Centennial Post!

That's right, this is my 100th post according to my blog interface (I certainly haven't been counting them myself)! Well, in recent news on Friday night we went to Rob's house and had about 6 or 7 from the class over there to grill up some food, watch tv, hang out, and sit around the fire. :) He bought a fire pit last Monday and we were itching to try it out! He got wood for it by dumpster diving into the wood waste bins of the construction taking place in housing here on base. We had a great though were up pretty late considering I actually had to go to Cantata practice Saturday morning. That went pretty well and then we all had pizza afterwards in the church cafeteria area too.

That afternoon Phil and Rob and I drove up to Tupelo to do some Christmas shopping. The town was packed with traffic backed up literally for miles! There aren't very many good places to shop around here so I guess everyone else in the area had the same idea as us...ugh, miserable! But we got some good shopping in and I got some wrenches I'd been needing to make some bike work a little easier. Speaking of which, the new battery I'd ordered came in too and I installed that on Sunday. It's awesome, my bike actually starts up now and I don't have to worry about the battery dying on me!

Sunday we had our Cantata in the morning and both Phil and Rob came to that as well. It was really nice having them come out for it after putting all that practice time and work into it. I hope it was a blessing to both of them. After services that morning bro Daniel threw a Christmas party for the singles class and so we all had a great home-cooked meal together. Bro Daniel cooked all the main dishes himself and his wife had cooked the deserts. Lasagna and fixings followed brownie-cheesecake for dessert. How can you top that!

This week has been pretty rough so far in the flying department, though. Yesterday we actually made it off the ground in the hopes that Jackson truly had the weather it was calling and that we would have the cloud clearence for a pattern. No such luck...the bases were at about 500'. At least I got to shoot a localizer and Tacan there, though it was an incomplete ride anyways, obviously. Then today the weather was even worse, to the point where there was no point in picking a base to 'brief' to except for just to have a base to brief up as if we were going to fly. Of course we knew the whole time that we weren't going to make it off the ground. These days are so difficult, though, becaue we are still on formal release and so we do a lot of sitting around. Like I had about an hour after the flight was canceled to get a burrito with Rob and spend a few minutes on the couch at home, and then we had to go to Gen Lorenz's briefing at 10. After that we were told we would have a USEM event so we went back to the flight room and literally sat around for 2 hours thinking we were going to start at any minute before we finally got that done. I would so much rather put in a solid day of WORK than sit around like that, it just drives us all up the wall! Only nice thing is that after 3 people pass their checkrides we'll be off formal release and won't have to wait around like that any more. It looks like we still may have a few check before Christmas, but with these weather days most of us won't check until after we get back. Oh well.

And I have to be up at 0400 again tomorrow, so must be heading to bed. Maybe the weather will be a little better, but doesn't look like it...