To Whom It May Concern

“Trainin’ Trainin’ Trainin’”

Wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted here. We have been so busy though, getting our mobilization up, doing our WTT classes, qualifying on ranges. This past weekend people’s families were allowed to come down, from 1600 Saturday till 2000 Sunday (that’s 4 pm Saturday till 8 pm Sunday, for you civilians out there). Belly couldn’t come because she needed to give them a specific amount of time notice before she would be allowed to leave, and they didn’t let us know until too late. But truthfully, paying probably 600 dollars or so (plane ticket, car rental, hotel room) for one day probably wouldn’t have been all that good, so we are going to try for one of the longer visits later, maybe a three day? *crosses fingers*

So, how goes things? Well, so far so good I guess, things are really a clusterfuck sometimes, but we are making it work. All in all I believe we have a good group of people who are all gelling together very well. Today some of us were doing land navigation while the rest of the company went and fired at the M249 SAW and .50 Caliber range. I was with the land navigation group, I spent about the last 20 minutes cleaning branches, leaves, neddles, dirt, etc, out of my shirt, crotch, pants, and hair. Not to mention the scratches all over my legs from the tangle foot and thorny bushes down in that little marsh we had to navigate to get to one of our points. But honestly, I enjoy that sort of shit, because that makes me feel closer to my infantry roots. HOOAH!!

I am in a room with 2 other SSG’s, and we are packed in here like sardines when you add in 3 duffel bags, 2 foot lockers, a ruck sack, and a personal bag, EACH person has this much stuff. Soon we have to send our foot lockers and 2 of our duffel bags into shipping containers to be sent over to the middle east by boat, so now the tricky part is trying to decide what we can live without for 2 months and putting it in the foot lockers and 2 duffel bags (they send all that stuff early so we have it when we get there, but the problem is that we can’t have it obviously for the next 2 months).

We have a little bit of internet, but we won’t have our actual good connection until Friday. Right now we are ‘piggy-backing’ off someone else’s connection, and it’s not very reliable at all. Also sometimes there are probably 30 or so people on that one connection and it’s just overloaded. All wireless of course. I can’t wait till we get a GOOD internet connection.

I get time to message belly back and forth using Yahoo messenger each night, which has been nice. I don’t really know what I would do without her in my life. There are so many ways in which she enhances my life, I give thanks everyday that I was lucky enough to find someone like her, and even luckier that she was okay with marrying a dork like me : )

Well, probably need to get a couple of things done around here so I’m going to keep it short, we are perpetually busy these days, hoping it starts to slow down sometime. Hope to keep you a bit more posted as to what is going on around here.

Current Lyrical Rambings

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.

Shine On You Crazy Diamonds – Pink Floyd