Irritable

I've been meaning to blog for several weeks, but I've been bogged down with school and just feeling irritable with humanity in general.

Way back in October I brought up the idea of an info sheet for spouses about what to do in the event of an airline emergency. The idea was well received by the union committee. I gathered questions from other wives, offered my assistance in compiling a document and waited patiently. I FINALLY heard something back and got to see the short document that they developed. What I saw was still in the rough stages, showing edits, but was a good start. It said to check the website for more detailed information, but, of course, I couldn't find anything posted. And although I am happy to have contributed to this project for the good of all pilot spouses, I will still be annoyed if they fail to give me credit for the idea and questions. Especially if the committee gets some kind of overall union recognition for the project.

We went to Wild Adventures theme park last weekend. It was hot as blazes there but we had a good time. Thank goodness A can handle G-forces well, because I couldn't stomach most of the rides that Kidzilla wanted to go on. Boy does that make me feel old. The incredible mass of south Georgia humanity walking around gave us no end to our conversations. I've never seen so many overweight people crammed, sausage like, into unflattering clothing or barely covered in string bikinis. The girls from the Baptist church who were have a teen day at the park had obviously not attended the Sunday School session on modesty. There were also several "Pretty Fly For a White Guy" punks there mouthing off.

I'm managing three classes during the super intense summer semester. I've become accustomed to teachers using PowerPoint presentations and putting the slides online ahead of time. This semester, none of my teachers use them and I'm actually feeling not right about that. It didn't take me long to get dependent on them and forget how to take notes for myself. Even worse is the sheer number of people who spend their time in class texting or on facebook. This is the first semester I have really seen people do this; before I thought it was ridiculous that teachers even had to put NOT to do it in the syllabus. These people are blatant about it! I hear that undergrad classes are even worse about it. Another reason not to go into academia.

After an unseasonably cold winter, we are having an unseasonably hot spring. It's already well into the 90's here. A feels compelled to give me hourly temperature updates, when really the rating of "damn hot out" would be fine. Here's hoping we have a seasonable summer because otherwise I am going to be one miserable girl.

The drama of the student mama

Spring term is finished and I am in my one glorious week off before summer session starts. It was a hectic end to the semester, with a big paper due and then other assignments due right after that. And most of my time was sucked up trying to get all the hours finished up for my internship. I finished up the semester with 433 internship hours and A's in both of my classes. Out of the available 100 points in each class, I missed a total combined 6 points. As a trade off through, I missed all of Kidzilla's cub scout meetings and only made it to 2 out of 8 of his baseball games. Luckily A has been there for him.

The end of this semester has been bittersweet. While I am glad to be done with classes, the end of the term means that several friends are leaving soon. It seems like most of my friends from our housing area will be gone by the end of the summer. The Estonians and Hungarians left in mid April, the Moroccan/Indian couple will head out in July, the Mexican family will return home in August. We did meet a dad with a daughter Kidzilla's age at the laundry room yesterday; they just moved in, but he's got split custody so we may not see them much. Hopefully we'll get a new influx of kids in the fall. I also have to say goodbye to friends I've made in classes that are graduating or are taking another path for the rest of our time in school.

I've got 8 weeks of summer school coming up, which means that all my classes are going to be at double the speed of normal. I have night classes 4 times a week which means I will continue to miss most of Kidzilla's activities. A will be providing childcare and hopefully will be home and not be called to training in the middle of my semester. At this point, we have no back up plan.

Somehow we missed that window of spring where it was just the right temp. The house went from too cold all the time to AC can't possibly keep up. Coming home feels like walking into a sauna. I guess that's what you get when all your windows are on one side of your apt and ventilation requires highly complicated geometric calculations to determine optimal fan placement for airflow. Sleeping at night is impossible without the fan blowing directly on us.

We are still working on collecting paperwork to submit to the FAA and getting through all those hoops. It's not nearly the trouble we had getting everything figured out at the beginning, which is nice. I've purposely stayed out of the loop of the Cal-United merger (UniCal?) although Dad and A have talked about it. It seems exciting for them because it's bringing together the two different companies they are associated with. I hope that soon I can get back to the original intent of this blog- to talk about how airline life effects daily family life instead of just rambling about myself all the time.

Things are going well for us too and there are some real bright spots in our future.