About a year after I started the initial training I finally passed my
checkride last week. The cross country hours took me forever to build
up. I finished that off with a nice flight from Hawthorne, CA to
Oakland to see the Dodgers play across the bay.

The oral went perfectly, it was only about 90 minutes and half of that
was the examiner telling me war stories. Pretty incredible guy--flew
Hueys and Cobras in Vietnam, test pilot for Gulfstream, and now captain
of one of Toyota's brand new G5's. Nice life. The weather was poor so
we decided to fly the next day.

The flight was tower en route from KHHR to Van Nuys for the VOR-A
approach, circle to land. Unfortunately as I was approaching CANOG
intersection the turn coordinator started failing for real. I
mentioned this to the DE and he said "you have bigger problems than
that." I looked and sure enough, I let myself get distracted and flew
through the fix without starting my descent. I recovered ok though, we
did a touch and go, then did a hold at TWINE intersection with a
parallel entry. Then 2 unusual attitudes, and onto Burbank (KBUR) ILS
partial panel. No problem at all.

The DE took over for a bit and flew us to the Compton NDB for a partial
panel NDB approach. That was extremely difficult for me since by then
the turn coordinator was completely done-in. Compton doesn't actually
have an instrument approach of course but you have to fly a procedure
turn per the PTS at some point, and SoCal Approach never lets you do
one. So he had me fly the old Columbia CA NDB approach, substituting
the Compton NDB. I didn't hold the course particuarly well but I
finally finished and the DE was nice enough to take the plane from
there back home. I was exhausted. I flew pretty poorly by my own
standards but good enough to pass, so I'm happy. Total flight was 1.8
hours.

Total time 144 hrs, 31.6 simulated IFR, 1.0 actual, 11.1 ground trainer.