Surrounded by Apaches

I think I'm sufficiently recovered from my the bash to my writing ego, so here goes:

Last week we took a short break from the never-ending grind of home improvement, and headed for south Alabama to attend my brother's graduation from Apache helicopter flight school.

As if it weren't cool enough to be a combat-decorated green beret, my brother had to go and start flying the coolest of the cool in fighter helicopters - the Apache.  With the other brother currently navigating a B-52 and fixing to go on to cooler things himself, my feelings of being the underachieving boob of a sibling have been greatly magnified.  I'm also green with envy - Fort Rucker's skies are an aeriel traffic jam of awesomeness in the form of all kinds of helicopters, and my brain was constantly occupied with trying to imagine how thrilling it would be to be able to at least ride in one, let alone PILOT one.  It's still hard to believe that the brother who was once the bane of my existence, who's favorite prank was to rub my toothbrush in soap, and who has the greatest count of stitches given to siblings (we all caused each other to get stitches, but Trent's count is highest), is so accomplished in the impossibly-hard, and is just generally a certified badass.  Yeah, despite my jealousy and feelings of inadequacy, I'm still very much a pretty proud big sis of both of the brothers.

Here are a few pics from graduation:

Hannah pinning on Trent's wings:

The Fam

As I mentioned, the skies at Fort Rucker were full of copters, and I never got tired of watching.  Even after the last few months of living on our own military post crawling with constantly active Blackhawks, I'm still fascinated enough to run outside like a kid to watch them fly over the house.  Perhaps I missed a calling.  Despite my fascination with helicopters, I did get very tired  of the Apaches buzzing our lakeside cabin at night every few minutes, low enough and loud enough to rattle the windows, cause items to vibrate off the nightstand, and to rocket you from sleep with the first instinct to dive for cover.  How my folks slept through that is a mystery to both me and Marden, but after two nights we were weary.  We later invaded Trent and Hannah's house for the remainder of our stay, where we were out of the flight path and the copters were merely a distant rumble.