Here's a new one, even for me. I should be cleaning my room, sorting out clothes, and packing for my flight to Brisbane this afternoon. However, my chosen mode of procrastination is hunting down cheap flights to Melbourne!
I'm mildly concerned at making the check-in time for Tiger flights, which I'm assuming is saying two hours prior to flying in the instance of international as opposed to domestic flights. Otherwise my genius plan of scooting out of early shift and jumping onto a plane probably won't work out so well... it helps if they're willing to let you onto the plane. Anyway, if boot was good for anything, it has taught me a sense of urgency and also how to get changed from one uniform to another within six to eight minutes. I hope I can make it.
This could be one of many semi-impulse flight purchases. I say semi, because there was some minor consultation with the voices inside and outside of my head, and I did have to sleep on the decision (because I didn't have my credit card on hand to buy straight away!) so there was some thought involved. I'll see how I go with Tiger, seeing as I
haven't flown them before, and it seems like their rates are as competitive as Jetstar's despite departing the airport at odd times of day.
So if this random foray into Melbourne at the end of the month doesn't work, I know I'll definitely be back in town on the weekend of 13 June. I even have the travel requisition and pile of cab charges to prove it! Turns out that my Next of Kin travel did get approved, even though I didn't hear anything about it directly from my Sergeant or Flight Sergeant - the first I knew of it was getting an email from Customer Service saying that there was a Travel Order ready for me to pick up.
Hooray for adequate communication channels.
I haven't been in any Hornets yet, but I've come to the realisation that there's probably going to be a heck of a lot of flying around in my life for the next few years. Since I've been enlisted (last July) I've been on eight flights, including international to Thailand. In the next month (including today), I'll be taking five more flights. Shame that not all of these flights will be clocking up frequent flyer points!
I think I'll try to ground myself a little more after I get back from NoK travel. The sooner I settle in here, the sooner I can con other people into grabbing a cheap flight up to come and see me! It's hard to resist a $40 fare though, considering I usually have to spend at least that much in order to get into town, let alone out.
It's been a good but tough six weeks so far. I can remember getting to this point in recruits and feeling good about getting through so much without dropping out or completely losing my marbles. Week six was all about getting through field exercise Tarakan Dawn, more commonly known as Murray Fridge, five days of learning, fighting, and freezing our collective nads off. But it seemed like the home run after that point, seeing as exercise Tommy Irvine was only three days in comparison.
My room feels like a good place to be - now that I've set myself up with computer, Nintendo, TV/DVD, plenty of books, and a subscription to Quickflix which means I have movies and TV shows on tap (although with a base library full of war porn and Ramsay on the telly three nights a week, I've got it pretty sweet). I think I've got enough going on that I can amuse myself for as long as it takes to save up for transport, a
house, and some furniture essentials.
Work is going pretty well - it hasn't been too extreme a learning curve, and I'll be moving to the Sergeant's Mess next month, a month earlier than I expected to be escaping the Airmen's. Not that there's anything wrong with this Mess in particular, I've just found it annoying to have to work in it for most of the days of the week, and then come back to it for all my other meals in my time off.
Field training was quite interesting, considering I had no real idea how Gucci some of the Air Force equipment was, compared to the stuff we were hauling around at Latchford. I'm not sure if the Army just doesn't have the budget, or they've worked out somehow that they can afford to get grunts to move around all the equipment with sheer brute strength instead of using forklifts and containers like we do. I couldn't
believe how easy we had it - all we had to do was set up camouflage nets and a few tents, lay some tarps down... while a handy supplier used a forklift to drop containers with stovetop/oven, deep fryers, tables, and other essentials into place.
Don't get me wrong, there was still some dirty work left to do with just the set-up of the field kitchen. And we didn't have our time sucked away over the two days by having to cook anything. We still got our share of dust, of hurry up and wait, of being stuffed around by people who didn't know what they were doing. But considering what we had to accomplish amongst a bunch of people who didn't really know what they were doing (it was a training exercise after all), we managed to do it within two days.
There's a big RAAF exercise coming up called Pitch Black (I wonder why our training exercises get cooler names than the real ones, such as Operation Popewatch), in June. I doubt I'll be involved in it because I'm too new here, and knowing my luck, my leave is probably going to happen smack bang in the middle of it. But I'm actually looking forward to going bush with RAAFies and cooking the real deal. It was really tough going for me out at Latchford because I was quite out of my comfort zone, but the more I see and help make things happen in a field kitchen environment, it doesn't seem too far removed from working in a proper kitchen.
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