the clueless american

After all the years of talking about it, I finally got checked out to fly at an aero club today. It all seemed so surreal because the AF does everything using the death-by-briefing technique, while today we basically shook hands and jumped in the airplane to fly. This was probably the first time in my life that a flight instructor examined my experience and then treated me as though I actually had that level of experience.

We did a fairly short flight from Dobbins up to Cartersville for some touch-and-goes, after which we did one more T&G at Dobbins followed by the full stop. I'm also a military fuel truck operator now, although my 20 minutes of training is substantially shorter than the 6-month school for full-time fuelers.

I'm going up by myself on Friday, and then my next flight should be with e and The Boy. How cool!

I'm here in a hotel in Colorado Springs, using my cellphone to connect to the internet because I don't want to pay $9.95 for a few hours of use. I found myself on a 7-day "I've been everwhere, man" tour around the country.

Leg one started out ok but was very long. We left an hour early but arrived only 15 minutes early thanks to the 70 knot winds in the face. GP baked biscuits in the oven and later a pot roast--it was fantastic. In my years of flying the Herk I've never had much to do with the oven; I need to start doing something when I go TDY.

Our hotel is the Sheraton not too far from the airport, right across from the Doubletree hotel. The Sheraton was no doubt once a nice place to stay, back in the early 90s when I was a zoomie perhaps, but it's a tad run down now. I'm not sure if my room smells like someone peed in it or died, but it's not that pleasant. Add to that some of the aircrew favorites: 1/2 mile walk from the front desk to our rooms (are we still in the same hotel?), no breakfast, and pay internet. I think next time we'll see if the D-tree has rooms.

All my whining aside, it's not a horrible place, and in any event I'll get to see one of my best friends tomorrow before leaving town for the next stop, Reno. No doubt we're planning to leave early so that some of the crew can go skiing as soon as possible. Your tax $ at work!

Well it's day two and I'm still here in C-Springs. JT picked me up this morning at 7 and took me to a great little breakfast dive, the kind of place you'd never venture into or even find without a local at your side. I made a happy plate and got to pick a candy and get a sticker.

After JT dropped me off I chatted with e on the phone while I waited for the rest of the crew. When they showed up we got in the plane and started getting ready to go. As we approached the runway, the pilot started panicking a little because the plane wasn't stopping. We managed to come to a stop right before entering the runway. Right now I'm back in Base Ops surfing the web while I wait for the brakes to be fixed. Looks like we may be a little late to Reno after all.

Update, 4 pm Colorado time:

After way too much coordinating and waiting around, it was finally decided that we'd stay another night here in Colorado and then go home in the morning. I'm a little bummed that I could have shown JT the plane after all (I cancelled when we were going to be leaving early today). Since we're in town more than 24 hours we have to stay on base. Getting the rooms was another more than an hour mess, but the rooms are nice. Although the room claims to have high speed access, it's so slow that it makes it hard to do anything. I'm hoping that for whatever reason the network demand dies down later tonight. I'd hoped to not even be in the room but my calls to JT have gone unanswered. I hope I haven't been bothering him by calling home, cell, and pager.

Last night was a blast! JT called about 10 minutes after I posted, and they picked me up about an hour later. It was really great to see ET again and to meet their kids who are also ET and JT but have different names :-)

We went downtown and ate dinner at the Phantom Canyon Brewing Company. The food and homemade brews were good, but the company was excellent. I really enjoyed catching up and wished that e could be there with me. We'll have to fly out there together some day.

Today we brought the broke aircraft back home. It was cool to get more than 70 knots of wind on the tail; at one point we saw 400 knots ground speed! We got home in 3 hours, swapped planes, and then took off for MacDill AFB in Tampa.

They've put us up in the Embassy Suites, which is always nice. We enjoyed the manager's reception before heading out to eat. Naturally everything was packed on a Friday night, but eventually we got some seats at Steak & Ale and had a great meal. I don't think I'll need to eat much tomorrow.

I'm at the halfway point of this trip, and home for a night. The pilot from the last few days can't do the entire trip, so they scheduled it to spend a night in Atlanta so that a new pilot can take over tomorrow.

This morning we got up early and headed out to the plane around 8. By 8:30 the poor nav had puked twice. He's certain it has nothing to do with the manager's reception last night and something to do with what he ate. In any case he wasn't very useful to us for the first part of the trip.

Thanks to our day off in C-Springs, the trip was in danger of not meeting its flying-hour goal, or at least that's what the pilot thought. So, instead of keeping with the theme of getting where we want to go as fast as possible, he decided to return home by way of Biloxi. The main reason for choosing Biloxi is that the pilot hadn't seen the aftermath of Katrina and wanted to take a look. We flew all the way over to Keesler AFB and then picked up our clearance home. As we climbed up the winds once again got into the 80's and 90's. The pilot initially said he didn't mind if we got home earlier than his planned 3 hours, but then 5 minutes away from home he suddenly decided to tool around West Cobb County for 20 minutes. I think because we were so close to home and because he didn't bother to run his decision by us before announcing it on the radio that I got a little frustrated. We were all happy to be getting home for the night a little earlier than planned, and it was a little annoying to have that delay thrown in without warning. In the end we flew more than 3 hours, so maybe later on in this trip we won't have to burn holes in the sky for no reason.

On my way home e asked me to pick up our favorite fast-food-that's-sort-of-healthy, Zaxby's. 2 lights before the restaurant, a little dog ran near the side of the road but seemed to be staying off the pavement. Right after I passed he decided to trot out into the street, and in my rear view mirror I saw the car behind me run him over. Poor little dog, poor kids whose pet won't come home, and poor driver who got the pu pu platter scared out of him, not to mention the damage he took.

I got home to some real sickos. MJ has a cold and fever, and e is starting to come down with it. The Boy slept more than half the time from my coming home until now; poor little guy is tuckered out!

I guess now it's time for a little rest before heading on to Tucson tomorrow. We set a late takeoff so that everyone could go to church, etc. before flying, but I don't guess we'll go with a sick little boy.

Well, my time off didn't go exactly as planned, but it was good to be home anyway. Not only were e and MJ sick when I got there, but also our friends' daughter fell and knocked herself out the day before, causing them to cancel our dinner.

Since we weren't having company, e and I ate our Zaxby's and then took a short nap. It was shorter for e than me because she got up when MJ started crying. It was very nice of her to let me sleep.

When we woke up this morning MJ's fever was gone, but e was feeling worse so we still skipped church. Poor little e just wanted to sleep, but she stayed vertical to put together the chicken pot pies she promised me. What a great wife!

I helped e get the pot poes together and then helped her prepare the dessert: "Hello Dolly," a neat recipe e found to help get rid of extra chocolate candies and such.

I got to the base early, but we still managed to go slowly enough that we took off late. The flight out to Tucson was a long 5.3 hours, but I spent a lot of it running back and forth to the oven cooking the pies. I had overestimated the oven's size, but I was able to cook both pot pies and some biscuits for everyone. I don't know how the first one tasted, but the one I helped eat was excellent. e really did a great job. Unfortunately the dessert didn't fit in the oven at all, so we went without.

We got to Tucson around 7 local and then made our way to the hotel. On a whim I decided to ask the restaurant staff if they'd bake the dessert for me so that it wouldn't go bad. The first guy I talked to sounded skeptical, but his boss the sous-chef said yes without hesitation. I changed while they cooked it and came back to a perfectly cooked dessert.

By that time the guys were down at the hotel bar watching the Sunday night game, so we had some excellent chocolate with our game. I'm not much of a Falcons fan, but since I live in Atlanta and was with a bunch of Atlanta guys, I decided to cheer for them. Bad move. Right after I started watching the game, I watched a Falcon get a great interception then fumble the ball because he was careless with it. It didn't get much better from there, and they lost 16-3.

I'm back in the room now to rest up for tomorrow's long day. We're supposed to fly 2 hours up to Ogden, UT. The weather channel says it's going to be nasty up there, so I don't know where we'll wind up. Hopefully someplace warm.

As I often say to e, "Guess where I'm not!" We got the plane ready and were prepared to go to UT when the weather shop reported forecast severe icing at the base. We're not allowed to go somewhere for severe, so we started looking for a new place to go. The AC, who did this trip primarily to visit relatives in UT, wasn't taking no for an answer. He called the forecaster at the base directly to see if they had anything different to say about the weather. The forecaster there said that there was no longer a danger of severe icing and that they were retracting the earlier forecast.

Based on this info we got everything ready to go to UT, but right before we walked out the door the AC decided to go back to the local weather shop to have them remove severe icing from out forecast. During this time a new forecaster came on duty in UT and re-stated the severe ice warning. In disgust, the AC told us to plan something else.

Since we'd been shut out of San Diego days earlier, we decided to try there. The Nav got us into the Courtyard in the Gaslamp district. It's not the Marriott Marina I'd hoped he was booking, but it's pretty nice. The building is an old bank built in 1928 that still has the original vault doors below. The rooms are small but comfortable enough, and the internet access is free. Don't waste any money on the bar, though. When we asked the bartender about the posted happy hour specials, he seemed clueless and then offered that the domestic swill (Miller Lite, Bud bottles) was offered for the low, low price of $4.50.

I tried to talk the crew into the Strip Club, not a skin joint but a place where you cook your own steak. They sounded interested on the flight in but then balked at the nearly 6-block walk from the hotel. They preferred to find a sports bar right down the street where we could watch Monday Night Football. We walked over to the Yard House, where they told us there would be a 45 minute wait but then paged us 5 minutes later when we were about to leave.

The Yard House has a fairly impressive selection of beers, by which I mean they have more taps than any bar in the world. The website says between 130 and 250 taps (they can't count?). I'd guess we were somewhere in the 200 range. Oddly enough the 200-ish great-tasting draught beers from around the world were about $2 less than the low-end domestic bottles back at the Marriott. The food was on the expensive side but pretty good. I got the waiter-recommended ginger-crusted salmon on top of wasabi mashed potatoes. It was hard to see at first because the whole thing was covered in fried carrot strings, but it tasted great.

By the time we finished dinner the Pack were already down 24-3, and everyone was tired from being on the road so long and the fact that it was already 11 Eastern time. We walked back to the hotel and now have about 12 hours until showtime in the morning. I thought I'd stay up a while, but it's 9:30 here (12:30 for my body) and I'm ready for bed.

Ok, so I can't count. Or rather, I misspoke earlier. It's a 7 night trip, which means 8 days, otherwise I'd be writing this from home.

Instead, I'm writing from the very nice but loud Renaissance Worthington hotel in downtown Ft. Worth, TX. Nice because it's more hotel than I'd ever want to afford (the gov't gets a rate quite a bit below the general public for official travel), and loud because the KU football team is here to play a bowl game on Friday. I don't know why it is that you can have a hotel filled to the gills with strangers and will hardly hear a peep, but the same hotel less than half full where half of those guests know each other is a different story. I guess people think that they have such a large group that no one else on their floor could possibly be a regular business traveler who needs to work the next morning--not in 3 days like they do.

Anyhow, the trip here was pretty fun. This morning we decided to plan to fly over the Grand Canyon instead of going straight to Texas, thus ensuring we'd meet today's 4-hour and the trip's 25-hour goals. The visibility was perfect and we went right over the South Side visitors' center and scenic overlooks; how impressive! On the way we got to go right past Lake Havasu City, and although I'm sure we flew right over the London Bridge I wasn't able to see it. I'm not sure I would have recognized it because I've always thought that it resembled the Tower Bridge, but according to the pics I've seen on the web it's just a regular-looking, flat bridge that used to go across the Thames.

Dinner tonight was to have been the Chop House at the hotel's recommendation, but when we saw the $35-40 steaks we decided to move on. I was happy with the next stop--Billy Miner's, a Fuddrucker's kind of place--but the bossman was very unhappy about the affair and pressed us to move on. We finally settled on the Fox & Hound, a very English-sounding name that turned out to be a regular American sports bar. I don't even know if they had fish and chips, but they did have $2 pints, which is not too shabby when some of the choices were Fat Tire and even Guinness. After dinner I couldn't resist a stop at the Marble Slab Creamery, and then it was back to the room for (I thought) some sleep before our early wake-up. Instead I'm getting loud teenagers 20 rooms apart shouting at each other: "C'mon, boooiiiiy, let's go get something to eat." Even as the hall noise quiets down I hear that 3-4 KU players are in the room next to me having a little party. I know I'm an old, old man, but I just want those pesky kids to quiet down so I can get a little sleep.

Update, the next day:

The hall noise stopped exactly at midnight as though a curfew had been imposed, but that didn't stop my next door neighbors from loudly opening and slamming the door every few minutes. I finally drifted off at about 1 and got up at 6 in time to get dressed and eat my mediocre breakfast that was $4 more than the same stuff I got in AZ but tasted worse. Go figure. Anyway on my way out I decided to repay my young friends next door. I set my clock alarm to 7:30 and turned the volume all the way up. I couldn't resist a phone call from the lobby just to be sure. All may have been for naught, though, as there was a bus outside to take them to practice. It was fun anyway, and at least I don't feel so old any more.

Well, despite the poor night's sleep, everyone was in high spirits this morning. We got moving at our usual slow pace and then were finally on the way home. Nothing ever seems longer than the last 30 minutes from Birmingham to the base, but before I knew it we were on final for 29. We got home just in time to miss the squadron's pot luck lunch, but most of us were more concerned with going home than eating anyway. I said Merry Christmas to the guys and headed home. For some reason it feels like I've been gone the full 8 days even though I spent the night here at the halfway point. Now to enjoy a little peace and quiet before the house is full of Christmas guests.

I'm off on a trip again, this time to participate in the 62nd anniversary of the Normandy invasion. We'll be dropping some troops on 4 June, but for now we're just concerned with getting there.

Today was a very early start, with a 3:30 wakeup time. Despite a minor maintenance problem the trip was fairly uneventful as we picked up passengers in Macon and Nashville. We're staying the night at McGuire, which gave me a chance to see my mom. Getting her on the base was a mess, since apparently everyone else in the world was trying to get on at 4:30 on a Saturday. After that mess we were able to have a good time.

There's not much town outside the gates, so we decided instead of driving halfway back to my mom's house we'd just eat at the Garden State Diner near the base. We had a true New Jersey diner experience, complete with a not-quite-rude-but-not-friendly-either waitress and a table of old women loudly complaining about the food and how they were going to eat some of it and take some of it home for later.

When my mom dropped me off I found out that my key wouldn't work in the door, so I had to walk over to the office to get it re-keyed. By the time I got back to my room she was already home! I'm glad it's closer than we both thought.

Now it's time to enjoy a little sleep before another early morning tomorrow as we head up to Goose Bay.

My night may have been uneventful, but one of our troops had an experience last night. Apparently while I was with my mom listening to old ladies complain last night the rest of the gang was at the sports bar across from billeting having some food and drinks. One of the guys had more drink than food and was worse off than he seemed to everyone. When the last three left the bar, two turned right to their building while the last guy seemed to be turning left to his. He overshot and instead wound up in the golf course 1/4 mile away, trudging through the fairways in the dark. At one point he fell down a drainage ditch and bent his thumb back pretty hard.

He says he was pretty out of it but woke right up when a security policeman said "On your knees!" and ordered him to produce his ID card. Seems the guy wandered on to the flightline side of a building and was nearly on the flightline itself when they spotted him.

It didn't take the police long to figure out what was going on, so they brought him in to the drunk tank to cool off a while. Later when they realized his hand was really hurt, they took him to a nearby hospital where they wrapped it with an ace bandage. Getting back to the base was his own responsibility and took him until about 5:30 am for our 6 o'clock bus time. As he gathered his bags from the room he didn't use, he realized that the night before he'd had his backpack with about $2,000 of camera equipment with him and had no idea where it wound up. We searched the base as much as we could before takeoff, but in the end we left without his camera.

4 hours later we arrived in Goose Bay, one of the more isolated places I've visited in my travels. For the first time here I got to stay off base, and the hotel is pretty nice. I suppose a travel guide might describe it as rustic, but it works for me. Due to an apparent addition error on the part of the scheduler, we only have 16 hours here instead of 19. That means I have to hurry up and get some dinner so that I can be up at 3 again tomorrow.

Update, 29 May 03:45: I checked my email one last time before packing up the computer and saw an email from e that said someone called her to report that they'd found the camera. The guy who found it said the first thing he did was look on eBay to see how much he could get for it. When he found out it was $2k he told his mother who said he should try to return it. So, the sort-of honest guy looked through the bag where he inexplicably came up with my name and home phone number. e told him that the camera was owned by one of my traveling mates and he said to call NJ to straighten things out. Unfortunately e forgot to give me the phone number, so we'll have to wait until we get to England to get in touch with the guy.

I am SO ready for bed! Last night I wasn't able to get to sleep until 10 before my 3 o'clock wakeup. When we got up it was the usual hurry up and wait until we finally got airborne just after 9. The flight was relatively uneventful, although it was interesting to see an O-6 have trouble with radio calls and position reports. On active duty an O-6 would have crossed the pond many times, but a reserve O-6 might be a high-time domestic Delta captain who's only flown over once or twice in his life. He did well enough to get us across in less than the predicted 7 hours (the winds get the credit for the shorter time of course).

By the time we landed my little headache from this morning was pounding from having a headset on so long. When we finally got to the hotel 2 hours later I announced that I wouldn't be joining the crew for dinner. I don't even feel like waiting for room service. I think I'll talk to e and then hit the sack!

There wasn't much flying for me today. I made it to bus time after having my £9.50 free breakfast. What's that you say? Well, breakfast is included with the room, so in addition to the £3.50 normal room service fee the hotel tacks on an additional £6 fee for putting your selected breakfast on a tray if you ask them to deliver. I figure since I didn't eat last night that's at least £10 worth of meal I can afford to spend on breakfast.

Since the Colonel wanted to fly again and the aircraft commander still hadn't been in the seat, those two went together while I hung around ops for awhile and went back to the room. Still jet-lagged, I just hung around for the few hours until I had to go right back to the base for the welcome BBQ. I haven't driven a right-hand-drive since 1990 when I was in Japan, so it was interesting to get used to shifting with my left and staying on the other side of the road.

The BBQ was pretty good although almost none of the RAF chaps were able to make it since they were flying. After I got some eats and a few free pints courtesy of the Royal Army I took the early bus back to the hotel. Tomorrow we're the backup crew for the other plane so hopefully we can get released early and go sightseeing.

Well, I'm off to a good start on another fun trip with the C-130. It started out Thursday night at 11:30 when I got the call saying we were leaving ASAP Friday morning instead of Saturday.

On Friday morning when I got to work the Air Force was already calling asking why we didn't take off at 10. This is the kind of small stuff I sweat: there is no way a crew can legally even be in the building less than 12 hours after the phone call comes in, so asking them to be airborne in 10.5 hours without any kind of waiver is ridiculous. Add this to the fact that there was someone else from the Air Force calling to say they weren't sure who we were or where we were going. Typical fun.

We finally found out where they wanted us to fly and got airborne towards San Antonio. On the way in, Houston Center called us and said we didn't have permission to land at our destination so where did we want to go? A few quick phone patches later the destination realized their part in the game and agreed we certainly did have permission.

When we got there, we found that our passengers were prepared for this supposedly high-priority mission by not being ready to go. We called them when we landed and the pilot kept saying things like "Yes, we're here. Right on the ramp. In San Antonio. Yes, we're here...." That didn't bode well for loading up and going like we'd planned. Thanks to the passengers' sense of promptness we left 2 hours and 40 minutes after we landed instead of the 45-60 minutes we'd been hoping for.

The 5-hour flight to California was fairly uneventful until the end. As we descended into the airport the pilot noticed the oxygen low level light come on. I was flying from the right seat, so that means my hand and the yoke were between my eyes and both the light and the LOX gage. We quickly found that one of the regulators in the back was turned on emergency, probably by a passenger who accidentally flipped the switch.

After landing we tried to get some help on the way for the LOX problem, but first we had to convince the Air Force that we actually were on a high priority mission and they needed to get us some help fast. During this time the FBO was showing its appreciation for the amount of money we were about to spend on fuel by doing nothing. They figured I was kidding when I asked for a power cart, so 45 minutes later when we got tired of hearing the APU and shut it down, we found out we were alone on the ramp. We had to drag our bags into the building and then ask if they'd be so kind as to help us find a way to the hotel. 8 hours earlier when I no doubt was talking to the previous shift, there was no problem shuttling us to the hotel. Now it was a problem that we had so many people and their cars are so small and they want to go home, etc. etc. We finally convinced them to at least call a cab for us.

Thankfully the hotel was very close, and we got in the rooms at midnight eastern time, only 12 hours after our initial takeoff. I'm definitely getting too old for this. I looked in the mirror and my eyes are bright red. I guess I'm off to bed to rest up for tomorrow night's return trip.

Well this trip is turning out to be loads of fun. After checking out of the hotel at 3 and getting to the airport by about 3:45, we started planning for the flight back to San Antonio with the medical team still over 3 hours away.

The pilot had the great idea of shortening the day by flying closer to the medical team instead of waiting for them to drive back to us. He looked around and found that they were 10 minutes away from Moffett Field near San Francisco and directed us to start planning for that.

This is where things got interesting. The pilot, while well known and somewhat important in AFRC, doesn't have a lot of experience with active duty missions--at least it seems that way. So far throughout the trip he's refused to deal with the active duty command who actually controls us; instead he only deals with AFRC command and tells them to report what he says to the Air Force. The reality is that we're on an Air Force mission and should deal with them exclusively.

Anyhow, this led to the pilot asking the wrong set of people to recut the mission down to Moffett. Some of these wrong people disapproved of the change despite the pilot's repeated assertions that as a reservist he didn't need to listen to the active duty controller. The pilot then started using his AFRC connections to get a reserve general involved. In the end AFRC cut us a training mission to Moffett so that we could continue on the Air Force mission to San Antonio. I'm not positive, but I think a lot of the friction wouldn't have been necessary if we'd been talking to the right folks from the beginning.

Just to kind of poke us in the eye for causing so much trouble, the airplane decided not to work for us. On startup the ignition relay on the #4 engine failed, causing us to shut down and replace it (luckily we had one). Then after re-starting normally we taxiied out for takeoff and on the runway noticed very low power on #4. We wound up taking it back to parking to troubleshoot for an hour, but nothing the crew chiefs could see fixed it. We had to give up for the night because no light carts were available and it was hard to see the engine. The plan is to go back to the hotel and look at it tomorrow in the daylight.

So, 9 hours after checking out I'm back in the same room tonight. The friendly front desk staff gave me a coupon for free internet, but naturally it says it already expired. I guess they base their expirations on Eastern time where it actually is tomorrow, but I got the $9.95 internet anyway. It's not like I wouldn't get it.

After more than 15 years I'm starting to get the first signs of a major relationship problem. Not with e, thankfully, we're doing just fine. I'm talking about the Air Force.

I've been in a committed relationship, you might say, for nearly 16 years now. In fact, I don't have the option of trying to leave until 2013. The Air Force, on the other hand, has no such obligation to me. It demonstrated as much by letting me know that I wasn't worth promoting to lieutenant colonel this time around. Being passed over puts me in the bottom 25% of the 1,000+ majors who were up for promotion in this board. It also means that if I'm not selected next year then the AF will have a second board to decide if it's worth keeping me around. A lot of pilots get what's called selective continuation each time they get passed over, but there's no guarantee. Without being continued, I'll be unceremoniously asked to leave the Air Force within six months of the decision to pass me over.

Wow. That's a hard blow to me. I've been wearing an Air Force uniform since I was fifteen years old. Granted, the first 4 years were as a JROTC cadet, but every day since 29 June 1988 has been with an active duty ID card, no matter what the retirement laws say about my time served. That's more than 20 years wearing the blue, olive green, and camouflage colors of the Air Force. I've said "yes, sir" and saluted more times in those years than I can even imagine. I've been around long enough to see the pendulum swing back and forth more than once on a host of topics.

It seems that the particular topic which will force an early end to my career is the infamous Master's degree. For years it has been an Air Force tradition to get a degree--any degree--to help get promoted. There wasn't any consideration to whether the degree was worth the paper on which it was printed or if the person did their job even .0001% better with that rag on the wall. The assumption was that the haze of getting a degree--even if it involved only sending off $$$ to a degree factory--made a person worthy of the next level of promotion.

A few years back, just when I was getting ready to complete ACSC--another mandatory, probably worthless haze, but that's an entirely different post--I realized that I was old enough to start thinking about a Master's degree soon. It was then that the Chief of Staff of the Air Force decreed that his officers should stop wasting their time on meaningless degrees and that from now on officers should only obtain a degree if required by the Air Force and that only those degrees would be visible on official military records. Fool that I am, I obeyed the CSAF, even though I realized his term was very short and that his decision would probably be quickly reversed.

As it turns out, the reversal wasn't nearly as public as usual because there really wasn't a leg to stand on. The previous CSAF had said his AF officers should stop wasting time and money--much of it gov't money--on useless education. The new CSAF could hardly say that he espoused wasting dollars and effort to help officers "fill a square," could he?

So it was with relatively little fanfare that we were told advanced education would be "unmasked" on future promotion board records. We weren't told to go out and waste time and money, nossir. We were just told that a harmless unmasking would take place, one that effectively returned the Air Force to the wasteful good old days without coming right out and saying it.

I'll admit it again: I was dumb. I shouldn't have believed the leadership when they said unneeded degrees were a thing of the past, because deep down I knew they were just paying lip service to the CSAF. But I was lazy. We were coming back to the States after a tough (but fun) tour in Spain, the baby was on the way soon, and ACSC was d-u-n done. I took a nearly two-year vacation from education, all the while hoping that I would make LTC before the pendulum came back. Instead, it got me squarely in the face. Not only was I not able to complete a degree fast enough after hearing that education would show up on my record, I'm still not able to do anything about it. I need to finish 6 classes by November if I want any chance of having a Master's on my record, and that just ain't gonna happen.

For starters, I can only take 4 courses a year at government expense. With 2 down already this FY, I'd have to pay for 4 of the 6 I need, a total of over $3000. Besides that, I'd have to basically take a "full load" of 18 credits--as a part time student! I'd have to be so involved in my studies that I'd stop working, which as far as I know might also impact my chances of promotion.

Yes, I am wallowing just a bit in self-pity, I realize that. I'll probably come back to this post in a week or so and hit delete, but for now it's hard not to lose hope. As far as I can tell, there's almost no way to avoid meeting the next promotion board without a degree, and that means this time next year I'll be looking for a new job. For the record--not that the AF cares--I'd have stayed until 2013 with no complaints. Heck, I'd have stayed until 3013 if it were possible. It's in my blood far more than any words like job or career or even family can describe. But you don't want me. Wow again. That's hard to take. You won't even blink when I walk out the door, but what am I supposed to do without you?

Well it's been a good long while since I wrote that last post and I still haven't gone back to delete it. Naturally it turns out that a good portion of it is wrong because the AF hasn't unmasked advanced degrees, but as my current boss pointed out that doesn't mean my previous boss didn't hold it against me. He also didn't rule out the possibility of him holding it against me so no telling what my recommendation will look like this time around.

Some things I did find out are that my performance reports for the last 5 years--as long as I've been a major--were not very well written and have a fairly strong negative impact on my chances to get promoted. I also have to consider that less than 30 out of 700+ promotees were above-the-zone, meaning that no matter how stellar the record my chances of getting promoted are very slim.

My cynicism only became worse when I saw that my previous boss weakened my OPR and downgraded my medal. It's hard to feel like he wasn't deliberately trying to cause me to fail. Happy news all around, huh?

Of course, good things have happened here, our Outstanding rating in our UCI being chief among them. Also, e and MJ are doing great, and that's what's important to me. They're actually leaving me tomorrow so that e can be at the military hospital in Germany to have the baby, but I'll be seeing them in a few weeks--hopefully before the baby comes.

I'm sitting here in the passenger terminal where've been for nearly 4 hours now, but I'm thrilled to be here!

Yesterday I got late word that I would be able to maintain my flying currency at Ramstein and that they'd like me to come right up. e and MJ have been up there for 2 weeks now and were expecting to see me a week from today. Now that I have a reason to go TDY I'll be able to go see them a week early, fly for a week, and then go into my pre-baby permissive TDY and leave.

e's due on the 18th with our second boy. We're both pretty excited but just last night were talking about how much of a change a baby is going to make even though we've been through this before.

Now that so much time has gone by, I'm not nearly as bubbling with excitement as I was when I first got here. It will still be great to surprise them, but as of now I've spent almost more time sitting here in the chair than I will be in flight. Hey, at least they have free wireless while we're waiting!