From 1700 Saturday to 2300 Monday

I packed my stuff, had dinner, watched lots of TV with Stace, till about 2:30 Sunday morning. Then, went to sleep.

I woke up at 9am, Out the door by 10:30am, got my hair cut at 11, got my paperwork by 11:30, and was at Sam's at 12. That's about 2 hours behind, but oh well. Then, it's off to Mojave. Stopped for Carl's Jr. I super sized it, no diet ANYTHING lol. Couldn't help it, it was GOOD SHIT! Been so long since I've had that, that I want it again badly! A couple hours of talking about airplanes is fun sometimes. 6 hours approaches insane. I survived.

We get to the base, and I'm greeted by everyone with, "YOU'RE THE GUY FROM SF RUNNING THE MED UNIT, WE'VE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO MEETING YOU!" What, am I some CAP celeb now? lol

Airport security is short on people, so I volunteer before dinner and the 8:30pm briefing to assist. I pair up with another gentleman and a cadet, and we go direct some traffic, and turn around cars that are trying to park in the RV area. Pretty boring so far to listen to, I KNOW! But you should've felt the energy there. It was a MAJOR event, and we had a job to do there. Before the briefing, I found out awake time was 1:45 am. OMG. It was now 8:30pm. SO, I'm thinking I'd love dinner, but have to go into the briefing... that gets delayed 30 minutes to 9pm. I don't have time to go get dinner, so I break out a water bottle, an MRE, and a heater, and enjoy some hot soup. It's really no different then Campbell's Thick and Chunky, but the DUST blowing into my food and mouth from the desert sands being blown at 20 knots, with gusts to 35. Cleaned off my eating tool (Stace's Xmas present coming in handy...) finished off my water and off to the briefing. I said a few words about the local snakes and ticks, and then got to reviewing the forms from the people on site. Created a staff for my unit with a fellow EMT that came down from Santa Rosa. He took a Flight Officer (not a cadet, not yet a senior) and I got the Cadet Safety Officer as my partner. We went over the contents of my trauma bag, and moved onto getting all the Med Unit people to review member entry forms. After we were done looking over forms including questioning a cadet that tested positive for a TB skin test (why no one caught that ahead of time I don't know), it was 11:30pm, and time to sack out for a couple hours before waking up at about 2am.

I decided it was such a warm night, that I'd break out my sleeping bag (really just a small flannel blanket with a zipper)and try to sleep in the back of my truck. The wind rocks the truck and hits me pretty bad but it was kinda fun. Saw lots of shooting stars, and listened to some rave music in the distance. At about 1:10, I fell asleep. At 1:20, I had a flashlight in my eyes, "SIR! WAKE UP SIR! SIR! SIR, WAKE UP SIR!" After receiving a salute and returning it, I ask why I'm being woken up at 0120 instead of 0200. If you had 8 hours of patrol/duty and 6 hours of driving ahead, and you had just finished a 6 hour drive and 6 hours of duty, you'd want to find an answer to that question, too! "SIR, they opened the gates to the event early sir, at 11 pm instead of 0300 this morning, sir." "Thank you, dismissed" salute/salute end convo. After that, I actually ran into a pair of Novato people down to see the launch as I got up from my 10 minute good nights sleep. Oh, my pillow in the truck... was my orange SAR shirt, and an EMT tee shirt, along with one of my steel toe high tops. I know, NICE huh? Jealous?

I get changed into the black/orange, and it was off to the morning briefing. Same old stuff, plus a report that one of our trucks ran over a snake... Great. They're out tonight and we're out too. After some cereal and milk, I got a tour of the airport, crowd areas, where our people were stationed, etc. My team broke away and started medic foot patrols along the flight line where people were setting up and sitting at 0230. We got our first call at 0340 for an injured cadet. We were driven to the area where she was, and found out the details. Blisters on the back of her ankles from the march in... She couldn't afford boots, so she marched in her dress shoes. Poor thing. I think I'll send her some boots if I can afford it or find her a pair. I treated the ankles, tried to layer her ankles with some extra support, and returned her to duty after giving her the choice to stay there or come back to the base. She said she'd like to stay there, so I gave her the rules for staying there (NO MARCHING!) and let her go. After that, back to the crowd for another foot patrol and then off to the base to get some down time before it was off to the VIP area to continue our day. By this time, the sun is starting to rise. We patrol the rich peoples area until the launch. The second med team made their way to that area as well. FUNNY HOW THAT HAPPENED!

The launch was neat. Funny looking planes when they were mated together as they lifted off from Mojave. When the rocket was dropped and the engine fired, it TOOK OFF like a bat out of hell at 50,000 feet. It was just streaking across the sky. Pretty friggin cool. It landed about 1.5 hours after it was carried to 50,000 feet. You could see a dent in the craft, probably thermal/pressure buckling. Hard to imagine that I had just seen an object up close that had left the atmosphere. The sun was beating down on us, and we had to get back to work. We went from place to place giving Cadets more sunscreen. Back to base at 1000, ate some food at 1030, and left by 1100. I dropped Sam off after we traded driving duty back and forth on the return trip, splitting it 50/50. I was too sleepy to drive at times so I caught some Z's in the passenger seat. MY PHONE WOULDN'T STOP RINGING! I just wanted to sleep so I could drive again so I shut off the ringer. After I got home at 6:30pm, I CRASHED on the papasan, and didn't move much for the next 4 hours at 10:30pm, I was cooked, off to bed I went. I applied some lotion to my face after realizing I took a decent burn, and sat in front of the fan for a while. going to sleep by 11-ish. In a nutshell, that was the trip.

It was fun, busy, met some good people (and one that needs to learn how to floss to eliminate stink breath), and was directly under the tower as history was made, and an Airport became a Spaceport.

And now, back to work.