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Today marks ten hours in the log book and a little over a month of flying lessons. I have been to (and landed at) two airports other than my home base and am starting to get comfortable with the multitude of tasks that you have to complete while operating an aircraft. The ground operations are pretty solid (preflight, planning, taxi, run-up, getting around the airport) and on smooth days I'm pretty confident during climb, cruise and descent.
Take-off and landing is coming along, now that my instructor is more or less hands (and feet) off during flight I've had some confidence set-backs but I can feel it coming back the more practice I get in. Unfortunately weather and work have encroached on my lessons so I have not had as many as I would liked to have by now but I can feel a lot of the stuff coming together.
We started working on emergency procedures today and I can feel some of the aeronautical decision making stuff come together.
Having a couple-week break between lessons really showed, I felt some of the rusty-ness during take-off and climb-out of SDC (my home airport) but thankfully that started to clear up once I got en-route. I still have trouble with some of the landmarks, usually heading south for some reason but I'm usually pretty confident moving back towards the north.
Radio calls are proceeding pretty well, I've got a good feel for it even though now and then I forget bits (most often I forget the end) so I end up with stuff like "Penn Yan traffic, cherokee five five whisky is ten miles north of the field, penn yan traffic" and my instructor will ask "and what are we gonna do when we get there?" Oh yeah, land... heh.
All in all I'm still super-glad I decided to pursue this. The whole world of aviation is just amazing and being a part of it (as well as getting to use the big blue yonder that my tax dollars are paying for) is fantastic.