What is red and green all over and doesn't make me feel like singing Christmas carols?

Thunderstorms.  Lots and lots of thunderstorms.  So, as it turns out, there are thunderstorms in Florida.  On Thursday, I was supposed to go on a 2.0 hour flight to the east coast of Florida (Daytona more specifically) and a 2.0 hour night flight back.  Unfortunately, the state of Florida looked a lot like this:

For those of you not used to reading radar and/or have no idea where Tampa is in Florida, we were going to take off from the western most bulge and fly almost directly Northeast which would have taken us through all that red.  Red, in terms of radar is bad.  It has very strong updrafts and downdrafts, severe wind shear and wing icing.  There will also be severe turbulence (the most you usually experience in an airplane is light to the low end of moderate).  So, we scrapped Thursday's flight.  Friday came and it was more of the same.  I showed up and I hopped into the simulator for two hours.  We rescheduled for Monday in hopes of better weather.

So, instead of flying, I spent the last two days with my head in the clouds.  No really, my head, the rest of my body and my simulated airplane were flying in the clouds.  It was my introduction to instrument flying.  The first day actually went pretty well.  We did some various basic instrument maneuvers which I did well within performance standards.  I went home and got ready for my next morning sim.  That sim didn't go NEARLY as well.  I had to perform my first instrument approach procedures.  While I didn't crash, I was well outside performance standards.  At one point after an approach and what would have been a successful landing if we'd not reset for another approach my instructor says, "well, you just made all your passengers sick."  Because it was my first instrument approach, I did a lot of "chasing my altitude."  Once I was established on the ILS 17L approach, I began to descend on the glide slope.  Unfortunately, I couldn't quite get a grasp of an appropriate rate of descent so I did a lot of this: ok, I'm descending too fast so I'm going to level out a little...ok, now I'm above my glideslope so I'm going to push the nose down a little.  Ok, now I'm descending WAY too fast.  I suppose you could call it porpoising.

We did three approaches and the third one was, by far, the most stable.  And then, at the very end, I got distracted and found myself way above my glide slope.  My glide slope indicator showed "full deflection" essentially meaning I was so high that it couldn't be registered and then was forced to do my first missed approach.  That actually went pretty well and I entered my first holding pattern.  It also went a lot better than I thought it would.  And then my two hours was up....this is going to be a VERY long month.  We just barely scratched the surface of instrument procedures.  So, cross your fingers and let's hope I get to log 4 hours tomorrow!  Everyone have a great night!