Little by little in Little Rock

Well, first of all, sorry I have not written in a while, I guess I kind of just got out of the habit. I usually write on Saturday mornings while friends are still asleep, but maybe because I was waking up at noon also, the day had already begun and I was trying to catch up. For about 3-4 weeks there, I was on the night shift. I would go to work at 9pm, get in the sim at midnight, and get out at about 3am. It was not fun. Sometimes we did get in early, so we get out at about 2am, but that is still too late for me.

Sims went pretty well I guess. We kind of motored through them, and now I have about 5 or 6 left. The nice thing is, they will be during semi-normal hours. In about 2 weeks I'll have my sim check, which is nothing more than, hey, you can fly the sim well enough to be qualified in the C-130. Yesterday I had the EPE, or emergency procedure evaluation, which is an evaluation of how we run through different malfunctions. This was another case of not doing anything dumb, different, or dangerous so that we do well enough to pass. However, everything in it was different. I hate checkrides for that reason. They say it is just another flight, but it doesn't matter, there is always a different personality of the flight. In the end, things went fine, we both passed and that is all that matters.

In other news, I went to visit my bro in Denver a few weekends ago. It was a short, but sweet trip, that almost didn't happen. I heard that he was going on spring break and didn't have any plans, so I thought about going to visit him to go skiing. After telling him about my idea and seeing how excited he was, I immediately began searching for tickets. They were all in the $4-500 dollar range, and for some reason, I decided to wait to see if the prices might drop on a random day. Fast forward to the weekend, and I am sitting in my apartment at midnight with nothing to do, because I can't sleep and didn't want to go the bars. I decide to have a look at ticket prices for flights. Sweet! Tickets are about half what they were a few days ago. Now I see how people always get tickets for so cheap, they buy them in the middle of the night. Fast forward another few days and I am at the squadron filling out some paperwork to let them know I'm leaving for the weekend. I go to get the flight numbers and realize a huge blunder. I bought tickets for a random weekend in April and that's why they were so cheap. I guess this is what happens when you buy tickets in the middle of the night. I start to become very disappointed because now I'm not only not going to go to Colorado, but Ryan is gonna be super bummed. Also, I had convinced my other bro Dave to go, and he had already bought tickets. I try to find a way to trade the tickets to that weekend, which would have cost me $1000 dollars because I was getting no sympathy from the airline. My mom recommends Southwest, so I give them a shot. Sure enough, the lady found one ticket each direction, and it was only about $500, which was how much it was gonna cost anyway. I'll take it.

In the end, Dave and myself made it to Denver, Ryan was super stoked, and we went skiing at Copper Mt. The skiing was awesome, the companionship fantastic, and was an overall great weekend. Oh, I forgot to mention, it was a surprise for Ryan that Dave came. We also, went to visit another friend of ours who lives in Denver.

Now I have to figure out if I'm gonna go to Denver again in a couple weeks.

Until next time, pray for SURF

Chris