Decemination of information/crew chief christmas

hello all,
sorry it has been a couple of days since my last post. been a lot of different things going on around here. since we have been in flight mode down here we have been starting to get the mass evaluations going on. monday we did NBC. and tuesday we did max performance flights. today we switched over to the night cycle to get NVG certifications for people who need them.
On monday we did NBC evals for the entire company. NBC for those who don't know is Nuclear Biological and Chemical. that is all the gas mask stuff. we have a full suit with rubber boots and gloves to go along with the mask. it is all very hot equipment to work in. everyone needed to be certified that they can do it on the aircraft. so they had 4 helicopters going. two were doing start up and shutdowns, the other two were traffic patterns. i was in my NBC equipment for about 15 minutes, which isn't bad. the jacket and pants of the NBC suit is lined with charcoal, so it can be very messy. right now we have the old style NBC suits because they are for training and they need all the new ones for deployed soldiers. when we get in country we will get new NBC suits. there were a few people who had new NBC ended up with very black uniforms from all of the charcoal in them.
yesterday (tuesday) we did max performance training. that doesn't change much for me, but we still needed to be certified that we were on a max performance flight. when we went out for start up we had 11 people on board. 6 crew chiefs and 5 pilots. we were going through start up checks and had a stabilator failure. so we ended up switching aircraft. after that we went out to to the training area. we got through two sets of people then we were pulled back into the airfeild because of weather. we watched the weather for a while after we put the aircraft away. the weather was far enough that we really were safe from anything that was happening. we saw a few funnel clouds form but never touch down. we went to the tornado shelter for 15 minutes after that.
today we switched to what the army calls reverse cycle. basically working the night shift. we didn't have to be anywhere until 4 pm today originally. Me and one of my roommates went out and did PT at noon and then went to the PX and alterations. we were back around 2:30 and went to the room for a while. i was talking to a friend when a knock at the door comes at about 3:20. it is my squad leader and formation time had changed without anyone telling about half the company. we ended up just standing around until 4 so it was pointless to get out there 30 minutes earlier, but it was dumb because my platoon sergreant was giving us a hard time because we didn't know what time formation was even though we were never told. when we got out to the airfield we pulled all of the aircraft that were flying out to the flight line. then the people who had flights started pre-flighting. by 7 the flights had been canceled do to weather again. so we did some classes and we had Crew Chief cristmas. the SI or head crew chief did a lot of letter writing and got us the funding for certain things that he thought that we might need. today we got a pair of WileyX sunglasses. a gerber multi-tool, a quick open knife and a finger light. the WileyX sunglasses are balistic glasses that we can wear all the time. the multi tool is good for doing daily inspections of the aircraft. the quick release knife is good for survival situations. the fingerlight is a aircraft approved light that can be used while flying under NVGs. and it is very tactical when it comes to being seen by the enemy compared to the lip light that is the other option.
On a side note, news of the general and his fishing buddy that we were looking for this weekend. on tuesday we were in line for the chow hall and we passed a newspaper stand. the general and his buddy was found. they were both on the bottom of the lake. the divers found them on monday. we don't know the reason that they were drowned. but probably had something to do with the rapidly changing weather that we have been having down here. it is sad.
i hope that everyone at home is doing well.
Signing off