Formation tomorrow!

Ok, man, and I'm still trying to keep this thing alive! Once again I'm going to have to back track a bit. This past week I passed the nav test only missing 2 questions. Also plugged through a bunch more instrument sims and rides, and I'm now down to only 3 I-sims and 1 flight left! My cross country will be in 2 weeks, and then my I-check should be pretty much right after that. We're taking the formation test tomorrow, though, which will clear us to start on the final block of our training. So tomorrow I'll take the test first thing in the morning, then go to the one and only formation sim, and then fly my first formation sortie after that with Bond! I'm really excited about getting into the formation phase, I think it's going to be a blast to fly so close like that!

Friday night was our solo party. I know, it's been like a month since we actually first soloed, but we wanted to wait for our flight commander to get back from his 3 weeks of leave. Part of the solo party is the naming where we go from student to student telling stories about them and then proposing callsigns based on those usually-emberrassing stories. Then they leave the room and every one else votes on the final favorite call sign. For me, my fellow studs came up with Soccer Mom because I drive a station wagon (jerks!) :) and then Flanders (the neighbor from the simpsons) because as one guy put it "I think DQ spends more time at church than in the flight room", and of course I don't drink, etc; so I took that as a compliment. Then the IPs had Gear and 'Chase Ship' because of my little incident with the gear during my solo... The one that every one liked was Flanders, and so I came back in the room, toasted Captain Stewart who soloed my, and then handed the shot off to Ryan who had kindly offered to take it for me. Then someone else yelled "hey, and that's just like Flanders would do too!" Heheh, oh well, I'll take it. I then spent a good portion of that morning with the 3 other non-drunks there getting every one home. Of course, then we actually lost on the IPs. One minute he was there, and then later in the night every one is going, "Where's he been? Did he leave? Did you see him go?" So of course we were afraid he'd wandered off and passed out somewhere or had been picked up by SF; so we spent a couple of hours trying to track him down before we finally found him at home. Evidently his wife, who was supposed to be out of town, had come back and picked him up and took him home without telling anyone. Thanks a lot!!!

So I finally got into bed around 3 in the morning Saturday!! Then, the power went out around 9 that morning. Of course, after growing up in Indonesia my first thought was 'great, now it's going to get really hot in here and I'm not going to be able to sleep!' Thankfully, though, the house is pretty well insulated and I got a couple more hours of rest. The lights finally came back on some time around 1. Spent the rest of the day mostly just studying, cleaning the house a bit, and doing some shopping. I got my 500 out in the lemon lot too and I'm hoping with the 100+ new Lt's coming to Columbus in the next week or so that someone will see and buy!

Also, Mom and Dad will be getting here Thursday! So I mopped the floor and did some straightening today, and Ryan actually cleaned up the whole kitchen, it looks better than it has in a long while! Sometime he just gets a sudden urge to clean I guess, because I'll find random areas of the house suddenly looking spick and span at random times. Then of course it's my solemn duty to mess it all back up... But seriously, we usually do keep the place relatively neat; though I must say it would stay a lot tidier around here if it weren't for all the cat hair! After sweeping up the house this evening I could have made a whole 'nother cat from all the hair I picked up!

Ok, and I'm going to try to get back into the swing of updating on here daily so I don't have to try to remember everything 5 days at a time because I know I'm missing something! And it's off to bed for me. Formation tomorrow and hopefully a workout before the test in the AM. We're over half way through the T-6 program now too!