Winning friends and standing watches

I received my first care package yesterday.  Janell and the girls sent me a big bag of conversation hearts and some random mini chocoloate bars.  And 5 Valentine's day cards!  It's awesome having so many Valentines.  I love to tell people I meet about my five ladies back home.  Opening a box full of cards in the ready room gave me a great opportunity to expound on the excellent qualities of all my girls.  And I had a captive audience as long as I was sharing my goodies.  The assistant squadron duty officer appreciated the chance to nibble on the conversation hearts.  The chocolates went especially fast.  I did manage to save about half of each bag by the time I went to bed last night (or should I say this morning).  The ASDO is an enlisted aircrewman who stands a 12 hour watch in the ready room, answering the phone and keeping our classified publications secure.  It's a pretty boring watch, except when things go wrong (as tends to be the case for many watches).

I didn't have any commitments this morning, so I was able to get my 8 hours, sleeping until about 11.  We had a brief this afternoon for an upcoming event, and then I worked on a stack of blue folders for a while.  Around 1600 I made my way down to the hangar bay for a run--and there was actually a treadmill available.  I only got about 20 minutes done before the humidity got to me.  I knocked it off so I could recover and get some dinner before my watch tonight at 1830.  At dinner, I learned that the CO wanted to get all the pilots and aircrew together in the ready room at 1820.  He announced that we had won two awards for the squadron for 2006--the Thatch Award for Naval Aviation excellence and the Isbell Award for Anti-Submarine Warfare excellence.  That was a good morale booster.  The most coveted end-of-the-year award, the Battle Efficiency, or Battle-E, Award went to HS-4, for the great work they did last year during their deployment.  HS-8 won the Battle-E in 2005 and we're hoping to get it back for 2007.

My FP watch went from 1830 until about midnight.  Again, a pretty slow watch tonight.  I shared more of my valentine candy with the guy sitting with me on the watch.  I'm making friends all over the place.  I think I'll try to get in bed before 3am tonight.  Of course, the squadron never stops working, so beginning my day at noon is no problem--it just means I get to spend more time with the guys who work nights.  Our maintenance shift changes at 0700 and 1900.  Tomorrow looks to be another paperwork-heavy day for me.  At least we get an extra hour of sleep tonight.  It's getting tough to keep track of our time difference from home now.  I think we'll be +1day, -8 hours.  Something like that.