Take 5

The past week and a half have been extremely emotional in our household. There's been lots of good and bad times. On May 1st, there was a T38 crash here on base. The T38 is the plane that Mason will be flying in a few weeks. Both the pilots died. Mason knew the student pilot and friends of ours went to church with the instructor. Needless to say the incident was very sad, and a scary reality that you don't have to be in the Middle East or Asia for flying to be a dangerous career. There were memorial services on base last week, and funerals were held out of state this weekend. We spent a lot of time with Mason's class and flight just talking and being together. It's really great to have such a great support system with our military family. Even though we may not have been best friends with the two pilots who lost their lives it was still comforting to be around our friends knowing that we're all there for one another. The investigation is still going on as to what happened exactly. There was a similar crash 8 days prior at Columbus AFB, so both situations are being looked into. This may cause some delay in the training pipeline, but it might mean that Mason had some extra time off before he starts T38 training.

After the accident, flying was put on hold a few days which allowed Mason to go away for the weekend and take a break from studying. We headed down to Mineral Wells state park on Friday, the 2nd, and were lucky enough to get the last campsite for the night. Mineral Wells was about an hour south of Wichita Falls and about an hour west of Fort Worth, TX. We spent Friday night at the camp site and hiked around on Saturday. The camp grounds were more forested than others we'd been to and the trials were flatter and larger for horseback riding, but we enjoyed the early morning/mid day hike. We headed to Forth Worth Saturday night, and stayed at a really nice hotel. The highlights included eating at PF Changs. (yum!) Mason and I went to see Baby Mama, which ended up being pretty hilarious; and after our night at the movies we enjoyed some live music on our way back to the hotel. Sunday we enjoyed a deep dish pizza lunch at Uno's pizza, some Jamba Juice, and were on our stuffed ways home. The weather was PERFECT the entire weekend. Sunny and upper 70s/80s.

Sunday afternoon we got back into the "get-ready for Monday" activities: laundry, dishes, clean the animal cages, study, grade papers etc...but we enjoyed a relaxing evening at home. Monday I had a half day of school and Mason didn't fly due to the pilot's memorial services held on base. We celebrated our 1 year anniversary with lots of nap time and relaxation. We were both pretty amazed that it's already been one year that we've been married, but when we reflected that in the past year, we've gotten married, graduated college, started pilot training, teaching, and moved half way across the country...we essentially became grown-ups. (Not to mention we turned 23 which is really old!) For our anniversary, I got Mason a computer game called Call of Duty 4. He's played a minimum of 2 hours each day since getting it. I think he likes it :-)

My students at school are definitely showing signs of spring fever! There are three weeks of school left and I can tell many of them are already at the beach (or so we'd say in Evanston.) Mason got back to flying this week. He had a checkride (actually before the crash) and he earned an outstanding score. This means that there were almost no mistakes or downgrades. I was really proud of him, and I know that he was pleased too. That finished off his advanced contact (acrobatics) phase and so he's been flying only formation sorties since then. On Friday he got to have his first solo formation ride. In formation they fly 3 feet apart wing-tip to wing-tip. It's scary but I know he loves it. (Mason getting ready for flight)

When Mason graduates pilot training they will have a red carpet day. Essentially this means that the families of the students get to come on tours of the T38 training facilities, and see the "behind the scenes" of pilot training. Because Mason is about to finish with the tweets (T37s) his class held a T37 red carpet day for families. My Dad was able to come into town and we got some great tours with the other pilots and families. We got to go out to the radar tower, the RSU (which is basically out on the runway) see the planes, and the coolest part, I think, was getting to watch Mason pre-flight for his solo ride. It was a really awesome day and I'm glad I got to experience it. I have such a good feeling when I get to see Mason fly because I know that it's the only thing he'd really ever want to do in life.

The weekend brought more relaxation, with a little scare when we discovered late Saturday that our hamster had escaped from his cage. After about 45minutes tearing up the house, I finally found him in a closet where he had conveniently begun chewing up a cardboard box and burrowing himself into a new home. He's on lock down. We had a bbq at our place tonight and are not looking forward to Monday. At least Mason doesn't have to report in until 2:40 tomorrow. :-)


(Mason is the second plane in the formation)