Where am I?

Okay so here we go. We have a new leaf on our hands folks, and it's being turned over. I'm finally at the point where I'll be able to spend more time entertaining myself with such activities as posting blogs.

My current location is Randolph AFB in San Antonio, Texas. Come tomorrow I'll be in-processing with the 562d Training Squadron. JSUNT is the name of the course, which stands for Joint Student Undergraduate Navigator Training. I'm pretty sure anyway. The first portion is called NIFT which stands for Navigator Instructional Flight Training. Actually I have no idea what it stands for. But basically it's the portion where we go through ground school and then actually get some stick time in the pilot seat for several flights, in order to sort of show us what it's like so we'll have a better understanding of how to navigate. I'll be here for a while, then probably go on leave for a week between Christmas and New Years. After that I'll come back for a couple weeks, then head back to Montgomery, Alabama for ASBC which is the Air and Space Basic Course. This is a six week course that basically starts your PME which is Professional Military Education. Hope everyone reads this post because I probably won't ever define acronyms more than once. :) Anyway at various times in my career I'll return to Montgomery for more training, such as ASBC and SOS which is Squadron Officer School. Basically each time you gain a rank there's more education that comes along with it. After ASBC I'll return here in March and hopefully sometime soon after start my actual JSUNT class. Once I complete my NIFT course I've heard they'll bump up my JSUNT date, which is currently scheduled for July 1, 2004. If I did end up in that class my graduation date would be June 30th, 2005. So basically even if I get my date moved up to the spring, I'll still be here over a year.

So in a nutshell that's what's going on. I know I repeated a lot from one of the previous posts but I just want to make sure I've communicated everything. I most likely will not be talking much about OTS on here. Unfortunately as a whole it was a pretty negative experience for me. I learned a tremendous amount, but my performance was consistently unsatisfying. I may make random references or tell stories from time to time (Goldhawks, hua) but for the most part I'm going to try to focus on the positive things going on, which at the moment means the future.

For all those who haven't driven the 10 freeway between Los Angeles and San Antonio let me some up a tour for you. To your left we have um, some desert. To your right we have um, some more desert. Tada. I ended up deciding to leave Thursday night instead of Friday morning, and did a little 250 miler out to Blythe at the edge of California. The next day I got going relatively early and was still feeling fine at 400, so made it a 600 mile day to Las Cruces. Yesterday I didn't manage to get moving until noon after the time change, but I decided to plow on through the eventual darkness and fog anyway, and managed to get here around 9pm. I'm currently staying in Billeting, because they don't inprocess in anyone on the weekends. The best time to tour a base is definitely Sunday morning, the place is a ghost town. Took tons of pictures, going to investigate various methods of posting them online once I get moved into the dorm and get my internet set up. Move in should be sometime tomorrow in between paperwork, so I'll have my address then for those who want it. I've managed to meet up with an OTS classmate who arrived on Wednesday and thus has gone through much of the process already. Always nice to be able to call on someone with a brain if necessary.

The base itself is cool, a neat layout involving octagon shaped roads and lots of pretty houses. A couple things were pretty neat about arriving, the first being the first salute I got at the front gate after showing my ID card, and the second being the exchange that followed. I mentioned I needed a map to billeting, and instead of giving me one the Security Forces guy said "oh yeah just go straight ahead past the flags to the Taj Mahal, take the traffic circle around and it'll be your third right, then go down past the chapel and take the second left, go down a ways past the static display and it'll be your second left again, followed by your first left and then right into the parking lot." Luckily given my AFSC (Air Force Speciality Code = job) is Navigator, I was able to make it without error, which made me think maybe I'm in the right place. Billeting itself is pretty ridiculously nice, I'm not sure if I was in the officer's version or what, but I had basically an embassy suites style room with bedroom, living area, full kitchen, and spacious bathroom. The dorm rooms are also pretty sweet judging from my friends, with the square footage being about quadruple the size of last year's dorm room at UCSB, which was already way too big for me. Should be interesting trying to fill the space or more likely than not, not filling the space. I'm quite excited to get everything out of my car and situated.

From what I hear there's a lot of downtime, so I'll be doing all sorts of nifty things like working out, reading, and posting blogs! Once internet is up and going we might even see daily posts! Good times.