What's keeping us up here, exactly?

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Landing gear down, heat is off, 365 off, door off…wait. Aviation is so fascinating to me, yet I don’t understand it one bit. I feel accomplished just operating my headset and flipping the radio channel switches. Looking in the cockpit, I have no idea what all those gauges, switches, and pedals are for, but I’m glad somebody does.
Yesterday I rode the helicopter again. We had two calls, neither of which I would have fathomed calling the helicopter for, but okay. The first was for a guy who fell in the bathroom, and the other was for a kid who had a little too much fun sledding, caught some air, and landed on his back. He was great, totally calm, adorable, and not even complaining that he was uncomfortable.
“Can you squeeze my fingers?”
“Okay.” (squeezes weakly)
“Squeeze them as hard as you can.”
(incredulously) “As hard as I can?” (as if to say: “Are you sure, because I don’t want to hurt you with my super-human strength.”)
“Yeah”
“Well, okay” (squeezes hard)
“Ooh, That’s great! You’re strong!”
…I love kids

Even though we had calls that weren’t overly ‘interesting’ I was glad just to go on calls at all. It was a beautiful day, things look different covered in snow. At one point I went from sleeping to flying in about 7 minutes; that doesn’t happen every day.

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