Well here I go again, I am a year away from my end of service date and I'm preparing to transition out of the Marine Corps to the 1st Civ Div again. Last time it wasn't as smooth as I had hoped. I was in from 1998-2004 as an Infantryman. I had been promoted up to Cpl and had the score for Sergeant but chose to exit stage left. I returned from Iraq and immediately got out, no plan, nothing in place, just out.

I worked for the State Dept Diplomatic Security for a while, and worked...

I guess the light was pretty close. I certified on departures today. It is a huge weight off of my shoulders now that I don't have to try to guess when I will get certified or if I will or whatnot. It is a great feeling. I worked for the first time on my own this afternoon for one session at the end of the day. It was really fun doing everything on my own. I thought it would be kind of scary actually because there isn't someone there, but that is actually more of a relief knowing that you can control...

At this writing I am still training on departures. I have just over 300 hours under my belt, and my checkride seems so close yet so far away. I was hoping that I would have been certified already, but I wasn't quite ready yet. Going into February I was doing really well. My trainer released me to the crew so that everyone else could give their opinions and offer technique advice. That was going well for about a week and then I hit a wall. I had one bad session and it started an avalanche of more...

soooo.....seem like life is repeating itself all over again....when i first applied to be an atc in jan '08, i was pregnant, waiting on the referral list for pubnat 1{thats right pubnat 1, I am the original stuckmic not a controller not even a pilot and i have no life member!!!!}

anyway, was waiting to hear about an interview location while i was pregnant, was spazzing about having to go okc while pregnant blah blah blah and boom! got an interview offer for ZDC....well you know what...

Well...I just finished up ETG's on two radar positions. I was training on Departure North and Tomball. Tomball is a satellite radar position and Departure North handles all departures from all of the Houston area airports that are going north bound.

Tomball was a bit harder than North because nothing was standard. On Tomball, you have six different airports aircraft will depart from or arrive to...overflights, and lots of VFR aircraft wanting to do many different things. You have...