Thoughts for today
17 March 2024
Hello,
I am not sure how to do this so it may seem like I am just writing out random things until I get into the groove of how this is supposed to go, at least tone-wise so here it goes.
Hello (again), My name is Miranda but you can call me Becky. I am a woman in her late twenties who works in the military and has for about almost 5 years now.
Some small background on me now I suppose. Hello (again), as I previously stated, all of you can call me Becky. I am married to my wonderful husband who we will call L for when he is mentioned in the future (for his privacy) and I have a child on the way.
I have recently moved to a new base (my husband will be following me in a couple of months) and I am still trying to figure out where I fit in at my new workplace. I recently moved into my first house so trying to decorate while pregnant isn’t easy or going over well with anyone since no one lets me on a ladder let alone a step stool.
I am someone who was raised in the south and has been stationed in the south so at least I am used to the weather here. And I do believe that right now is the rainy season because of the transition from winter to spring. I grew up in the woods so going from the country to city life where everything was fast-paced, was basically a form of culture shock for me but I got used to it after a long while and then adopted the fast-paced lifestyle as well. Now that I am back in the South where slow living is the norm, I am finding it to be difficult to settle back into the slow-paced lifestyle again.
I am not sure when it happened when I suddenly needed all of this stimuli around me to just feel like a person who does something. But now that I am somewhere where you can just open the windows, listen to the birds chirp and sing again, listen to the trains that pass by about 7 to 10 times a day, and actually have time to cook from scratch and listen to your thoughts again just because you can, I am not sure what to do with myself. I suddenly feel lonely, inadept to a slow-paced life, and not sure what to do to keep myself busy. I feel like I have to be doing something and that I don’t need to be alone with my thoughts.
I haven’t had a slow-paced anything since I joined the military 5 years ago. Everything has been go, go, go since then so I am not sure how to relax my mind and body anymore. Granted I do understand that with a child on the way soon, it won’t be as quiet as it is right now but I am sure that it’ll have its moments of calm and tranquility as well as its moments of chaos.
Not really sure what else to say but I guess that I’ll just start with my job and what I do in the military. I work in NDI which is Nondestructive Inspection and instead of using technical speak, I think that I’ll just describe it in my own words. NDI is in the maintenance field in the military (not sure about the civilian side) but it is more on the science side of maintenance if you ask me.
NDI is exactly what it says it is, nondestructive inspections. In the military, we use about 7 different inspection methods but not every inspection method will be used the same amount of time on each aircraft because not all military airframes are the same. Fighters use different inspection methods than other fighters let alone bombers and cargos. I have only worked on 3 different fighter aircraft and so far, only 1 bomber.
The first fighter that I worked on used all but 1 of the inspection methods (x-ray). The 2nd and 3rd fighters that I worked on (at the same base, at the same time) used all of the inspection methods except for 1 again (bondtesting) but these 2 fighter aircraft used an inspection method that wasn’t used on the 1st aircraft that I worked on for about 3.5 years (x-ray). Now that I am working on bombers, again there are inspection methods that aren’t being used/not being used as much as they were on the fighters that I worked on in the beginning because they just aren’t needed.
I could say that I was raised on fighter aircraft. Being raised on fighters made me have to learn how to go from a slow-paced environment that I was used to (grew up in/worked in), to having to move very fast, and learn to adapt as quickly as your brain and body would allow and learn how to speak up for yourself and your job because others will look down on you for whatever job you are in. That is just a fact when you are in the military. Now that I am stationed at a base that has bombers, I have to learn how to go from that insanely fast-paced work environment to going back to how to learn to work in a slow-paced environment. Fighters are very different than bombers and cargos. I have learned that bombers, for my job at least, the workload isn’t as intense or fast as the fighters. Because of this, I am having trouble settling down into this slow-paced environment, inside and outside of the job.
I am not sure what else to say other than this was one long introduction. I apologize if I caught some of your attention and then lost it with all of the ramblings that I did. I am not sure how long or how short these should be so I suppose that I will continue to write until I feel like I should stop.
I do thank you for reading and listening to me though. Makes me feel not quite as alone as I am at the moment. Thank you and now with that……….
~Becky signing off ~