IFF COMPLETE...and I had to work for it!

Let me start off by apologizing to those faithful readers for smashing your reading dreams this past week by not having my blog up to date. It has been a very difficult past two weeks and the last thing I had time for was updating my blog. So here is what has happened since we last sat and talked.

Candi went off to frolic with friends and watch a great football game and I, well I had a different experience. First, right after I posted on my blog and tried to hold it together like I wasn’t crying the whole weekend, my toilet broke. In my attempt to fix it, I broke even more parts and tried to recreate some of the natural wonders of Yellowstone Park, right in my bathroom. I was able to get the geyser turned off and the new parts in, but to do so, I had to put my two helpers outside while I did this…my dogs.

Upon capping the spill in my bathroom, something BP would have been proud of, I go to the back door to check on my dogs. My eyes were quickly drawn to the gaping hole in my fence that was now missing several boards. I then shifted my gaze to the other side of the yard and was easily able to find Jaxson, since he had a twelve foot 1”x4” in his mouth and was taking it to his pile of three similar pieces. I joyfully returned to Home Depot for the second time on Labor Day to prove I was doing just that, laboring. I got home and fixed the fence in the 98 degree heat, then decided to sit down in the air conditioned house and watch a little TV before the big BSU game.

That was the time that my weekend got even better! 4.35 minutes into pleasuring my eyes with my lovely fifty inch TV, the bottom two-thirds goes blank. After pushing every combination of buttons on the remote and turning off/on the TV multiple times, I realized it was dead. I confirmed this by going to Best Buy, which is coincidentally right next to Home Depot…and they both aren’t just around the corner. Luckily, we had a backup, small TV in our bedroom that I was able to watch the game on.

I know I haven’t mentioned flying yet, so let me get to that. I couldn’t go to the game because I needed to fly and our airline flight back from the game might not happen due to weather. Well, Candi made it in right as a tropical depression hit San Antonio…and I was cancelled for the next two days due to weather. I COULD HAVE EASILY MADE IT TO VIRGINIA WITH TWO DAYS TO SPARE!

I finally got to fly a low level on that Thursday and all was well. Then I had to wait a few more days to let my roommate finish his last two flights, since there were limited instructors qualified to instruct our last two flights and he needed to finish first because he had to go back to Boise for personal reasons. He got his flights done in two days (I sandbagged in the back seat of his lead aircraft on the two flights) and then it was my turn this past Tuesday to start my last two flights. These flights are pretty much, “we are going to throw as much at you as we can, don’t worry about it, do your best, and don’t do anything dumb, different, or dangerous.” One minute into my first flight, I did something dangerous. The rest of the flight went pretty well, but the one thing at the very beginning made me fail the flight. However, because I completed the actual mission and did that well, they let me go on to the last flight…I just had to redo the one item. No big deal, right? The next flight went descent, until I decided to drop a bomb without getting clearance to do so…BIG DEAL! Dumb and dangerous! Well that little bit of indiscretion, bought me my second hook (failed flight). And by regulations, two hooks in one phase of flight gets you a progress check. A progress check, as explained to me, is to see if you should stay in the program or get kicked out. Since I was on my last flight, it was now an “all or nothing” flight. Needless to say, I didn’t eat or sleep very well for a day, knowing that my future, career, etc. all depended on this flight.

I flew the progress check on Thursday and didn’t make any stupid mistakes like the previous two flights, thus passing the flight…AND GRADUATING!!!! I later learned that even if I had made a mistake, they would have given me a few practice flights to try to iron everything out and then try it again, something that if I had known, might have saved one to two linings of my stomach. It was a very stressful and frustrating last few weeks because of all that happened, waiting for flights, and then falling flights when I got to fly them, especially because the overall flights were good, they were just marred by one bad decision each. But, alas I am complete with the course and can now breathe, eat, and sleep again. I could never have made it without all the prayers everyone lofted on my behalf- it definitely was a miracle that I held it all together at the end and got through. I could never have made it on my own.

With that being said and your attention span waning because of the length of this, I will wrap this up by telling you that Candi and "it" (as she calls our baby) are doing just fine and I am taking a few days off from studying. We did get away last weekend to Dallas to watch the Yankees play the Rangers. I must say Candi was a trooper for being pregnant and sitting in the hot 99 degrees sun with high humidity to watch men swing a stick at a small white ball. However, we had great seats literally right on the field (see picture from our seat below). It was a quick up one day and back the next. It was a good little trip, we made the most out of it by hanging with the cowboys at the Fort Worth Stockyards, seeing where JFK was shot, and touring the associated museum. Here is one of the suspected gunwoman on the grassy knoll (and a view of the building the shots rang out from & street where JFK was shot)…

Other than that, we are looking for a new TV, I am starting to read the stack of “Dads for Dummies” books that Candi has put together for me, and we are getting ready to come home for a few days in less than two weeks…HURRAY!