been a pretty fun-filled and exciting past couple of weeks in regards to flying. Well lets start out on Thursday of last week, I got all comfortable in my airplane, heater on, auto-pilot on, all was good... till I came in to land in St. Louis... I reached over and put the landing gear selector in the down position and low and behold that action was not accompanied by the standard whirring sound and subsequent thuds known as the gear coming down!!! Well for all of you reading this post, this includes Les... don't panic, there are other ways to put the landing gear down. Well after flying around for about 8 minutes east of St. Louis I got the gear to come down (you turn a little hand crank about 55 times counterclockwise, in case any one wondered). This was followed by an uneventful landing, well when I got on the ground I was then able to reset the circuit breaker and the flight home to the Rock went off without a hitch. Ok that brings us to Friday, if anyone needs a reminder that was the day that the weather was pretty bad and icy... Well when you are flying an airplane ice is a very different animal then it is on the ground, for every 1000 ft in altitude you gain the temp. decreases about 3 degrees. This means that it could be 50 degrees on the surface and below freezing at about 6000ft. Well Friday came and I was supposed to go out to Little Rock and fly the airplane that I had been flying back and forth nightly to St. Louis to Hot Springs in exchange for an airplane that safely fly through known icing conditions. Well when I arrived safely at the airport, that plane had about a half inch of ice all over it. Well I started to do my best to remove the ice from the plane, when it started to sleet again. So as fast as I was taking ice off the plane it was getting right back on the places I had already polished smooth. Well there were a couple of jet pilots sitting inside Central Flying's building that got a pretty good kick out of my attempts at ice removal. I asked the lady that works behind the front desk to have my plane put into a heated hanger at this point to help let the old girl thaw out. Well that night on the flight to St. Louis we picked up some ice... but thankfully our plane had a heated windshield and props and all was fine. This weeks weather doens't look any better as, there will be rain and snow in the forecast for the St. Louis area... so heres to hoping that the weather starts to warm up as I like flying alot in warmer weather without the worries of encountering icing conditions.