Random Update

My father told me people were wondering if I forgot about the blog. Not really, it is just not much has changed. Still in Oklahoma. I am pretty much settled now. I finally found out the dates for IFS (Initial Flight Screening) in Pueblo, CO and ASBC (Air Space Basic Course) back at Maxwell AFB. I will be going to IFS on May 16 till June 27 and then I have ASBC from August 5 until September 12.

On a side note I have talked to a lot of people who have gone to IFS, they pretty much all say it is a washout program. I am not quite sure exactly what they mean by that but I think it means that the program exists to weed out those not perfectly suited to flying (ie: airsickness, unenthusiastic, etc.). I will definitely update the blog with my first impressions when I get there and my experience there, however short that may be. I have also started studying the boldface and the ops limits. Most of the information is available from the website here.

The dates of those 2 course will make it pretty difficult to start a masters degree as it breaks up my summer so I won't really have a decent amount of time to get much work done. So that means I am looking into doing another language. I am thinking about Slovak or Romanian simply because I am interested in those regions and there are only 2 people in the entire USAF who are registered as knowing how to speak it thus making it a language I might get paid for, gotta check into that though.

I have a job now. I am working in the Wing Programming office. It is pretty cool because I am learning about how the airfield runs. But a lot of the things that are done are number crunching for reports to higher ups. Pretty much tons of Microsoft Excel programs that pull numbers from somewhere and add them with numbers from somewhere else and display it all on slides for Colonels and Generals to look at. Well these programs break pretty bad. Once the guys in the office found out I used to do computer stuff, they had me start fixing all the programs. So I am doing almost the same job as what I did before I joined the USAF, except I have to wear a uniform to work, shave, and live in Oklahoma. WTF?

There are things to do in Oklahoma. I have had some interesting times since I have been here. I went camping with a friend of mine at the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge. It was very pretty. Buffalo, long horn cattle, prairie dogs, and vultures being the predominant wildlife. I would post some pictures but I suck and don't have a camera yet. The next weekend a bunch of us (casual pilot trainees) went out to a motorcycle rally called Bikelohoma out near Pryor, OK. Two of my friends had ridden their motorcycle and my and another guy, not having motorcycles, had driven in his Saturn. We setup our tent in a muddy open field filled with biker folk. People are super friendly at biker rallies, so we immediately met a really good group of people from Wichita and ended up hanging out with them off and on until 4am. After swapping names we walked into the biker rally festival area. As I walked into the festival I smelled something super familiar...jet exhaust. It turns out some guy had strapped a jet engine to a go cart and was doing donuts in an open area of the festival while people watched from about 10 feet away. I guess the guy figured that strapping a jet engine to a go cart wasn't crazy enough, so he hopped into an outhouse on wheels, and yeah, this thing had a jet engine strapped to it as well. We continued to walk and check out the bikes. Some guy with an albino Burmese boa, naked chicks on a mechanical bull...had to stop and watch that one for a while, music so loud it hurt to be within 50 meters of the stage, and standard biker rally burnouts. All in all a pretty fun time. The show didn't stop at the festival though. Because when we got back to camp the biker mating calls started. One guy, somewhere in the huge encampment, would start his bike, rev the engine until it generated the maximum noise possible, and eventually turn off the bike,. Immediately another guy somewhere else in camp would start his engine and do the same thing. This went on and on until 6AM. I assumed that some of the mating calls must have been answered, and my fears were confirmed when around 3AM a burly biker dude threw a burly biker girl on the hood of our Saturn and proceeded to bang her like a screen door in a hurricane. Not wanting to interfere we all just sat around the campfire in dumbstruck awe. Awe that was compounded when the Saturn alarm was tripped but the biker love continued unabated.

The clutch went out in my truck last week. Finally. It took a damn long while. I knew something was wrong down in Mexico when the clutch would slip while driving in the sand. It only got worse and worse. Gear oil from the transmission had seeped through one of the seals in the bell housing, coating the friction plate, pressure plate, and flywheel. The oil started dripping from the bell housing onto the ground leaving ominous dark puddles shortly after getting back from Mexico. Instead of fixing it I drove it cross country to Alabama, down to Key West, and up to Oklahoma. It finally went while driving around on base, no more than a 10 minute push from the auto hobby shop here on base. Awesome, I love my truck. So I put the truck up on the vehicle lift, pulled the tranny out, took it to a transmission shop in town to have the seals replaced. Went home and ordered the new clutch kit off the internet. Assuming I get the clutch kit tomorrow I should have the whole job done this Saturday.

I guess the last update is that I bought a motorcycle this past Saturday. It is awesome. The roads here are perfect for cruising. Rode down to Oklahoma City this past Sunday to Bricktown which seemed like a pretty nice place. Here is a picture of the bike:

It is a Suzuki Marauder 1600. Until next time...