Northwest (mis)Adventure

Here's the photos from the trip.

I've been back a few weeks now. Mostly at work doing local radar class to prepare for training on radar. Worked local quite a few times now on my own. Finally got a busy session yesterday with my worst flow (RWY 7), kept everybody pried apart and safe, so that's good.

Can't wait to start radar training. It'll no doubt kick my butt but its such a challenge that I'm very excited about it. A friend of mine once said that earning your approach radar qualification is "the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life." I'm already beginning to see what they meant.

The Tower

Told you I wouldn't update again till this happened.

After a good week of working traffic for the most part on my own over on local control, my supervisor returned from vacation and gave me a checkride. I passed pretty easily and was immediately certified on local, thus making me a certified tower controller.

The next day, Labor Day, I had the checkride on TRACON Data, which secured enough positions in the facility to earn me my D2 promotion and pay raise.

Now I'm on an 8 day vacation and tomorrow morning, bright and early, I'll be hitting the road westbound. Plan is to drive highway 2 till Leavenworth and then head over to Seattle for a couple days. After Seattle head over to the peninsula, stop at Hurricane Ridge and Crescent Lake, and then start working my way down the coast. Once I get to Pacific City, OR I'll head inland to McMinnville and then up to Portland and back home along the Columbia River. Should be an interesting trip. I've got 7 days to waste time out there so I'll try to enjoy myself as best I can.

New Year

The usual lack of updating for the usual reasons.

Crazy last few months. Trained on Ground so much I started to burn out on the whole being a studious individual concept. Thankfully I got along rather well with my training team and managed to enjoy the entire process. In December I was recommended for certification and sometime in mid December I had my check ride and of course passed with flying colors.

I worked through the holidays nonstop, minus my usual days off, none of which actually fell on a holiday. This earned me a rather fat bonus on my latest paycheck. In fact somehow I've saved up more than I expected. I had planned on using the holiday bonus to jut get a new video card, which I did, maybe...not really sure if Amazon is lying about it being in stock or not. But I ended up making quite a bit extra on top of what I had planned and so I let myself get a new 5.1 speaker set up for my computer (not that it was very expensive). I guess now I can start seriously looking at cabinets for my future new TV.

For now I'm just burning time on ground working as coverage until my Local Control class starts on January 25th. That'll be 2 weeks of a "normal" work schedule, Mon-Fri, 0700-1500. It will be agonizing to say the least. I've grown quite fond of the odd schedules we work here, although now it seems I'm perpetually on a third swing shift (1400-2200). This kind of nullifies the good of moving to my new Monday/Tuesday days off as I can't even take advantage of Friday nights. Oh well.

Now to get myself back into studious, hardworking mode for Local training. I'm pretty confident this will be my hardest position, although radar may surprise me later.

Maybe I'll update this again when I get local, ha.