Well on Friday I picked up a few more CONUS Challenge airports. One of which was 0C2 a glider/parachute airport. No one was there in the middle of winter. The field itself is very interesting. Lots of bumps. On my take off roll at 40knots I hit one that launched me into the air. I pulled very slightly back on the yoke to prevent the nose wheel from coming down too hard, the stall warning horn was blaring, the mains touched down ever so slightly as I had also speed up to about 45 knots and was able to get it up into ground effect for the rest of the take off.
I headed up north and flew IFR into KUES. It was nice to break out and see all those lights on the runway right in front of me. I picked up about .5 hours of actual.
Then today I flew down to Valparaiso where my niece was playing a basketball game. It was IFR all the way. I had a comm failure that I will have to get sorted out. Seems Comm 1 went TU. After about 10 or 15 minutes and not hearing C90 and passing a handoff point I started calling them. I finally raised them on the comm2. ATC chewed me out, he said "I have been calling you for 60 miles, you are in the worlds busiest airspace" yadda yadda yadda. If I had traveled 60 miles I would have been south of Peotone and not just south of DuPage. I just let it slide, he was being a typical C90 jerk.
BTW no warning of the comm failure, all was well and then the radio just went silent. I occasionally could still here things and sometimes they heard me on it. I think I might have an antenna problem. But I'll let the tech sort it out.
Trip back was interesting as I flew night IMC. Made my first real approach at night and broke out 300 feet above the minimum. I was very happy to see that runway. I elected to land with an 8 knot tail wind instead of circling to other runway. I figured it just was not safe enough to see to be able to do that.
Also C90 routed me out to DeKalb before turning me east, that was different. Here is the track
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N8116B
All in all a good couple of days flying. 2.9 hours actual, three real approaches (2-GPS, 1-ILS).
That caps off of my year with 131.4 hours total, 18.6 hours of actual IFR and 7.2 simulated