I've Been Trying...

To fit updating into my schedule for this entire week, but haven't been able to get around to it. The people over at scheduling apparently have it in for us, as we've gotten shafted in quite a variety of ways that have kept me quite busy. When last I left you I'd just finished my first sim, and was about to begin my first CGM the next day. Well since then I've had two more sims, and two CGMs. The third sim was an especially interesting surprise as we found out about it on Thursday, and it was Friday 3rd period. So while you all were enjoying your Friday night I was working until quite late. The good news is I'm progressing quite well in the sims. On the second and third I basically had zero communication errors, earning 4's in all the related categories. This was my area of weakness in the beginning, and the scripts I've been working out and extensive preparation has been paying off. Unfortunately just when you think you have everything down, they add more stuff into the mix, and you have about ten more things you need to think about at once at various times during the flight. It seems like the trick to being a great nav is to have the big picture in your head, with the list of all the things you're going to need to do, and somehow manage to do them all at once without skipping anything or making a mistake. Human error is just one of those things though, and sometimes you can't even explain what causes it.

It's kind of sad actually the reason I have time to blog is I got up prior to 6am today in order to fit a run in before class, and instead was woken up by horrendous thunder as according to weather bug rain is pouring down at a rate of two inches an hour outside. They definitely are keeping us busy, if you're not prepping for whatever CGM or Sim or Flight is coming up, then you're having to memorize Emergency Procedures (EPs) or draw up charts for future missions. We haven't really run into anything essentially hard, it's just a lot of busy work to be done simultaneously and keeping it all straight and knowing what needs to be done next and when is a bit tricky.

Unfortunately I received my first 2's on my gradesheet over the last two events. In my third sim two of the new categories that were being graded were things we hadn't covered very well in class, so they basically just demo'd them and gave us 2's which is somewhat irritating because I probably could have at least attempted it and had a chance at a 3. My 2 yesterday on the CGM was out of pure retardness, and basically forgetting to circle a couple of the points I'd plotted on the chart. All my log work was fine, but aesthetics apparently cost me. I'm still ahead of the curve grades wise, I seem to get plenty of 4's on all the events, but the 2's are quite annoying. We had our planning session for our last CGM yesterday, and I managed to only have one mistake, which was one more than the previous day. So instead of three 4s for the planning sections I'll probably get a 3 or something, and have to pick up the slack during the actual mission. Our first flight is still looming on Friday, with the EP test Thursday. Other than that it's a somewhat less stressful week than last week when a whole lot was hitting us at once, including two third period sims in three days.

On other fronts, it's now less than a month until my girlfriend will make an appearance, at least temporarily. Due to all her leave being rejected she's only going to be able to fly into the states to see me for a day, then fly to Florida to see her family for a day, then immediately fly up to Ohio for her technical training. The hope is during some of the weekends during that training she'll be able to bounce down here, but nothing is ever a sure thing with the military. So after it'll have been over three months since I've seen her when she arrives, we'll get to spend a short number of hours together, then maybe a random assortment of days over the next few weeks, and then after that she's back to Germany and I'm back to training by myself until most likely literally Christmas. It's not really the wait until July that's been bothing me, it's the wait that's looming between August and December, which will be a lot longer.

When asked the other day how my relationship was going my response without really thinking was "It is what it can be, and it isn't what it should be." Reflecting upon that statement after I said it was kind of depressing, but I guess that's the way it goes. It's not like we didn't know what we were getting in to, no one said it would be easy. Thank god for webcams, at least we are able to see each other on a daily basis, or the difficulty level would increase.

It's weird how there's not enough hours in the day sometimes.