Christmas!

Is it really Christmas? It sure doesn't seem like it. 60 degrees outside without a cloud. There is nothing out there that reminds us of what we are used to. The hills with tons of Christmas lights, green trees and family and friends.

We spent the afternoon, early evening hours with the Edelhauser's. Kurt is another controller that is going to the Seattle Center with us. We had a great time. We were very happy to have a great time with a quality family. A few fun games of Scrabble were had. We won't talk about who won both (me) games. We had to cut the third game a bit short as someone's wife, and someone's cousin came to town. Alyssa came to town bearing gifts. Oh, and I love almond roca. So good.

We have been doing alright in class. We just finished a really hard 2 weeks. This is why I haven't been blogging. The past two weeks were pretty demoralizing to some extent. We were doing non-radar stuff. Basically, it's kind of the way they used to do it before radar stuff. Still, some places use this form of controlling. Example, parts of the Rockies are areas that radars just can't reach. People controlling those areas have to use strips to simulate where planes should be. I don't think that I'd like to do that forever, however it was a very interesting and complicated thing to learn. One guy in our class is going to be in the non-radar sector at the Denver Center. Let's just say that he hears about it everyday from someone in our class how bad it sucks.

Monday, we passed our second of three pass/fail tests. Our next and final one is going to be the toughest. In the next month and a half, we will be learning stuff that will lead to our final "PV", performance verification. Essentially, a person from the region comes down here and watches us and decides if we get to continue to the facility. A bit intense? I think so. It's about that time to put it into overdrive and crack skulls. On average, 95% of people do pass the final pv. One class last week had a guy not pass the pv and the retake of the pv. Guess what facility he was going to? Seattle. The other class that pv'd last week had 3 failures. I'm determined to not let it happen to me. I spent the whole day today not doing much. The next three days, I'm going to spend doing atleast 4 hours of studying. Nobody else in the class is going to do that. Why? Every single person in the class, with the exception of the 4 Seattle trainees, went home for Christmas.

Alright, I think I'm going to bed soon. Thanks again for reading. I love you all. I'm finding out more and more that people are actually reading this. Nobody ever comments, so I don't know what to say. I'm glad that I know who some of the people are so that I can censor accordingly. I don't want to offend anyone with my language. I think I have done pretty respectably so far.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

Jeff

Yet another update.

Okay, things have been pretty nuts. I'm struggling with things pretty bad. I mean, things make sense, I just can't apply them quite as fast as I'd like to. We are running control problems using on strips. You get about 15 minutes to preplan everything that you can and then the clock starts running. There are a few people that are just rockin', then there is me. Hahaha. It seems like you have to rember 3500 things. Sometimes I get confused and rattled. Then, I get all flustered and stuff. Then it just snowballs. I guess there have been worse, I just don't believe it.

Today we finally talked to someone from the facility. He wasn't really a manager that could answer too many questions but he did his best. We also found out that it looks like we are going to get the day off after Christmas. I suppose that's a good thing. However, I can't really afford to get home. Since we decided to get off the central credit card thing for our apartment, I have been kind of behind on the money situation. We will get paid the same since it will be considered a holiday, so that's good. I just want to be in training if I'm already going to be down here. Who knows? Maybe a 4 day weekend will be a good release.

Well, I don't know if anybody really reads this. Thanks if you have or are just reading for the first time. I'm going to try and keep posting regularly. Just be patient with me. Gracias...