I realized I haven’t written much here lately. I screwed up my body clock, just after getting reset from two weeks in Asia, by working a midshift on Saturday night-Sunday morning. Dumb idea, but I needed the credit hours and now there’s a guy who owes me.
I used to work midshifts every other week. They’re not so bad for me when I’m on the “regular” ATC schedule, which goes roughly something like this:
Sun- off
Mon- 1600-2400
Tue- 1400-2200
Wed- 0800-1600
Thu- 0700-1500
Fri- 0600-1400 OR 0001-0800
Sat- off
That last day of your workweek, where you work Thursday until 2 or 3 pm and then go back in that evening at midnight (0001 Friday morning) and work until 8am, is the rough one.
For me, though, since I’m a night owl, if I’m working that “standard” ATC schedule (known as “the rattler”) I usually don’t get enough sleep on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. That means by the end of my shift on Thursday, I’m pretty tired… and I can go home and fall asleep in the afternoon.
So if I can snag 4 or 5 hours of sleep on Thursday afternoon, it’s good; I wake back up at 11pm, go in, work the mid, come home, and sleep another 4 or 6 hours. Then I’m up at noon or so on Friday and the weekend is in front of me.
Many, many controllers work that midshift EVERY week. I did it every other week when I worked mids, but there are enough people in my area that love mids (they apparently need less sleep or something) that I have had a “no-mid” line for several years now.
I much prefer the “no-mid” line. It’s just easier. So working a midshift, right smack in the middle of my weekend, was a pretty stupid thing to do. Oh well.
GG and I have been planning an engagement party. Where I’m from, people don’t have engagement parties, so I’m pretty unfamiliar with the concept. Apparently it’s a lot like a wedding reception where the bride and groom might have eloped, except that it’s not considered to be as formal. You get a hall, have drinks, have dinner, maybe have dancing. Okaaay… I don’t get it.
I mean, if you’re going to do all of that at a wedding reception, why do it again? Are we that happy that we’ve managed to get engaged? (The again, considering I’m 39 and this is only the second time I’ve been engaged, perhaps it is worth celebrating.)
All that said, for GG and I, it’ll be a fun party and it kind of makes sense. We haven’t set a date for the wedding yet, and we’re starting to lean pretty heavily in the direction of “we’re going on vacation to Fiji/Thailand/India/Japan/Korea/Somewhere Else and we’re going to get married on that vacation and turn it into a honeymoon and no, nobody is invited.”
GG’s already had the big wedding (she was married once before) and I don’t really mind NOT having it, so doing the whole big church thing (what church would take a Buddhist and a lapsed Mormon, anyway?) and spending about a bajillion dollars doesn’t really appeal to us.
Add to that the blended family considerations, the difficulty in pulling together friends from all over the nation (the world, actually, now that I think of it- GG’s biological mom is in Japan and GG has good friends in Korea, Australia, Ireland, and Japan) and suddenly the notion of skipping the big wedding reception makes a lot more sense.
So it’s looking like the engagement party is the big bash for as many friends as we can afford and can make it; the wedding itself is just me and her on a beach somewhere; and the wedding reception is likely just close family and a couple of friends, probably as a big dinner group at a nice local restaurant.
I can live with that.
What I can’t live with is the ridiculous amounts of money that you have to pay for a big party. Man, it shoudn’t be this hard! In Enumclaw, what a lot of us would do is someone rents the VFR hall (or the Danish Brotherhood hall if you had a bit fewer people) and someone else arranges to pick up a couple of kegs of beer from the Ski Inn Tavern or the Rainier or maybe, if you want the hoidy-toidy stuff, you get a keg of microbrew from the Mint. (If you sweet-talk the tavern, sometimes they’ll throw in a couple hundred plastic cups for you and save you the trip to the store.)
Then you get your aunties and cousins to bake up some casseroles and make some salads, maybe you hire the local barbecue guy to “cater” the event- or maybe you just do it yourself if you know a guy who has one of those big 55-gallon barrels cut in half and made into a barbecue- and finally you get your buddy who has the loudest stereo to bring it and set it up for some music.
And then you have your party, it costs a couple grand, people you don’t know hear about it and show up and listen to AC/DC and everyone does the Electric Slide line dance at least twice (even the grannies- they love that Electric Slide!) and that’s an Enumclaw wedding reception. Paper plates and plastic cutlery, a couple of garbage cans and people “bus” their own tables (pitch their plates), and you’re good to go.
I’m definitely not in Enumclaw anymore. 
GG and I were going to rent the Seattle Parks’ Community Center in the International District. (That would have been fun for all my Enumclaw buds.) Thing about throwing your own party is that it’s a hell of a lot of work. Arranging a caterer, hiring some kids to set up and take down tables and help with serving, getting a banquet permit for the booze and hiring a bartender, getting liability insurance, you name it… lots of stuff to do.
Instead, she sweet-talked the Marriott where she works part-time into giving us a screaming deal on using their facilities. So we’re going to have a nice party where someone ELSE does all that work for us. Niiice.
Let’s see, beyond that… Hawks lost yesterday and just looked BAD. Mariners season is finally over, thank goodness, they were terrible.
The mosquito bites on my leg, that I got over a month ago in Vietnam, are finally fading away, but they still itch and you can see about three or four of them. They were infected, moderately bad, but all in all I figure I’m lucky I didn’t get anything worse from them. Learned my lesson- when going out/about over there, keep using plenty of REI’s Jungle Juice. And if I do get bit, don’t get a foot/leg massage where they vigorously rub your legs up and down, because that’s what spread the venom all around and made the infection so nasty.
I’ve been writing some political stuff for my other blog (the one that people actually read), the FAA Follies. Each Friday I’ve been covering why people should vote for Obama instead of McCain. I’ll probably rant a bit more there and here as the election draws closer.
Hasta for now…