The Scoop on Idaho

There are lots of questions regarding my new job and our upcoming move to Idaho. I'm going to attempt to answer as many of those questions as I can, all in one fell swoop. Here goes...

I first read about the job in the Air Jobs Digest, which is this periodical consisting of nothing but aviation-related classified ads. The ad was maybe 2 lines long, and didn't really say much, but I was e-mailing my resume to other places, so I figured I'd toss out a line and see if anyone bit. The next day I got a reply from the owner of the business in question, telling me to feel free to call him about the position. I called him the day after that, and we talked for maybe 20 minutes. His name is Kevin; he owns an FBO that does maintenance on General Aviation aircraft, at the airport in Burley, Idaho, which is about 45 minutes east of Twin Falls. His FBO maintains all the aircraft for the Civil Air Patrol in Idaho and Utah, plus the firefighting aircraft for Idaho. He keeps a staff of maybe 3 mechanics, in addition to himself, and was looking to fill his #3 spot. He thought I sounded like a good guy, but really wanted to meet me. I closed my flight account at the college, which gave us a little extra money, and I flew out this past weekend. I met Kevin at his shop on Saturday, and we talked for about 2 and a half hours. He offered me the position, which I gladly accepted.

I finish school on September 24, and Kevin is expecting me at work on September 28. I'll be working Monday through Friday, 8 - 5, with paid holidays. There will be some overtime, because the shop is too busy to not have overtime, but Kevin tries to keep it to a minimum. I'm still working on getting in touch with an apartment complex and a lady who owns 10 rental properties in the Burley area, so I can figure out where we're going to live. Burley is roughly 3 hours away from Nampa, ID, where Mission Aviation Fellowship is headquartered. MAF, as you'll recall, is the missions organization Jen and I want to go through when we're finally ready for the mission field. Additionally, Burley is maybe a 17-hour drive from Douglas; we'll probably be renting a U-Haul truck to move our stuff from here to there.I think that just about covers it. Feel free to let me know if there are any questions I haven't answered.

Business Trip

I've hinted at something on Facebook a couple times in the last week or so, and I've told a select few what's going on. I've decided to go ahead and go public with the news, which should save Jen and me the time and effort of having to tell the rest of our peeps on a one-on-one basis. So here's the news: I sent out a half-dozen resumes via e-mail last week. A guy in Idaho e-mailed me back and told me to call him about the job. I called him, and we kind of did an impromptu, informal phone interview. He owns an FBO at a little non-towered airport in southern Idaho and has a staff of 3 or 4 guys who do maintenance on General Aviation airplanes. During our conversation, he mentioned more than once that he'd like to meet me face-to-face, so I decided to use some of my flight account funds to make a weekend trip out to meet him. He told me in no uncertain terms, though, to check with him before I actually buy my ticket, just in case he gave the job away before I could make my way out there. I called him today to see if the position was still open. It is, and he agreed not to hire anyone until after next weekend, and he's looking forward to meeting me next Saturday. So I'm flying out to Idaho next weekend to meet my prospective future boss. I made all my reservations and whatnot today, so I'm set to go. Unfortunately, Jen won't be able to make the trip with me, as she has to work next Friday and Saturday. I'm taking the digital camera with me, though, and I plan to take as many pictures of as many things in Idaho as I possibly can, so she can at least take a photo tour of our potential new home. And now you know.

"I'm Spider-Man, no more."

And now, curiously, I feel motivated to write a real, new post, now that I've just posted about how I'm intimidated by the thought of posting. (Yeah, I know. If you were ever able to see into my mind, you'd probably claw your eyes out. Or you'd mercy-kill me. Either way.)

I posted, almost two months ago, about how I had just become an intern at the airport in Benson. Here's the update: The week after I started being an intern in Benson, I stopped being an intern in Benson. To fully explain why, I'm going to have to provide just a little bit of backstory. At the time, my class schedule had degenerated to the point where I'd sit in class for about 2 hours on a Monday morning, then have the rest of the week off (my class is SUPPOSED TO be from 7:30 til 4, Monday through Thursday, no exceptions). That being the case, I had appalling amounts of spare time on my hands. I thought to myself, "I just earned my Airframe license. Wouldn't it be sweet to volunteer as a mechanic and score some hands-on experience in my down-time?" So I got in touch with a friend at New Tribes Mission Aviation, and I explained my situation to them. They took my offer of free labor to the rest of the guys in the shop, and they decided not to take me up on it. Apparently, there were some pretty big political issues happening within the mechanic-y side of NTMA, and they didn't want an "outsider" to see the drama, especially when said outsider would eventually be working for an organization that frequently partners with NTMA. So they shot me down. My friend, though, suggested that I volunteer to do grounds maintenance at NTMA for a while, and eventually I would probably be able to worm my way into the hangar to do some mechanic work. I met with the guy in charge of grounds maintenance. He told me he was semi-retired, so his schedule tended to be a little erratic, which meant we would probably have some difficulty connecting, since the highly erratic nature of my own schedule was why I was trying so hard to volunteer in the first place. The other big problem (in my mind, at least) was that I had attempted to volunteer as a mechanic, to do some free labor in an area I had just spent 9 months get certified in. They would get free help, and I would get some really great and relevent experience. What I was actually being handed was a chance to do some free labor in a field in which I had no training or skill, that wouldn't really benefit me in any way, besides providing that vague possibility that maybe, just maybe, someday I would be able to eventually work my way into the hangar to be able to do the kind of stuff I was volunteering to do in the first place. It seemed very... not what I was after.

Meanwhile, around this same time, I'd been in touch via e-mail with the owner of the FBO at the airport in Benson (FBO stands for Fixed Base Operator; FBOs are where you go to rent planes, buy fuel or pilot supplies, etc. They're the party store of aviation). I'd contacted him to get some information about the planes he has for rent. In the course of our correspondence, he mentioned he was looking for an intern to help out around the FBO. After NTMA shot me down and the grounds maintenance thing didn't look promising, the FBO guy offered me the internship. I thought to myself, "Finally, a chance to do something aviation-related, that I can put on a resume," and I jumped on it. After my first weekend on the job, I really got to thinking about the situation. My ideal had been spending my down-time from class out at NTMA, picking up some hands-on experience from some solid Christian missionary guys, so I could say on my resume that I actually had some experience in the field. The reality of things was that I was giving up two of the three days a week I got to spend home alone with my wife, spending just over 3 hours a day in my car, to work for free at a job that would really and truly have zero bearing on my resume. The internship was so far from what I'd originally desired, that I couldn't really find any reason to stick with it for even a second week. So I let it go. And now you know.

Why don't I blog more?

That's a pretty fair question. After all, it's not like it takes any kind of actual effort to hammer out a blog post. So what's my deal? Well, I'm going to level with you. A curious thing happens to me, when it comes to blogs. I'll start a blog and have no problem at all pounding out posts fairly frequently (I am, for instance, a five-time veteran of Livejournal; I kid you not. Most of those have been deleted over the course of time, however, so don't bother searching for them). But after I've gotten my blog well-established, I start to get intimidated by the thought of writing new posts. I'll log in and go to type a post, and I just go totally blank. Or else I'll start typing, make it halfway through a post, decide what I've just written is stupid, and delete it all. Eventually, it gets so bad that I come to dread the sight of the big white box on my screen, just waiting for me to fill it up with my words. I really and truly don't know what the problem is. Performance anxiety maybe? Can't say for sure. But, whatever the reason may be, that's why I update my blog so infrequently. The only bright side, I guess, is that just about all the people who used to read my blog with any kind of regularity, have given up checking for updates, so even if I do write the most idiotic post in the world, the only people who will read it are me and whoever might accidentally stumble across this blog while Googling random words.