The Pains of Moving

...getting my own internet tomorrow night. Better and more frequent posts to follow. In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out what to do with all the boxes and packing paper that are slowly taking over my apartment as I go through and unpack everything. Seriously, they wrapped up some of the stupidest stuff, and then quadruple wrapped other stuff. If I had a fireplace, I'd be set on starter paper for the next year. Nothing new at work, just more in-processing stuff and a dental appointment, trying to get my work email account set up.

Back to School, Back to School

It's only day one, but man am I glad I switched career fields! I haven't been this excited and motivated about work since I first got commissioned. Today was mostly in-processing stuff, entailing driving around base to various offices and filling out a bunch of paperwork. I'm sure Monday will be the same, plus a dental appointment on top of it all. But just getting here and seeing everything, and finding out my class dates, makes it feel much more real than a set of orders and a "hey, we'll see you when you get here!" feeling. Turns out, by the way, that I won't be here at Randolph for as long as I thought. More like half as long. So it's kind of hard to decide if i really want to unpack everything and get settled if I'm just going to end up moving in a few months anyways. Another thing I found out today is that I should be finding out my follow on assignment fairly quickly, like mid-May, instead of all the way at the end of my training. It's all becoming clearer as to what's going to happen to me.
What has my brain completely out-of-whack, however, is that all that's expected of me between now and when I start my classes is to in-process, study what I can, and help out with odd jobs when they come up. Going from leading a flight of 70+ people, 50+ emails a day, meetings, taskers, deployments, etc., to basically only being expected to show up to work on time and not get into trouble is mind boggling to me. And the icing on the cake is that my hours are now 0800-1500, instead of 0700ish-1700ish. I'm not going to know what to do with myself these next few weeks with all this free time!
It's also very weird for me to be considered a "flyer" now. Going through in-processing and claiming active flyer status, getting my new patches for my flight suit, and meeting my new squadron commander who has flown fighters throughout his career. It's all very surreal to me. I'm sure I'll feel kind of dirty and wrong when I get my flight suits and gear on Tuesday. Coming from a maintenance background, these are the people I would butt heads with on a weekly basis about aircraft availability and scheduling. Now I'm one of them. I've crossed over to the dark side!

Moving Day

Today I'm supposed to be moving into my new apartment. Fortunately, I was able to find a place a couple of months ago and set everything up to make it really easy once I got down here. Now I'm just sitting around waiting for the movers to show up and deliver my household goods. They told me they would "squeeze me in" sometime between noon and 5. Awesome...so, I'll just sit around and wait for them to show up during that 5 hour span. Not a whole lot else other than that. In hindsight, driving 15 hours through the night to get here probably wasn't the smartest idea. Note taken. Reporting to work tomorrow morning!

On a side note, I didn't really have an official sponsor for my move down here. The squadron gave out enough information when I first found out I was going be coming here that I didn't really feel the need to have one. I know where to report to tomorrow morning, in what uniform, don't need to buy a house, don't have a family in-tow, familiar with the area, and I took care of everything else on my own. Hopefully there aren't any surprises!

And the Journey Begins!

Tonight I'm making the drive down to San Antonio to start this new adventure of becoming an RPA pilot. It still hasn't really sunk in yet that I'm not only leaving Omaha, but that I'm switching to an entirely new career field. I guess it's the combination of how I got into all of this and the lack of knowing exactly what's going to happen from here on out that makes it a hard concept to grasp. It feels more like a TDY than a PCS. But I'm sure it'll hit me after I get there, sign my new apartment lease, and I'm sitting there by myself with nothing to do but unpack and no one to really hang out with. But, it's not like I haven't been in that position before, and at least I'm moving somewhere that's actually closer to friends and family.
On a more technical note, I'm three days out from my RNLTD to my new squadron and I still have no idea what's going to happen when I get there. I think it's safe to assume that my first week or so will be filled with in-processing stuff. After that, though, no clue. I was originally scheduled for a class (IFS, for those in the know) starting at the beginning of January, but that has since vanished of my projected training in the Assignment Management System and I am currently not scheduled for any classes. So, along with that, I can't exactly start making plans for the holidays since I'm in the middle of a PCS with nobody to submit my leave to. I guess I'll just figure it out when I in-process. Right now, I have to get ready for the 15-hour drive I have ahead of me tonight. yee-haw!

New Blog (sort of)

I'm working on revamping this blog to transition it from my deployment blog into a blog about my new job and all the training I'll go through. Stand-by. I'm also fixing to make a big cross-country move as well, so things are sort of busy at the moment.