Rick's Weekly Chime-In

This whole blog thing is pretty cool, but I typically don't take the time to do it. My goal is once a week to log into this thing and give a recap from my perspective on the week. Here we go.

1. Worked a lot
2. Worked some more
3. Celebrated a friends retirement
4. Typed on the blog

That's it. Until next time......



Just kidding! :-)

Let's see, this week really was another week of 12-16 hour workdays for me. With a lot of our unit gone, the rest of us are really having to pick up the slack. I had my annual mission checkride (imagine a driver's test, only you're flying). This one was pretty non-standard in that I took it at night and as a Forward Air Controller (Misty.......Dad you should know what that is if you're actually reading the book I gave you). Of couse, Korea standard, the weather was crappy and I had to deal with all sorts of stuff that's just too hard to explain on a blog. Nevertheless, at almost 1AM on Wednesday morning Korea time, I had finished the checkride and had actually earned two commendable's on my performance. That's a first for getting those. Aside from that, I got to fly again on Thursday night and again found myself in unfamiliar territory. Chik-Do island is a small bombing range out in the west sea. It's simply two small islands that we drop weapons on. Well, thre are several limitations to actually be able to drop ordinance out there. One of them is that there can be no boats within 3 miles of those things. The fishermen seem to have a problem avoiding this ring since about 80% of the time, we can't drop because of boats within the danger ring. Not on this past Thursday night! There were no boats, the weather was actually good enough to legally drop weapons, and no kidding, all the weapons on my jet actually came off as advertised! My 3 counterparts were not so lucky in that they had aircraft "issues" and were not able to get all their bombs and bullets of the jets. Whatever, I got mine so I was happy!!! Just kidding....but really. On Friday night, we went to Camp Humphrey's (a Army Aviation Camp about 8 miles south of Osan) and celebrated Chief Warrant Officer 4 Chris Delao's retirement ceremony. It was a wonderful time that lasted well into the early morning hours of Saturday. Yesterday, Rachel and I relaxed and then went to dinner and our friends, the Shemchuks. She made some awesome lasagna (not as good as Rachel's) and we had a nice time. After that, Rachel and I finally got to see Transformer's the movie at the base theatre. It was a bit of a let down, but still watching huge robots go mano-e-mano is always entertaining. Today, it was church and study day for Rachel and I. I'm finishing up my LAST master's class this week and Rachel is taking the formidible Korean driver's test tomm morning. Well, I've got to be up in like 5 hours, so I'll chime out for this week. I Love and Miss you all!!!!!

Love Rick