It’s been so long since I posted here that I feel like I should do the Internet equivalent of shaking out the rugs and dusting the furniture.  (I’ll avoid the vacuum metaphor lest it reinforce how badly I have sucked at being a regular MilSpouseBlogger.)  So, uh… hello.  Nice to type at you again.  Hope you had a nice Halloween, Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, Sukkot, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, and any other holiday that has passed since I managed to throw up an entry here in Nth-land.  Ours were fairly nice, on the whole.  We even built our own sukkah for the first time this year, as this was the first year we were in town to enjoy having our own yard in which to build the temporary hut for the Feast of Booths.  Our actual “dwelling” in the sukkah for meals was severely curtailed by the bumper crop of mosquitoes; we discovered that being a festive meal is much less joyful than eating a festive meal.  Still, we felt pretty accomplished just for building and decorating the structure, and we did manage to partake of a few tasty beverages within before getting too chewed on by bugs.

On the Navy side of the coin, things are still slo-o-ow on this journey to the first fleet squadron, wherever that might end up being.  However, there is evidence that the pace will be picking up considerably with the arrival of 2010, in the form of a mad dash to get my husband prepared for carrier qualification sometime in March.  Keep in mind that we arrived here in early May… of 2008.  That puts us at nearly a year and a half of being told that things are going to get moving any week now, so stay ready to pick up and move at any time.  On paper it looks like we’ve had a lot of free time, but the fact that my husband has still had to check the flight schedule every evening on the off chance that he might have an event the next day has put a damper on any number of things we might have liked to accomplish.  There are several home improvement projects that we put off starting lest we have to drop them in the middle when the flight training finally picked up.  We could each be well on our way to completing a graduate program.  I could have put more serious effort into looking for a job if I’d known to laugh in the face of the predicted six-month FRS timeframe.  Hell, we could have gotten me knocked up as soon as we moved into our house, experienced the whole pregnancy together, and spent the first seven months of our child’s life with hardly anything to distract our focus from the nugget — er, baby.

On second thought, scratch that last one.  Murphy’s Law would have ensured that the moment we saw the little plus sign on the pregnancy test, my husband would have been rocketed through the syllabus at record speed, sent immediately on his first det, and left me to move to California by myself just before giving birth.  I’m glad we opted for cats instead.

Don’t get me wrong — I love having my husband around so much on a day-to-day basis, but I think we’re both going to be relieved when he is finally able to dive into flying again.  There is very little sadder than a Naval Aviator who is not flying, and I can tell it’s getting to him.  It’s more than mere lack of flight time, though.  He has many friends from his graduating class at the Naval Academy (not in aviation, obviously) who have already completed their first sea tours and several deployments.  My husband wants to get to the point where he is truly serving rather than only training to do so.  I’m proud of him for it, and I understand, but I do feel the need to point out that there is little need to worry that the Navy won’t get its fair return (and then some) on the investment.  I am certain we’ll be looking back wistfully on this relative freedom soon enough, but we ought not let ourselves forget that too much “free time” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.