Monday, Monday, Monday!

Had a pretty good weekend. Friday we got back pretty late so I just hung around the house and chilled and then slept in late Saturday morning. Saturday I got all my errands and shopping done for the week, and I also made a pretty mean roast!

I picked up the meat at the commissary and then I decided I wanted a little bit of onion, carrots and potatoes in the roast. And let me tell you, this is why guys don't cook! I had to call Mom up in the middle of the store to get her input on all of these choices. You'd think picking up those three items would be easty, but no! First the carrots, you can buy both baby carrots and 'regular' long carrots. Then, even the long carrots have different kinds, and some of those are pre-packaged and others aren't. Ok, and that was the easy part! (I used baby carrots). Then, I went to buy potatoes, and had the same problem! There are red potatoes, white potatoes, baking potatoes, and russets!! And I am not exagerating on this: there were at least 6 different types of onions!!!! All I wanted was 3 things and I had to pick between about 20 different items?? Who needs this kind of stressful decision making situation just in the grocery store?!? Luckily Super Mom was there to save the day and she got me all straightened out and let me tell you, I made a pretty mean roast!

Sunday Jonny and Crista (spelling?) asked me if I wanted to join them and Miss Kathleen and her daughter Breanna for lunch at the Main Street cafe. Of course I joined them and enjoyed the meal tremendously. Then Sunday night pastor used them and the Heatons in his sermon and publicly acknowledged them for especially reaching out to me. Oh, and Sunday morning right before service started Pastor Jimmy walked up to me and asked if I could pray in public, and I kind of stumbled over myself saying "Well, I have, and I can, and I will if that's what you're asking." :) So he asked me to join him and open the Sunday morning service in prayer from the pulpit! From the bottom of my heart, I take that as a great honor! I just praise the Lord for His guidance to this church, and for the great blessing that they've all been to me. It's pretty neat because even on Saturday at the commissary I randomly ran into 4 or 5 different people who all greeted me by name and chatted with me for a bit, and they were all people I know from church! And even our teacher for this last academic block is a member of the church. So Lighthouse has been a huge blessing to me here, and definitely an answer to prayer.

On to today. This morning I got 'stood up' during our morning formal brief. Every day we have an emergency procedure (EP) given to us in a very formal setting, and then one of us is chosen at random (we don't know ahead of time) to stand up in front of all of our peers and all the IPs and step through the scenario in a heavily governed fashion. It's meant to put one into a stressful situation by the pressure of being in front of people, having to remember a lot of little nuances to get through the EP structure, and then try to solve an emergency situation as if you were in the aircraft at the time! And, praise the Lord, I think I did really well this morning. If you mess the EP up, you are sternly told to 'sit down' and someone else is called up in your place to pick up where you messed up and try to bring it to a safe conclusion. So far, only 1 other person has made it all the way through one without being sat down, and I was able to pull it off today as well! I was pretty nervous, but just made myself act and think as if I had all the time in the world, so once I took a deep breath and started into the EP, I really wasn't too shaky or anything. I had a few of my bros even compliment me on it, and the IP giving the EP even told me this evening before I left that I'd done a good job. So I'm quite proud of that! However, before I blow my own head up too big, I will say that it was by no means a perfect performance. There were definately some areas where I kind of held my breath and tip-toed through, but in the end, I made it.

I was scheduled to fly today and it would have been the first flight in this new block. However, there was some sort of issue with maintenance and the jets today, and after standing fully geared up and ready to go for about 20 minutes all of our flights ended up getting canceled. And, I was actually dissapointed! I think I'm starting to enjoy all of this just a little bit. Scary thing is, I know it won't last forever...it's only going to get harder before it gets any easier, and after a test we took this evening on the local procedures (which I think most of us probably failed), it's not getting easier anytime soon. Oh, and I got a 92% on the Instruments test we took this morning. Not nearly what I was hoping for, but it was a pretty rough test. The hard one will be the Instruments 2 test, which is the most failed test in all of phase II of UPT. So, that's something fun to look forward to!

Also got a good workout in this afternoon as well. I'm shooting to get back down to somewhere between 165 and 170 and have about 6 pounds to go. But, the important thing to me is just that I work out on a regular basis and make sure I'm eating right. So far I've lost about 3 pounds since starting to consistently get to the gym in the past couple of weeks. I know keeping this up will really help me with dealing with the stress and all as well.

Tomorrow we don't start until 1300 so I'm hoping to get my car registered in MS in the morning. I'm also giving the morning standup briefing tomorrow so I'm going to try to get there at LEAST an hour early to get that put together, and may shoot for 2 hours to have plenty of time to get it done and run through it once or twice so I at least look like I know what I'm talking about. We got our new flight commander today as well, so this will be an opportunity to put a good foot forward in front of the whole flight room. Besides that, it kind of sets the tone for the rest of the day.

Must go to bed now as this post turned out to be a lot longer than first anticipated. Sleeping until 830 but 1240 is late enough (the 'post times' shown on these blogs are WAY off). These alternating schedules are so crazy...The other week I'd be getting up in 2 hours. Oh well, it's all part of the game.