Nathan's update

Not having written anything in a long long time, I decided that it was time I contributed to our blog. There have been a number of new and exciting things that have happened.

You may or may not have known that I've been working night CQ (essentially it's security) for the past two months. This has kept my life very, very boring. But October 29th (my class start date) has FINALLY come, and I started my class today. So Tuesday was my last day working CQ. In order to adjust to the upcoming daytime schedule, I just stayed up Wednesday morning until about 9pm Wednesday night. That was difficult, but made the transition fairly simple.

Class today was exciting. There are 23 students taking the course with me, and we're split up into 4 sections (classes). It's about half navy and half airforce. I was (as expected because I'm old) chosen to be section leader, so we'll see how that goes.

The day mostly consisted of initial briefings and meeting the teachers, dean, department chair, military language instructors, and other staff. Oh, but there was a suprise! Up until today I was under the impression that I was going to learn Modern Standard Arabic. That is aparently not the case. Our class will be the second ever class dedicated exclusively to Iraqi dialect. I know what most of you are thinking. "Wait, I knew you were learning Iraqi when you said Arabic. Don't they speak Arabic in Iraq?" Yes, but a dialect that's very different than MSA. Different enough (aparently) to make a whole class out of it. I've got mixed feelings on learning Iraqi instead of MSA, but mostly I'm just excited. Our entire staff is from Iraq, and most of them very recently.

This next Monday will be a very exciting day for me. I was selected, along with about 100 other 1A8's (airborne linguists) to attend a special event down at Travis Airforce Base. They're flying a Rivet Joint aircraft (wikipedia it) over from Nebraska for us to view, tour, and ask about. The crew will be there to answer whatever, and we can actually see what we'll be doing upon graduation from training. The staff here puts this event together once a year or so as a motivational tool. They say it gets students excited about their job. Well I tell you, I'm certainly excited about going!

Off the subject of the military for my last little bit of news. This past Monday I started a Bujinkan (wikipedia it, it is VERY cool). I've been wanting to find some sort of regular activity to get my mind off my class once or twice a week, and after talking to Sergeant Kramer (worked with me in CQ) about it, Bujinkan sounded like something I'd enjoy. I observed the class on Monday as per the requirements, and I'm going to go in to class 45 minutes early tomorrow to actually have my introductory class. Again let me encourage you to look it up on the internet.

Anyway, that's prettymuch my life right now. I'm glad to finally have one again, after just waiting around for 2 months.