Passed the final at Ground School - still flying the Grob. Enjoyed a great flight on Saturday, followed by meeting Daniel in Berkeley and enjoying dinner at Cafe Tibet (great place! - everything is made fresh!) Enjoyed the foreign film "Goodbye Lenin" afterwards, definitely recommendable.

I was supposed to do my first unassisted take off on Monday, as well as practice stalls, but the winds were too strong to fly. So, it's postponed till Saturday afternoon.

Yesterday I tried a Paradise Vegetarian Restaurant on 4th Street in San Rafael. Very reasonable prices, simple decor, and GREAT vegetarian dishes.

Flew the German-designed Grob on Saturday, WOW, what a plane! You can see it by going to Attitude Aviation's site and scrolling down to the Grob Barvarian. I'm now going to be continuing my lessons there. It is a sleek, sporty plane with a joystick and hairtrigger controls.

This week is finals at Ground School at Gnoss Field... we'll see how it goes!

Yesterday I tried a new Japanese restaurant in San Rafael - Tenkyu. Something to be missed. The actual food presentation did not match the one-page photos of their food, and it was quite greasy, and the sushi was heavy on the rice, light on the sashimi.

Had a really fun weekend with my Dad. We had a cute movie made of us flying on a magic carpet all around San Francisco. There is a company called Studio 39 that does this using a 'blue screen' technique. We finished off the Sunday activities with a Blue & Gold Fleet hour cruise around the bay. It was a nice sunny day to do it. We also went swimming and dipping in my hot tub as the pool opened for the season on May 1st. Nice relaxing weekend.

I did my first take-off from a busy (air tower controlled) airport on Saturday morning with my CFI, Dan. We took a little round trip to Santa Rosa airport from Gnoss Field to check out Katana airplanes that he thought I might enjoy learning to fly.