Hello everyone!

Yes I'm home finally. Sorry its taken me so long to post, it's no excuse but i've been feeling pretty sick this past week. I don't know why but whenever I change time zones by a lot i get sick. Oh well, guess that's going to do me well in this job hehe. This week has been very nice, they give us a week off when we come home from deployment. Its nice just to rest and not fly so much. Though in between now and the next deployment i'll be going what they call tdy, it stands for temporary duty. I can go anywhere from alaska to australia, or from italy to hungary. Mostly tdy's last from 3 to 7 days. So I will still be busy flying around unfortunatly. I will be able to see some pretty cool places though I'll be missing out on some really fun family time.

Crys, as you have already seen, has been doing an amazing job raising and teaching Amber. She has changed so much, she's like a real person now. She doesn't just sit there and make noises every now and then. Now she is everywhere all the time. Luckily she's singing wherever she goes so we always know where she is. She's so tough too, she rarely cries because she has fallen down or something like that, but take away something she wanted or tell her no and she might shed a few tears. :( She's pretty freaking cute though.

Our dogs are as crazy as ever but we have them hooked up outside now which makes them and us much happier. Kodah is 85 pounds and 9 months old, he's the brawn. Jake is 65 pounds and 2 and a half years old, he's deffinetly the brains. Kodahs really sweet but really dumb, though he's starting to learn. Jakes a pretty good teacher. We did have to get Kodah a shock collar because when he's outside he has this annoying yappy bark. When he barks once is shocks him on low and for every bark after the first within 7 seconds the shock value will increase. He barked three times in a row before he realized what was going on and jumped straight into the air yelping. It was sad but you couldn't help but laugh because he was so "shocked" by it. (Yes that's a pun) He did it again a few times until he finally figured that if he wasn't barking he wasn't being shocked. Now we have a peaceful street again.

On the way back home we had 36 hours on the ground which was very nice. Most crews coming home get min-turned is what they call it. That means they have the minimum time on the ground before they have to take off again, which is 13 hours. Since we had they extra time we made use of it by spending a day in London. It was so much fun. We went to the Westminster Chapel, Big Ben, Parliament and we also road on The Eye. It was pretty amazing. The Eye if you didn't know (i didn't) is a gigantic ferris wheel from which you can see all of London. It was pretty amazing. The deployment definitely was not fun but the way home was.

Its very nice to be home and am not looking forward to the next time i have to go out which I will find out probably on Monday. I love you all.

Love Nick