SO IT STARTS! Day Zero

So I thought I'd start keeping a little journal of these grand glory days in API. I don't want to call API flight school yet because of the "Pre-flight Indoctrination" part of the acronym. It's just ground school to me. So here's to graduating "ground school".

DAY 0:
I anticipated the inspection to be a lot rougher than it was, but my roommate told me that they just did a quick look up and down, a right step and moved on to the next. But you know, you can never be too sure which inspector you'll end with that morning. I actually forgot what time they told us to meet at the F-18 by the NASC building, Erin told me wrong, so I showed up 10 til 7, so I showed up right after the Marines who were already there, smoking and joking.

Our class leader was a LTJG who admitted right after the bat that he forgot the commands used for an inspection. Now, I know there must have been a reason why we practiced Open Ranks so much during Pro Lab. The Marines helped him out with the easy close order drill and once one of the marines did all of the commands to "demonstrate", our class leader decided to leave us there to save him the trouble. Go figure.

Now you'd think that on the first day you'd want to make an awesome impression with your uniform. The one time I needed my uniform to look good, I was worrying about the iron stain I got on it yesterday from ironing it. Figures I'm down to my last pair of khakis (the others died after I washed them both with an ink pen in the pocket) but lucky for me, the inspectors (2 LTs) saw my awesome shoes and apparently, that's all they saw. A quick "good shoes" and then I was home free.

Next we went and had our physiology brief (8 hours of sleep, don't drink too much alcohol before a test, no self-medication, and apparently no dietary supplements and teas with ginseng--I've got stuff to throw out now), TRICARE enrollment, "good on you for picking aviation, its not going to be easy", and at the gym, a little Water Survival speech from PO Trombley. It was weird because I had worked there since September and Trombley made a comment when he was scanning the room ("Awww, they let you go?") calling me out and leaving lots of the students with confused looks on their faces. Well, we'll see how he does, we're his first class. The guinea pigs.

Monday will be our PRT (this one counts) then our first aerodynamics classes. I can't wait. Bring it on, I'm tired of not having to plan my day out! Until then, I've got this one weekend to relax, so I'm headed to florabama and possibly the beach tomorrow... til Monday, y'all.