still here, sometimes.

I haven't updated this thing since the end of October. And here it is MARCH. I am really bad at this crap.

All that's really happened between October and now is an endless cycle of going to work, coming home, back to work, back home. over and over and over. Oh, and I adopted my foster dog! After bringing him to OKC with me (and chasing him all over the apartment complex a couple times) I got kinda attached. So did Ken. So, now I have two hounds.  ARoooooO!

 Ken's in front, Dylan is in back.

Also I spent two months (and $1300) doing physical therapy for my neck/back which I've had a problem with since I fell down a tiny hill snowboarding like 6 years ago. It worked, for a minute. But now I'm right back to the pain level I was before I started. Not good. What a waste of time and money.

Went to Providence/Cape Cod area in January. It was the first time I'd ever been to Rhode Island! And the first time I'd been near Cape Cod since I was like 6. It was very cold, as is to be expected in January. It was also the first time I'd flown since before I'd started this job. I was picking everything apart from my window seat, trying to figure out what kinda climbs/descents and vectors we were being given. Looking for converging aircraft. Nerdy!

We had some severe weather here last night. An EF1 tornado about an hour north of here, an EF2 tornado an hour south and lots of flooding all around the city. A couple days ago it was 70. A couple weeks before that we had an ice storm. Midwest weather is rarely boring.

Let me preface the rest of this post with this: It'll make a hell of a lot more sense if you familiarize yourself with the contents of this post.

When I last left you, I was waiting oh so patiently for my local class here so I could start training in the TRACON. That's Terminal Radar Approach CONtrol, if you didn't know that already. Oh. So. Patiently.  When the three of us were in Oklahoma for the FAA class, we were on the schedule for a class a few weeks after we got back, around the end of September 2010.  Which was perfect! Considering we'd been strung along during our tower training an extra 6 months because they treated the three of us as one person. If one of us messed something up, we'd all get extra weeks of training tacked on. Never mind that we only got like an hour or 2 of training per week, since we were all fighting for scarce time that had good traffic.

Then a few days after we returned from the shimmering city of OKC, we were all inexplicably off the training schedule and back on the floor schedule. Only to find out the next day they'd booted us out of class for "STARS refresher training". MMMmmmhmm. Word travels kinda fast in a 50 person facility, and I soon caught wind (and passed it on to my 2 cohorts) that the son of the guy who runs the training department had gotten a class in place of ours. STARS refresher training my ass. So we all just shut our mouths and filed away that little nugget for a later date.

Days... weeks pass. Still no word on our class. We ask around and get told the same STARS refresher training line. Okay, well, if you're not gonna have a class for us because of that, then at least START THE FRIGGIN CLASS! come on now. We're already the laughing stock of the facility due to the 1039329832 extra hours it took us to certify in the tower. Now we're the laughing stock of the facility because we're getting screwed by the training department. People start a pool when our class is ACTUALLY gonna start. Awesome.

So, skip ahead a few months. We finally get this class. FOUR months after we returned from RTF in OKC. 6+ months after we certified in the tower. Meanwhile, pretty much everyone else had certified in the tower, gone to OKC within a month, come back, gotten a local TRACON training class within a month and started training.  Here we were, held back in the tower 6 months, then another 6 month delay for our stupid class.  A year behind everyone else, pretty much. The other girl and I never stopped complaining about it to anyone who would listen. The guy with us didn't really care, he doesn't talk ever, so it was up to us lady folk to be pains in the ass. Finally we got the attention of the ex-NATCA FacRep. The current FacRep didn't seem very interested in our grievance, but the former one was ALL over it. He wrote up all sorts of stuff to help us, and with that, I have my first grievance. Yee haw.

So we started class in the middle of January. (after it got moved back another 2 days at the last minute due to a "scheduling conflict". AKA the training department taking a mini-vacation to Florida to golf.) And boy, were we fired up. Finally we were getting this shit OVER with!! Or so we thought. The first week of class was freaking SELF STUDY.  One day we sat in the classroom with the door closed until after NOON and no one came in to check to see if we'd even showed up. So, basically we waited 4 months to sit here and play scrabble on our phones. cause let's face it, it took us about a day to memorize what we needed to, but they wouldn't let us take the test early, so we just sat there for 2 days and didn't do anything til they let us take the test. Can you say waste of time and resources?! We were freakin PISSED. Even more so than before. So we got a meeting with the AATM and OM. they were "shocked". Yeah, you should be. You've got these contractors who are retired ATCs, getting ATC retirement + $50-70k/year from this "job" where they stick us in a classroom and don't teach us shit. We get a whole day of them reading out loud from the 7110.65.  I can read that myself, thanks. Being able to read was one of the requirements for getting this job, I think I can handle it.

Okay, so enough complaining about that. It's over and done with and I'm training in the TRACON now. I'm actually not as horrible at it as I was in the sims. My new trainer is very impressed with me. He says I might be a natural. *Insert sound of ego inflating here*  He hasn't trained anyone in years due to a spat with a former OM here, something about bad phraseology. It's a shame, cause he's a very good trainer. He writes up page long training reports, but instead of the scathing ones I used to get from my old trainer ripping me to shreds for telling someone to turn left off the runway instead of right (come on, like no one has ever done that in the history of air traffic control), they're incredibly positive, pointing out what I did right, in addition to my mistakes. It's so much easier to learn when you don't feel like the person training you thinks you're a piece of shit. And when he says, "Oh, you did that really well! good job!" instead of picking me apart for little things like not knowing the frequency to the VOT (which I'm still pretty sure does not even exist at the airport anymore).  I no longer dread having to train. It's such a good feeling.

In other work-ish news, the Indianapolis Zoo got a new dolphin Sunday. How do I know this? Because they flew it in in a DC93. How else would you get a dolphin to a place that's more than 1000 miles from any ocean?! Duh! ;)