Saturday

Had a good Saturday today. Got a lot of misc errands done around the house including purchasing my Christmas tickets. This afternoon Phil and I went out with a mission to find a shooting range somewhere around here. Since it is Mississippi we figured it should be pretty easy to find a spot since there is so much empty land around here and so many gun-carrying locals and hunters. Well...we ended up driving around for a long time! Eventually we started taking roads that looked like they'd get us farther and farther from civilization. Finally we ended up just parking under a bridge and hiking out into some woods next to a river and setting up some trash left there by some campers to shoot at against a burm. We didn't shoot any of his rifles as it was just too close of an area but we did get to shoot through a few clips of my .45 and his .22. It was nice because I just HAD to try out my new pistol, but we've definitely got to find a better and easier place to shoot in the future!

Yesterday we really had almost nothing at all to do. It was a report to fly day so Phil and I just went in at 8 for holiday safety briefings and then came back and chilled until a little after 12. Then we went in to be ready for a USEM event and some flightline academics. Well, we ended up sitting around until after 5 o'clock just waiting on the USEM to finally do something with us! It was the rudest thing because they changed the schedule by taking the event and classes off the board, but didn't bother to inform a single one of us. Then we had to ask them about the USEM event and he finally told we'd still have one but 'not right now', which evidently is supposed to mean 'about three hours from now'. So again we sat around doing nothing (most of us had studied so much up to this point that there was no more to be gained from it) in the squadron heritage room, and then decided we'd move into the flight room just to give him the hint that we were ready to do this thing and get out of there! So we all moved into the flight room and set up the chairs and all for the USEM event while he continued to sit at his computer and read emails and completely ignore all of us. Then, he sat around just chatting and joking for over an hour with a few other IPs and then finally just got up and left the room with them without saying a thing to us!! So again we sat and waited. Finally the flight commander came in very surprised to still see us there and asked what we were doing. We said we were wondering that ourselves! Finally he found this guy and brought him back in and he eventually told us that we'd just go ahead and take one of our no-notice tests. This was after 5!! Our first event was supposed to have started at 2! So needless to say we were pretty ripped about all of this. That's just completely out of line and shows a complete lack of mutual respect on their part, and certainly does nothing to bolster our respect for them. To make things worse this guy was just a 1Lt, still an Lt like the rest of us! Anyways, anywhere else and this kind of thing just would not fly; only in this silly training environment could he get away with wasting 13 other peoples' time without even keeping us informed as to what was going on for over 3 hours. I couldn't believe it, just try doing something like that with some airmen working for you and see if you EVER get respect or 100% devotion out of them again! I think not!

That kind of thing just makes me mad, I understand 'training environment' type things but when you disrespect me and waste my time without even communicatng with me as a fellow human-being and servicemember, I find that very hard to swallow! Enough said!

After work last night we then went and watched the new Bond movie Quantum Solace. It was decent but again pretty different from the traditional 007 movies: still no gadgets or anything like that at all!

Looking forward to being back in Lighthouse again tomorrow, it's been 2 weeks! Going now to shower then bed...