cockpit "stuff" management

i have a check ride coming up (JYO-CBE-PHL) in prep for my long cross country. the first leg is dead reckoning/pilotage (no GPS or VOR, arg!) and i need to be prepared to divert at any time (which means i need to know where i am, how fast i'm moving, how to get somewhere else and how long it will take) so i was practicing a little using ms fsx (microsoft flight sim x) over the weekend. by the time i was done i had my e6-b, plotter, chart (going a long way across several folds just to make it harder), pencil(s), nav log and my watch all spread out.
doing the same in the cockpit with someone in the right seat is going to be entertaining. i'm thinking i might just put pieces of tape on them and stick them to the chief flight instructor i'll be flying with. i'm hoping that the landmarks that i saw (a city, couple of private and public airports, a river) will hopefully help with my poor visual recognition skills and it also clearly showed the smaller mexico farms (1W3) runways just south of CBE which i suspect adds to more care in the approach.

first solo cross country (JYO - CHO - JYO)

i just got back from my first solo cross country. i went from KJYO to KCHO (leesburg, va to charlottesville, va). it went reasonably well. going down i flew via the LDN (linden) VOR and on the way back i flew direct to JYO (ATC flight following both ways) using GPS. i wanted the VOR practice which is why I went via LDN heading down there. it was probably excessive but i flew to 7,000 feet across some of the mountains on the way there but i have to admit, they still looked pretty close. coming back i was cleared by ATC into class bravo airspace (around IAD - Dulles) but i had to refuse it being a student pilot. overall i had one or two hiccups dealing with potomac ATC but i got there and back and nobody came out the worse (as far as i know). the weather was perfect. i think i saw CHO around 15 miles out but i wasn't sure that was what it was until i was around 10 or so (being a bit over cautious i suppose). i suspect that each time i said student pilot (initiating radio contact for each new ATC handoff) the real pilots in the area added a few miles of airspace between me and them.

weather can be worse than the forecast

i've been trying to get a short cross country flight for JYO-CHO (Leesburg, Va to Charlottesville, Va) in for a few days but the weather has not been cooperative. the interesting thing today is that the METARs and TAFs (weather observation and forecast info) do not appear bad but it looks much worse outside the window. the winds aloft are even worse according to another student at my flight school. if i were relying only on the weather forecast info i might have considered planning a flight but based on the mark one eyeball and outside the window combination i'm going to wait another couple of days. friday looks like my next chance. the flight plan i did last night was also to practice some VOR navigation so i'm going:

• JYO->LDN (Linden VOR)
• LDN->CSN (Casanova VOR)
• CSN->CHO (Charlottesville)

i put several checkpoints in the nav log for crossing a railroad, abeam a small town and so on.
for the return i'm going to do it a little differently:

• CHO->CDN
• LDN->JYO

i'm planning on using VOR radials for my navigation but also doing flight plans in the GPS just to be safe.

if you're interested in what things like "winds aloft" look like, here is an example of the current ones for my area (you can find it at: http://aviationweather.gov/products/nws/winds/?area=boston&fint=06&lvl=lo ) :

FT  3000    6000
EMI 3324 2844+06
RIC 2824 2841+11

what the above says is that weather station EMI (Westminster) is observing winds from 330 at 24
knots at 3,000 feet and from 280 at 44 knots at 6,000 feet, +6 Celsius (the range i typically fly in).
RIC (Richmond) has winds from 280 at 24 knots at 3,000 feet and 280 at 41 knots at 6,000 feet, +11 Celsius.

you can find weather info at: http://adds.aviationweather.gov/metars/
enter 'kiad kjyo kokv kmrb' in the text box for airports to check and hit 'submit' with either 'raw' or 'translated' checked. the airport identifiers above are: Dulles, Leesburg, Winchester and Martinsburg. there's a lot of into contained in the output from that and it's interesting to compare the raw and translated output.

e-6b practice, maneuvers work and next solo

i did one dual (meaning with my instructor) and one solo last week to practice maneuvers (been a while), next solo is likely to be to CHO (charlottesville). i spent half a day sat morning with another student going over chart reading, flight planning, tidbits and so on. i am trying to work on my e-6b practice every couple of days. i am more comfortable with it now but i still have an annoying tendency to make little mistakes that take a while to catch.