A Great Week

Spirits are high here in the Hampton's (if you don't know, we live in the ghetto subdivision called North Hampton) and it is mostly due to the fact that our air conditioner was fixed this past Tuesday. Gone are the nights of sweating on top of the sheets, fighting dogs and wife for window air conditioner time, and out staying our welcome at restaurants just to take advantage of their A/C... long after they quit giving us refills.

And as a bonus, I finished up my first phase of training on Wednesday. My roommate, Aaron, and I finished up with five flights in three days to finish right on time. We were hoping they would string the last several flights out and extend past our finish date, since we don't start the next class until the 8th of July. However, we weren't so lucky...or maybe we were...only time will tell.

I say that last part because we were told to move on to our new squadron, the 435th Fighter Training Squadron. I am now a part of the "Deadly Black Eagles." It comes with lots of anxiety, because these are the guys that are going to crush us over the next three months. We didn't really want to start the kicks to the mid section any earlier than we had to, but so far they have treated us decently. They appear to be waiting until the class actually starts to commence with the hazing, which is alright with me. However, we will see this week if the "decent behavior" continues because we will start flying "sandbag" rides and give them an opportunity to let their true colors show. We have met a bunch of the guys in the 435th and they are really nice dudes, but they have to play the part for training. It does make it a bit easier to take when you know the guys are cool, they are just doing their jobs. Not that you care, but we had to get new patches because we are not worthy of wearing our home unit patches yet... although we had been worthy for the last sixteen months.

The change in classes has given me a chance to breathe and not study every waking hour. I originally thought we would literally be sandbagging every other day and not have much to do, so Candi and I had planned on doing all our "tourist activities" during this time. It looks like our plans may not work out so well with me going to this new squadron and Candi has seen an increase in work load. Candi all of a sudden got swamped and is working so much, that she now has to set an alarm and get up in the mornings. And by mornings, I am pushing it at best. Let's just say, McDonald's doesn't serve breakfast at the times she calls "mornings."

Candi continues to be great with child. She has her 16 week doctor appointment this next Wed. I am finding out that I should have been studying about pregnancy, rather than how to shoot down bandits. Trying to figure out how to answer, "Do you think I look pregnant?" is way more difficult than figuring out turn circles and aspect angles of opposing jets. And if you don't figure out the latter, at least you don't have to live in the same house with the person after they yell at you, like the former.

I did manage to beat the chickens up on Saturday and score a round of golf before Candi started her "morning." Then we went to a minor league baseball game on Saturday night, which was cool.

Of course, we sat right by "that guy" who had too many drinks and too little restraint on his yelling. Thank goodness for security that finally removed this guy, but they were about seven innings too late. I tried to tell him that he wouldn't like it if the baseball players went down to Burger King and yelled at him for not holding the pickles on their Whopper, but that still didn't deter him. Here he is yelling at the opposing batter that he would bet his weekly pay check (his words & yes, he was holding up a $20) that he won't hit the ball.

Other than that, Candi and I haven't been doing a whole lot. We are pretty bored most of the time (mainly weekends) and we are continually searching for things to do around here. We are trying not to do all the "touristy" items during the weekends to reduce our standing in line time and hopefully we can get to some of them during this time between training. We don't really have anyone to do anything with and you really don't want to do too much outdoors during the day because of the heat and humidity...so we really have limited things to do. If I had dime for every time Candi or I said, "what is there to do?" we would be able to pay in full for that answer, if we ever found it. However, we do have the community urine deposit, I mean pool, that we frequent often. It's quite refreshing when it's mid to high 90s...