In other news...

Mike has recently carrier qual'd in the F-18 Horney! Yay!! We are done with official training and have joined the "big" Navy. When Mike was practicing to go out to the carrier, his family and I were able to go out to the runway here and watch him "bounce" or do touch-and-go's. We were able to get pretty close as evidenced by the following pictures:

While Mike has landed on the carrier before, in the T-45, this time he had to do it more times....AND AT NIGHT!! Scary...I wouldn't want to do it. We were lucky enough to have a buddy in another squadron on the same carrier and he was able to get some pics of Mike:

(Mike sitting on the deck waiting to taxi and take off)

Also for neat...Mike was able to get some pics of him flying over the Grand Canyon...

Pretty neat!

Like I said, we are officially done in the training squadrons and have joined a fleet squadron. Mike finished the boat on August 31. Normally the pilots find out within a week of finishing the boat what squadron they are going to...not so with us. There was only Mike and one other guy that finished at the same time. When pilots find out what fleet squadron they are going to there is something called a patching, where the new squadrons cause some raucous at a bar location and put the new patches on the pilot, it's a many ceremony. Well we didn't get one of those...instead it took us almost three weeks of getting jerked around before Mike was told where he was going. We had a knock on our door Tuesday morning and there were about 12 guys in flight suits standing on our front door...quite a wake-up call. We are now proud members of VFA-146, the Blue Diamonds. Mike leaves next weekend for a month of training on the carrier and then deploys for 7-8 months in February.