IAFTSGH Part 2

Today I went to Captain's Mast. Actually, I should clarify; Today I had the opportunity to observe Captain's Mast. Rest assured, I didn't actually get into any trouble myself!

There were 5 people masted, and each one was seen separately. They were all tried under the same article of the UCMJ: Article 92, failure to follow a lawful order. They all broke the same rule too, they all were caught with alcohol in their rooms. That is sooooo against the rules it's not even funny. Now, I have to say that while witnessing Captains Mast did reinforce my desire to follow all rules to the letter exactly, it did also allow me to feel a little more relaxed about my chances of being masted.

I'm always slightly nervous that I might get masted under article 92 for something dumb -like forgetting that I have watch, or putting my name tag on the wrong way. But keeping alcohol in your room? Is it even possible to do that on accident or to 'not know' it was wrong? Especially if you've been here for a whole year already...

Anyway. It was a good experience, but also a pretty scary once. Obviously everyone takes it very seriously, and there are all these officers in the room passing down judgement - and there's always the threat of the worst punishment ever; separation from the navy, or WORSE, loss of the right to study at DLI. If they were to kick me out of DLI and send me to some other job on the fleet, that would be like a fate worse than death practically. I love it here, I've dreamed about studying here for years, and I'm totally dedicated to this job. The idea that it could all be taken away because of one simple mistake or lapse of judgement is a frightening one.

It's all fun till someone gets hurt

Hello,

Today had a perfect ending that more or less nullified all of the bad stuff that happened; First, we had PT, and for PT we played football. I've never played foot ball, and I think the last time I watched it on TV I was like, nine. But it was FUN, and I caught the ball almost every time it was thrown at me ^^:; At one point I was trying to defend our goal (?) and attempting to catch and 'tackle' (two hand touch) the person with the football - And I totally missed him and dove straight into the ground. I thought I'd have bruises, but all the lovely marks I got seem to have faded already. All in all, So much more enjoyable than running laps!

Everytime someone missed a catch, the two people involved in the pass (?) had to do ten pushups. Whenever a team scored a touch down, the entire opposing team had to do twenty pushups. Like I said, it was fun.

After that I had evening colors. I dread evening colors because I'm short, and the shortest person has to 'call'. ( Attention, parade rest, hand salute, all at the appropriate times in the correct order. ) I'm not stupid, but I do have my week areas, and anything involving directionality or sequence is not my strong point. I'm always doing things out of order or saying left when I mean right. However, comma, today I did colors and called it almost perfectly. I think the days of me dreading colors are numbered, possibly even over. Yata!

This all means that the ickiness of the rest of the day has been nicely balanced. There were a lot of angry words, uniform inspections, dental appointments, and Captains' Mast. I'm gonnna write about Captain's Mast in a separate blog post though ^-^

Chill

Hello,

Life is starting to fall into a predictable routine. Means I make less mistakes and am rarely late to muster, but it also means the monotony is starting to show. It's beautiful here and sunny, but at 50 or 60 degrees, not quite warm enough for my taste. I'm always a little cold - seriously need to buy a nice jacket, but haven't found one I like yet.

I've settled into my new room and cycled through all of my new cloths ^^;; enjoying going shopping on the weekends. This week I went to the mall, and then spent the rest of my weekend in my room, pretty much. I'm knitting this lace shawl and the yarn is sooooo soft. My previous shawls have been done in knitpicks yarn, and it's great for what it is, but never again. I'm knitting with malabrigo lace right now, and I think my new mission in life is to sample a wider variety of brand name lace, because this shit is *soft*

Oh, saw Burlesque. Epic. I'm totally in love <3

Laptop

Hello,

My box came in the mail last week ( yay. ) It contained all of my very favorite worldly possessions including a sampling of my knitting, my kindle, DS, Journal, ipod, and of course, Axiom, my laptop.

The Kindle and DS have seen extensive use. I read This Book which is the second book in the series. I love it so much that I think I may explode while waiting for the third book to come out. If you like fantasy novels and you haven't read this book yet, why are you still reading my blog? Go read it now!

I also bought Pokemon heart gold because... It's pokemon. Do I seriously need to say anything more?

But poor Axiom, he was neglected. I had this insane idea that I would refrain from paying for internet. I thought, I could save money *and* guarantee that I get a good work out, because it's a decent uphill walk to the place where free internet lives. But no, I've realized that that was an insanely misguided idea. I now have internet. Yay. On a sadder note, poor Axiom's battery is completely busted, and he wont run without being plugged in now :(

This past weekend was my first liberty weekend off base, and I was authorized to wear civilian cloths. The box contained 1 pair of jeans, my favorite pair of shoes, and several t-shirts. (My Disney baseball cap however, was not included.)

I just do not know how to explain how wonderful it felt to wear jeans for the first time in 2 months. I feel human again, and *almost* like myself.

I went all sorts of crazy shopping, bought *more* cloths, ate out at a fancy Japanese restaurant, walked up and down cannery row, and even went into a little wine store that was doing a wine tasting. (There are many of them around here ) I think wine tasting is going to become one of my favorite weekend activities. I'll probably even by a notebook dedicated specifically to taking notes on which wines I like ^^;;

Oh, and I saw Tangled, which is a perfectly adorable movie. Loved it!

Ok, well. I'm going to go crazy and surf the internet until bed time.

Cheers

Theo

Liberty and Libraries

Yesterday they let us go in the early afternoon, (much to the delight of the 2-weekers who phased up and ran off to put on their civilian cloths, or go buy some), and the first place that I hit up was the DLI library. I went with a very good co-conspirator and we were very very excited by what we saw. They have scrabble in Arabic, monopoly in a multitude of languages, shelves upon shelves of movies and Audio, and of course, tons of forign-language books, both fiction, poetry, and history. Actual English-language books are the minority there, but I opted to avoid checking out anything Arabic (Language classes tend to be hard to study for in advance, since you never really know how they are going to be structured), and instead I checked out this wicked English-language linguistic book. (I sat in the laundry room and read it for about an hour last night. It's Epic!) The book is Modern Arabic; Structures, functions, and varieties. By Clive Holes. If words like aspect, morphology, and intransitive/transitive make you happy, then you will enjoy this book. There is even a little bit of IPA. It's also an interesting way to get a peek at the linguistic culture without jumping into anything historical or political which I don't really feel ready to do just yet.

After the Library we did a little on-base shopping. I bought boring things like Hangers, shoe polish, and a power strip. While she brought more exciting things (like a new computer.) The newish mouse that Apple is selling now? Yeah. I'd never actually seen one before and so it amused me for.... a long time.

Long story short; I consumed massive amounts of junk food and sugar, we watched the movie RED (I'm a huge Bruce Willis fan.), and in general went 'crazy'. I tried hard not to be jealous of all the alcohol drinking we passed on our way to our rooms. Siiiigh. You don't really need that stuff to have fun, right? *nods*

This morning, I totally slept in, waking up at freaking 0630 (which would mean probably missing breakfast on a weekday). I have a lot of plans for today, most of which will probably fall through, but I totally want to be productive and get things done. *nods* I'll be super happy when my laptop gets here and I can have more reliable access to facebook and stuff, but until then, I'll sign off here.

Cheers
THEO

Monterey Welcome Wagon

Hello,

Today I'm going to write about arriving in Monterey!

First, let me tell you that leaving boot camp is probably the most awesome feeling in the world. I graduated on March 18th which was a Friday, got about 4 hours of liberty to hang out with my family (love you guys!!! <3 ) before having to return to the compartment and finish packing all my stuff up. Went to bed at ten, woke up at 1AM the next morning @_@ Spent pretty much all of Saturday in the airport which, again, after boot camp was not that bad. Went crazy and bought some of the super expensive products at the body shop ^__^ Smells nice!
- My family met me at the airport and brought me a bag with my cell phone and knitting, along with a butt load of snacks and other things.
A word to other CTI's : I was told not to bring a whole lot of electronics, because I wouldn't have any room to store them or keep them locked up. THIS IS NOT TRUE. If you have ipods, e-books, laptops, ect, BRING THEM or have them MAILED to you. I'm insanely jealous of the people who already have theirs, while I have to sit and wait for FedEx to bring me mine -__-;;

The people, petty officers, and chiefs here are all very nice and none-threatening. Definitely nothing like the RDC's at boot camp! On Saturday night I unpacked all of my stuff, stuck my chocolate in the mini-fridge, and went to bed content. Since the next day was a liberty day everyone was planning on sleeping in, but I was still on boot-camp schedule and so I finally gave up on sleep and got up at 0500. Went to the head - That's Navy for Bathroom - and only as I was looking at myself in the mirror did I notice that I was covered from head to toe in ants!! I'm pretty proud of myself, I took it in stride; stripped, shook all the ants off, and headed over to the computer lab to test out the Internet. Allot of the obvious sites like facebook are blocked on the computers 'cause we're supposed to use them for studying, but ravelry and blogspot are not. Surfed until ppl woke up and then went hunting for someone to help with the ant problem. Everyone was very nice, sympathetic, helpful, and horrified, but ultimately they all said the same thing. "I'm so sorry this happened to you. " "Can't do anything about it today because it's Sunday" "Spray everything with Windex." We were led to believe that we might be able to move to a new room ('we' being myself and my room-mate ) so we packed everything back in our seabags and tried to push our stuff towards the center of the room away from the ants. The ants hadn't invaded the drawers under my bed so I kept my cloths and toiletries in there (they did find there way in there at some point, however. Now where was safe. ) Eventually, however, it became clear that we would NOT be moving rooms, and would be expected to sleep there AGAIN that night. Ick, right? But I was still amazingly chill, It wasn't until Monday that I started really freaking out. I was obsessing about the ants - telling anyone I walked past about them, even if they were new like me and obviously couldn't do anything about it. It got to the point where everyone important knew about the problem, but it didn't seem like anything was actually being done to fix it. (Although, admittedly, I may have a biased opinion on the matter....)
Then we had our room inspection. My room-mate and I freaked out because our room was trashed - we hadn't vacuumed, there were dead ants all over the surfaces from our windex spray, our closest weren't locked... And we were starting to wonder if maybe we'd blown the ant thing out of proportion. Sure, it seemed like a big deal to us, but what if loads of people had swarms of ants and the inspectors thought we were being sissies???
Fortunately the moment they entered our room they kinda freaked out. Score! Since the inspectors were higher up in the chain of command, they would really make things happen, and by the end of Monday evening we were completely moved out. Yay!

The ants were so bad that we were shaking off every single item individually. When I opened my toothbrush holder the inside was black with ants. Bleech! Good thing I bought extra toothbrushes at the PX! I threw that thing out faster than a hot potato!

So yes. My first few days at Monterey were very exciting and interesting, but I wasn't discouraged at all! It was only after those problems were delt with that the stress and lack of sleep caught up with me, and now I have bronchitis. It's cold and rainy here and I feel tired pretty much all the time. But even though it's soaking wet outside, it's still way prettier than Great Lakes ever was! The grass is green and thick, and dotted with tiny little daisy flowers, and like I said, everyone here is nice, friendly, and helpful! I'm already making some tentative friends, and I can't wait until this weekend when I can - hopefully - really start meeting and getting to know some of the other people who I currently only know by face/last name.

I'll sign off for now,

'Cheers, THEO.

Going Forward Now

Hello friends.

Wednesday 5th is exactly 1 week away from my official departure from home, to boot camp.
I decided to join the Navy Sometime in August, after a lot of thought and some rather discouraging job searches. I was looking for a job that would be both challenging and fulfilling; something that would be satisfying intellectually and financially, something preferably related to my own interest in linguistics that would allow me to further study linguistics and to continue to learn to speak other foreign languages.

For various reasons, none of which I really understand anymore, I didn't contact a Navy recruiter or actually do anything to join the Navy until much later.

However, Once I actually began talking to a local Navy recruiter, enlistment into the Navy was a rapid and painless procedure. I took booth the ASVAB and the DLAB, and successfully got a job as a CTI. This is the Navy Linguist position. I signed my contract early in October.

A new adventure in my life is about to begin and it goes without saying that I'm excited and nervous. The closer I come to my ship-date, the more excited I become. In some ways, I really can't wait. I feel that regardless of the challenges and demands of this new path, that it's the right one to take. I'm sure I will be, in general, happy and successful.

Of course, I do worry. But it's only the vague sort of concern that comes with facing up to the unknown. Everything that I know about my immediate future; Boot camp, the DLI, traveling by plane etc, those are things that I'm confident that I can deal with. It's the things that I don't know about that worry me. What if some unknown factor pops up and takes me completely by surprise?

I've read a lot about the Defense Language Institute and have dreamed about studying there for years, so I feel that all of these fears are totally worth it. After all of the grief, self-doubt, and sleepless nights of college, I have done what few people manage to do; I'm getting to live out one of my fondest dreams.

I'll miss my friends and family. Knowing that I'll be able to keep fairly easy contact with everyone I care about via the internet is a great comfort to me. So it's not a surprise that my last few days before leaving have been all about insuring that end.

I'm re-starting this blog so that I can communicate updates about my new life to everyone at once. I also plan on setting up a new e-mail account, since my goldensquare one will be a bit of a hassle to manage. Those who know the full story behind GOMN might understand a bit how happy this makes me. I haven't picked a name for this new address yet. I'm savoring the potential.

Anyway, since it looks like I've started to ramble a bit, I guess I'll finish up for now.

To summarize; in a little over a week my entire life is going to change. The way I feel now is exactly the way I felt in 2007, when I was preparing to move out of my parents house and start studying at college. All of my personal belongings are being put into storage, and there is really know reasonable way for me to predict who I'll be or what I'll be thinking this time next year. In my head, I've already started to think of 2011 as "The year of Transition." I'm on my way to something different, but I wont know what it is until I get there.