The Swing of Things

After a couple of days, I've pretty much got my job down. It's actually very simple. Mind-numbingly-simple. All we do here is pretty much take-offs and landings. I'll either start up the airplane, take off and hand it over to the people back home; or I will take it back from them and land it. And since I work the same shift every day, I pretty much always do the exact same landing and/or takeoff. It's kind of an anti-climax. Here I am out in Iraq, I start up an airplane (albeit I'm not actually in it), take off, and then call it a day. It's kinda frustrating to say the least.

So I have focused more on the things I do that aren't work. In the hour or so in between each launch or landing, I either read a book (I've already finished one, and am halfway through the second) or play my guitar (I brought mine into the alert trailer that we have right next to the squadron). After work I go to the hospital to volunteer for a few hours. Then I go to the gym. They have this incentive program at the gym: if you do 5,000 or 10,000 push-ups or sit-ups, you get a free shirt. So I figured that would be a good goal to try to achieve. In addition to my normal workout, I always do 100 pushups and 200 situps. At this rate, I will get the 10,000 T-shirt for both. After the gym I go to lunch, and then back to my room to study for my math class that I am taking online. Then I shower and go to sleep at about 3pm in order to get 8 hours of sleep and wake up at 11pm. It's kinda nice to give myself a schedule like that, because it prevents me from ending up sitting in my room doing nothing. But at the same time, it's kinda like groundhogs day: every day is exactly the same.

Supposedly the work schedule is going to change around a bit soon, so I might have to totally redo my whole routine. So we'll see how that goes. Other than that, there's not much else going on. I imagine that other people deployed here have more exciting things to talk about, but for us, the exciting stuff happens back home (if you can really even call that exciting).