I'm joining Civil Air Patrol

Hey - before you all go calling me a nerd...... I was always really reluctant to join, and I was especially not going to join after all the horrible stuff I read about it online. Ultimately, what I've heard is that it just depends on the squadron. It depends on the people, the stuff they do, the partnerships they have, and the aircraft they own. 

This squadron is all seniors (aka, all adults) and deals directly with search and rescue, emergency stuff, and has even flown training missions with the USAF. Everyone there at the meeting was super cool and looked like they REALLY wanted to teach the younger generation about the skills they've learned. 

With the group, I'd be learning stuff like radio communications from the ground and the air, and there are various positions I could take in the aircraft even without being a licensed pilot yet. After getting licensed, I could do even more stuff. The more advanced pilots get to go on missions - which this squadron does quite a few of! 

I'm really excited to get started with them. So far, all of the stuff that people complained about (egotistical people, babysitting cadets, no flight opportunities, no aircraft owned by the squadron) is not an issue with this local group. I have high hopes and can't wait to see where this will take me! 

Anyways.... The rest of today was pretty bad, so I'm glad that I got to end it on a happy note. My flight this morning got cancelled AGAIN, so that had me pretty upset. I also only got about 4 hours of sleep since I was up at 6am for my flight. 

To top it all off, I got a pretty bad headache after running out of water in the car on the way to the CAP meeting, so once I got home I just chugged water. Haha.. 

I drove around with my mom and had a heart-to-heart talk with her. Suprisingly she listened, and I guess we're all just super stressed out with work and it's making us all snap at eachother here at home. This Civil Air Patrol thing will hopefully be another way for me to get out of the house and away from the stress here.