...is where you hang your hat

Well, we're buying a house and here it is. I'm sure we'll post more pictures later. Can you believe it?(!) We're scheduled to close on 13 October. We were very blessed to find a lot of house for our price range. It's in a new community so it should appreciate rapidly. Ethan will be going to a new kindergarten:( However, we checked it out of course and it's great. He will do fine but we will miss his current teacher.

We're going to be home owners!!!

Golf at Barskdale AFB

With Taylor at PreSchool, Ethan at Kindergarten and me being the opposite of busy Jen and I were able to sneak away to the golf course. It was fun. Jen was my caddy and professional cart driver.

Ethan Art

Ethan made a book about himself at school. I thought I'd post a few of his masterpieces. The first one, from left to right, is Ethan, Taylor, Mom and Dad. The little four legged creature above Mom is Abe, our dog.



The next one is a depiction of his two favorite meals, pizza and chicken and broccoli casserole.



The last one is what he likes to do at school, yell for his friend Jada.

Storied Planes

P-38 LightningRC-135 Rivet Joint

I sent a letter to Lynn recently to thank her and Jim for all their hard work during the family reunion. In it, I included two stories that I failed to share with everyone else. I want to make sure that I relay them now.

Grandpa shared a neat story with me and I wanted to make sure I wrote it down. During the war he refueled P-38’s. He always wanted to get a ride in one. Even though it wasn’t an “approved” practice the pilots would sometimes take maintainers up on sorties. One pilot agreed to take Grandpa up with him and a time was agreed upon for the following day. Well, the time to meet came and went and Grandpa could not find his pilot friend on the flight line. He went looking for him and discovered that the pilot had to leave on the sortie without Grandpa, and it was the last one he would ever take as he was shot down. Grandpa confided in me that he felt he was protected that day. Now, take a moment and reflect on all the smiling faces at the reunion. Indeed he was protected that day.

I know that you prayed for me while I was deployed and I truly felt the blessings. One sortie in particular we were taking a pre-assigned route into Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. This route took us over some air refueling (AR) tracks that weren’t supposed to even be active (in use) that day. The weather was crap and visibility was less than a mile at our assigned altitude. I felt the need to adjust our route in such a way that it would take us around the AR tracks. I didn’t feel it was a prompting at the time. I saw that it wouldn’t affect our mission objective and I just wanted to change the route. The pilot agreed and shortly after we were clear of the AR tracks we got an advisory call from the Controlling agency informing us that those tracks were indeed active and due to poor weather they were in use at our altitude. I immediately felt the spirit bear witness that I had been prompted to alter our route of flight. Otherwise, if we had come beak to beak with a somebody there would have been precious little time to react due to the poor visibility. Thank you again for your prayers, I was truly being watched over.

The Family

We're all unpacked and getting to know the Shreveport area. Ethan's first day of school, and Taylor's first day of pre-school, have come and gone. I'll post the pics later. They're both doing very well and they're the cutest kids anyone could ever ask for. I start the B-52 course on 3 Oct. Until then, my workload is relatively light and I've been able to spend a lot of time with my family and it's been great! Even after I start, though, the hours won't be anything like pilot training. Thank goodness! This picture was taken at a recent ward activity; I can't believe how fast the kids are growing up. The other day I said to Taylor, "Boy you're a big girl!" She just said, "Yep, I'm huge. I'm huger than Texas!" The girl's got confidence. What a great family I have. Words will not express how much they mean to me. I love my sweet wife and fantastic kids.