Little Things

Splendid element of being camp staff - if there's work to be done, you just automatically pitch in. No questions, and usually not much hustle about who's-doing-what - we have evolved over the three hottest months of the year to convert clearing and setting up into a well-ordered dance. Most of the time, anyways. Sometimes someone gets a chair or something dropped on their foot, but camp staff are a hardy bunch.

Second element - as always, the Camp guys are amazing. The way they live, and work, and play together always leaves an impact, even when it's a small thing. Even more impressive because they don't think anything of it. "Of course I'd hike three miles through the mud and gravel on a rainy night with old shoes and no socks from my nice warm bed into the freezing rain at two-thirty a.m. because my camper needed something from the nurse!"

One of the bits of the Camp Code (this may be part of what it means to be a Knight of Spike) is their approach to the girls working. Not that the girls shouldn't be - if half our staff relied on the other half to do all the lifting, raking, and wide variety of sweat-making that happens around Camp...well, it would just take twice as long to get anything done. Longer, probably, as having everyone pitch in has a tendency to significantly lift morale.

So, Stephan and Josie's wedding was outdoors, and someone had built a dance floor. Once dinner was over, about five of us fell to clearing out the tables and chairs so that said floor might be accessible. There are only about six folding tables, rather like the ones we haul around Camp for various purposes.

But it happened with two different guys - I'd have packed up a table, and be carrying it across, and I'd get about two feet before one of the guys stopped me with, "Hey, I'll trade you," took the table, and handed me...a tablecloth. Which also had a place to be, not where the tables were headed, so I trotted off with a load 1/15th of what I'd been carrying before.

There's a part of our culture that might see this as the guys thinking we're not capable. You have to work with them to see how this manifests. Camp guys are often as blown away by everything we do as we are by them. Camp girls can do just about anything together. If Spike said we needed another cabin built this June, we'd just need to be pulled off our other work and have someone directing, and we'd get it done. Okay, it's not guys or girls - Camp staff are just amazing. But this business with the girls is just somehow hardwired into the male minds. It breaks something in their brains to be standing around if the girls are working. They have no problem with working alongside the girls, they just have to find some way to be doing at least as much as the girls are. Or they don't deserve to be called guys, or warriors, or whatever the Knights of Spike call themselves.

(Girls don't actually know a whole lot about the proceedings for the male Knights of Spike. It's supposed to be that way. They don't know a whole lot about ours, either.)

A GMC once explained that there's a very similar reason for why women aren't in combat. It's not because we're not aggressive enough. Honestly, if you had an all-female division and things started to get rough inside the division, you'd find that there's an ugly side of women that can be downright vicious. It's because they found that you couldn't put women fighting next to men without some of the guys having some issues. They'd either do something stupid that would get themselves killed in order to protect the women more than they would just another soldier, or they'd have to sit and take it when they lived through something that a female comrade didn't, which ended up messing up a lot of the guys' brains. Not all guys - some of them are solidly professional, and once a person's in uniform, all they see is the uniform and act accordingly - doesn't matter who or what they are until they're back in civvies.

Josie!

Memorial Day weekend is a four-day weekend from class. Not from duty, but it coincides with what would be my duty-free weekend, so, I don't have to be back to class until Monday.

It also nicely coincides with my dear friend Josie's wedding. For the last month, I've been looking forward to this, and trying NOT to look forward to it, because it's the Navy, and everything can change about half an hour before you put plans into action.

But, the wedding was lovely, the day was splendid, I got to spend time with a pile of friends from Camp (Camp-staff are all in that double-category of friends/family, thanks to the amount of weirdness we go through every summer and how much we love and depend on each other), and every time I saw Josie for more than four seconds, I would start to tear up.

It's also Stephan's wedding, I realize, but Josie's one of the girls, probably the girl that I was closest to this last summer, and I've really missed her over the last six months, and now she's married, and she looks so beautiful, and please excuse me I'm going to go find a box of Kleenex.

So, this was a very happy day.

Pony?

"He's a lightweight!"
"Really?"
"He's flighty and undependable! He's like a wild pony."
"Ah."
"I know the pony's pretty, but leave it in the corral!"

This was probably hearkening back to my Sheridan days, where I walked to church past ponies and longhorns (and the occasional peacock). One of my favorite advisors, I tend to go to her when I'm frustrated over a situation with a guy, because a)she's far more objective than I am, b)she has more experience than I do, and c)she's absolutely brilliant with language.

Personally, I hope that she someday compiles a book of life-advice, because she's often right, and always entertaining. However, as is the case with most of my friends, I doubt she's got time for it.

But, that discussion was the tail-end of a lot of frustration. Actually, up to that point, no one had suggested that there was a problem here. Could also be summed up, "If a guy has repeatedly proven himself undependable, don't depend on him!"

...sometimes I'm a little hardheaded. That one finally got through.

"It's too .... hot!"

One of the beautiful things about living right on the lake is the effect of heat on the water. A lovely white-bright mist rises, obscuring the division between sky and surface while seeming to reflect qualities of both, with only the faintest sparkles from the sunlight's reflection off the waves winking through.

That's out there. Here, it's hot, and desperately humid.

The only alteration to uniforms is made at the beginning of May. This would be when we take our digis and - gasp! - roll up the sleeves past the elbow. And that is prescribed wear through the rest of the season. This leads to a rather comical combination on very chilly days - we're not permitted to unroll our sleeves, but we can wear our parkas over them.

The school is not air-conditioned. They're working on it. As our class is on the top floor, we will be the last priority. The first priority is wherever the LCPO is located. Which makes sense, but has us no less miserable. We're allowed to take off the blouse in the classroom, because we wear a solid navy undershirt with it. This actually is considered underwear, and inappropriate outside of one's room back in the barracks.

The barracks are not air-conditioned, but, evidently in the belief that the AC-lords may pay a visit and be pleased to see their humble followers holding out hope for relief by preparing themselves for blessings from freon...we're no longer allowed to open the windows. Because it's air-conditioning season.

When it gets to be three notches past unbearable, we'll sometimes be permitted to wear Navy-issue PT gear, and call that a uniform. By curious coincidence, the buildings that ARE air-conditioned...are the gyms. There are four gyms on base, two of which I frequent (because one has treadmills and one has a pool). And I could now spend all DAY in there, if I had time. It feels so lovely. So blessedly wonderful. So divine.

MA1 taught us in Boot Camp that your body always has more resources than your brain knows about, so, all you have to do to get through a particularly tough or long workout is to take your brain offline - your body knows how to run without supervision. A four-hour workout is only hard if you focus on the fact that you've been doing it for four hours (or if you're running/swimming. Those actually DO eat up a lot of your body's resources, apparently. You can do it, but then you'll be shot for about the next three days, and we don't have time for that in the military.)

So, yes. I will be moving into the gym now.

Blech.

I like to run, it makes me smile;
I think I'll go another mile!

Some nasty little lung-critterbeast has moved into my chest. It is heavy, fluidy, and causes a painful cough. It also renders speech impossible in the mornings.

Allen is getting a kick out of this. Allen is my buddy - except when I'm mad at him. Allen is a 6'7 Eagle Scout. He's the tech guy for the BMC Choir. Very useful person to have around - except when I'm mad at him. He's completely exploiting the fact that he can talk and I can't.

Jerk.

We'll see if this wrecks running, or just continues making it difficult. I have a goal to hit this week, so I'm hoping for the latter. Actually, I'm just hoping it goes away.

Do not want!

Tide Fresh!

There is something so delightful about the smell of clean laundry.

And the celebration, "At last! I have shorts again!"

It's not so much that we're lazy, we're just ridiculously short on time. The best time to do chores is when they won't LET you try to play catch-up on half a dozen other things you need to get done.

I'm going to sit here and breathe my shirt for a good ten minutes. Or until my roommate offers me one of her cookies. Hint hint, Mills.

...hold on, who named "Tide"? Have they ever been NEAR the ocean? Have you SEEN the sorts of things (and smells) the tide brings in?

Ah well. There's not much of a tide on the mountain, either, but mountain breeze t-shirt is delightful.

The Purpose of Pain

We did something good marching back from class today. Our section leader praised us for it.

This was weird.

Waiting to get back into the barracks (between id checks and baggage checks, it can actually take longer to get all of us back into the ship than it did to get us here from the school), he and I were talking about this aspect of the Navy. Simply, doing a good job will not get you praised, because all you did was exactly what you were supposed to do.

Oh, you got that done? Effectively, in a timely fashion? Here's the next task.

This doesn't sound so bad, until you realize that this applies to EVERY aspect of life on base. You will never be praised for ANYTHING that you work hard on. You will be recognized if you really excel, and you will be recognized in an instant if you do anything wrong, or at a standard below the expectation.

So, we were talking about why this is. And we've come to the conclusion that it's not just typical upper-management bull. Quite honestly, we're pretty sure that it's to keep all of us on an emotional spectrum that is at best surly and at worst suicidal. And it's not because they're sadistic. Not entirely - if you're a sadist and you're very good at your job, you get to go be an RDC at Boot Camp. There is a reason for wanting us all to be angry and frustrated all the time.

When you're happy, you don't want to kill anybody. You want to go to the park and play frisbee. Grill burgers while the sun sets, smell the fresh-cut grass. You want to play with your dog. Spend the day with your sweetheart. Do something nice for somebody you like. All kinds of good things. You can't kill people when you're happy. It just doesn't work.

The Navy keeps you in a cramped living environment with absolutely zero time to yourself. The Army treats you like a filth-encrusted floormat. The Marines never get all of the equipment they need to keep themselves alive. The Coast Guard works ridiculously hard and nobody ever takes them as seriously as they do the other branches.

(We have no idea what the Air Force does. They get way more living space and better food than any other branch. Maybe threaten to take those amenities away.)

But, there is a problem here. In theater, there's one "M" word that you don't even like to say. In the Navy, there's another one. And if you destroy morale enough, you could be looking at that M word. So, you've got to keep everyone a little unhappy, but balanced in their unhappiness. If they decide to walk off the flight deck, that's unfortunate. If they decide to band together with some of the other unhappy people and threaten the hierarchy of the ship, many very bad things happen.

Now, it should be noted. I am an ET. My job is about maintaining and fixing messed-up electronics. I shouldn't need to be in a state of constant frustration in order to do this properly. But, not only is a ship a city, it's also a weird, huge, family. And if I'm happy all the time, other people might get a little bit happier, being around me. Could happen to anyone. Can't have that.

...today was actually really, really tough. Class-wise, anyway. I started a procedure yesterday afternoon that should have been wrapped up in forty minutes. It took me eight hours. I will be going in both tomorrow and Sunday to try to make up some of my other work. And that's actually part of my training - that sometimes, you're going to have to fix something and lose a weekend to it.

But I can't stay frustrated for long. Haven't learned that yet. I got home tonight to find that Ambrose had posted a photo from Hanson's New Years' Party, had me with two of the best guys I've ever met, and I had snarfed somebody's fedora. All kinds of smiles. I needed that today.

So, we'll be built into a new alloy, but I don't think anyone knows what that alloy's going to be. Kind of interesting to find out. :)

I'm Not Allowed To Do This At Camp Anymore

Navy-acceptable PT gear leaves a lot to the imagination. So, it's not until after the workout, when my friend and I are back in the locker room, that this conversation took place.

"Hey, what happened there?"

Glance down. Annoyed expression. "Oh. That."

Expectant expression. She's noticed what appears to be two pinpricks about a fingernail's width apart, just above my clavicle.

Aggrieved sigh. "That's from right after I moved in. Like, two weeks after Boot Camp."

Nod.

"It's never going to heal."

Concerned eyebrows.

Really annoyed. "Did you know vampires exist. Like, for real? And did you know that fairies are real, too? And most importantly, did you know that it's possible to combine them???"

...she doesn't really have a chance to respond, before I go into my tirade.

"I'm sleeping, right? And then I feel this little pain, and I jerk awake, and this thing...I thought it was a bat at first - leaps off me and flies up towards the ceiling, but, dude, it's cackling. I'm not kidding - it's a fairy-sized vampire. You could wrap your hand around this thing. Creepy little monster. I tried to catch it, but y'know how when you first wake up, your reflexes don't work? Yeah! Fell out of bed, it got away out the window! Epithet!" I'm actually really worked up by this point.

Friend is really unsure whether to believe this. "So, you're mad that he sucked your blood?"

"No! I'm mad because when I die, my body becomes the undead zombie-slave to a creature the size of a hummingbird!!!"

Silence.

Silence.

"So, uh, what's that one from?" There is a rather violent purple shadow on my quad.

"Oh, that? Took a power nap during our first smoke break at ATT today, and my pen exploded."

My Giants

Saw Facing the Giants Friday night. Nailed home some points that I really needed to hear. I've been doing a lot of, "God, what am I doing here?" lately.

Life made sense when I was studying music and working with kids. I'm utterly confident about where I'm supposed to be for the next twelve years (after this enlistment, I'm positive about where I'm being led) - and utterly baffled about WHY I'm supposed to be there. Things make sense when I'm in the Midwest, and in the woods, and with my family. Things make sense when I'm using talents we know I'm good at. Between not being around kids for six years, not being around proper woodland for five, and seeing my family sporadically for twelve, something here doesn't look a whole lot like MY life.

So, that raises the question, am I still going to give it to Him when it doesn't make sense?

Concept that isn't exactly broadcasted but just clicked while watching, that I've been trying to articulate for over a year now - what matters most when building this family isn't going to be that you're so solid that you can avoid any crisis. What matters most is that in any crisis, your first response is to go to God first.

So, maybe, that's what I'm supposed to be training on for the next few adventures. Going to Him when I'm broken, and trusting Him when it doesn't seem to make sense.

Navy Coffee

They say that in the Navy, the coffee's mighty fine;
It looks like muddy water, and tastes like turpentine.

I have perhaps mentioned my argument with Navy coffee.

I would like to state that, if you've never had coffee, you will still have an issue with Navy coffee. But perhaps not as much. You will just assume that you're not supposed to drink the stuff, and it is in fact a military-issue cleaning product.

I've worked for two competing coffee shops. One makes better coffee than the other, because they fresh-roast the beans, and the other does more creative stuff with their espresso. Either one's good. And I wasn't much of a coffee-person before Boot Camp.

Note: Everyone forms some kind of addiction to deal with the stress here. If not here, then definitely in the Fleet. This is supposed to be the easy time, before things get really intense. My addiction is to the endorphins off of a workout - that's how I deal. And somehow, it got programmed into my brain that if I'm going to work out, I need coffee first.

My first experience with Navy coffee, I concluded that it was made by drying out manure, pulverising the result into a fine powder, and bubbling used engine oil through the powder. The best thing that you can say about Navy coffee is that it will definitely wake you up.

Some coffee wakes you up gently, like someone coming in your room who's already been up for a few hours, and sits on the side of your bed. Sip. "Morning, honey. Time for school." Backrubbies. Mmmm, okay. We'll get up.

Then there's coffee that wakes you up happily. Comes bouncing in, throws open the curtains, letting the sunlight flood in. "G'morning!! Come on, get up, it's time to play! Let's go, let's go, let's go!" You're annoyed, but a little entertained at the same time.

Navy coffee has nothing to do with this. Oh, no. Navy coffee is when mama turns into mama bear, and she is mad. You're blissfully sleeping, unaware that you've forgotten some chore, and this coffee silently comes in, grabs you by the short hairs at the back of the neck, hauls you down the stairs by the same shorts despite your painful yelps and protests, and throws you shivering into the barn or kitchen where work evidently needs to be done. It's not a chore you would normally mind, but your brain is rather confused about what just happened, only certain that whatever it was, you didn't like it. That's Navy coffee.

I use it to make instant oatmeal.

Tension Can't Hold

In the last two weeks, there's been an impressive amount of rule-breaking aboard the ship. Which means that now, the ship is not a very happy place to be. Tension's running high, SDCs are carefully monitoring watches, we're a hair's breadth away from losing a lot of weekend liberty, and everyone feels like they're right on the verge of getting in trouble. Nope, not a happy place to be.

Unless you're a Firefly.

"Hey, how are you?" Julia, randomly running into me in the P-way between our rooms.
"I'm happy! I have an apple."
"You always have an apple. Every time I see you, you have an apple."
"Obviously, this is why I'm always happy!"

This is the best part about our digis. The pockets. Especially the cargo pockets. No, wait - the parka pockets are the best. As long as you're choosing non-messy or prewrapped food, you can fit two square meals in the pockets of a parka, and use the cargo pockets of your trousers for the third.

Also, thanks to blousing straps, the entire pant leg converts to a pocket, so long as you're not carrying anything heavier than what a blousing strap can hold. But, I do almost always have an apple in a cargo pocket. It's less messy than oatmeal.

So, there are still some of us who are finding little ways to enjoy ourselves, in the midst of heightened tension. This is good, because in our room, somebody's royally irked with her boyfriend, and has been fighting with him via phone for the last hour and a half. I have taken the opportunity to utilize mom-roommate's internet, since she said it was cool once her downloads finished, and likely won't be back before morning.

At some point, she's explaining why he's making her mad, and how he's pushing her to the point where she could kill somebody out there, "But I'm sick and so I can't go!" Argument seems to be centered on him being a control-freak, ironically.

"And then I'm just going to have to kill the closest person to me, which is Bro! No offense, Bro."
"No worries." I half-grin, not looking up. "I'll just run like a squirrel." This is my usual method of self-defense.
"Yeah, that's right! And she's a runner, and I won't be able to catch her, so that'll just **** me off even more!!"

But, I mentally reason, I'll be a half-mile away by that point, so, I'll have found something else to play with by then!

Times fun when you're having fun!

(The Tautology Club is the Tautology Club.)

Party?

Let us say only that last night was Cinco de Mayo.

...

And I woke up this morning with shelled peanuts in my shoes.

Package!

They say that in the Navy, the mail is mighty fine
Last night I got a letter from 1999.

Half of my ship is entirely male - separate building. (Actually, half of my building is also male, but whatever.) This is the same building that houses the mail room. In order to keep their quarterdeck from being clogged by people who actually shower on a regular basis (heaven forfend!), they post an every-other-day list of who's got mail in our lounge and theirs.

I was elated to see that I'd had a package, AND a card. Yay mail! You actually never know what a package is, because the timing of delivery is all goofed up. I will explain in a moment.

Package was...my birthday present. From my grandmother.

For anyone who knows ME, my birthday was a month ago. For anyone who knows my grandmother, there's not a chance she put this in the mail late. For anyone who knows the military, this is completely par for the course.

I was talking with Faramir about this one. We've concluded that the speed that any mail makes it on base is inversely proportional to its size. I've never had a letter take more than a week. One of my friends sent me chocolate for my birthday - very appreciated. Arrived the day after, very nice. Happy day. One of my camp friends sent a translation of the Bible that he knew I wanted (I grew up with an NIV, but I like reading other translations, too*), and that arrived less than a week after my birthday. Three pounds of deliciously dense cookie-bars? Yes, that'll take about a month.

Although, we had to conclude, it's far better this way than the opposite. If speed was directly proportional to size, I can see my sister mailing me a refrigerator, just so that my roommate could capture the instant of puzzled horror on my face as this behemoth comes flying through the door and pins me to the wall.

But! Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me!


*Thus far, my favorite was a leather-bound (nice nice nice leather - oh, no, I'm not a tactile person by any means. Yeah, I just liked holding this one. Nice nice nice - I have leather issues, it seems.) NASB. I didn't even have it a year before it vanished. Not only that, but it vanished the DAY I was sworn in, in the very building where I was sworn in. That seemed uncomfortably like an omen at the time.

Home is in the Lowlands

It feels both beautiful and strange to be home.

We got in at 0300. I slept 'til 0900. Woke up and the house was quiet - NEVER the case at 0900 on my ship.

Seeing Rochester and the familiar quiet little streets of Byron feels good, but very weird. It feels like I'm not really back. Well, I'm not. But that somehow I'm not supposed to be here. Like Edward Bloom in Big Fish - the first time he arrives in the town of Pleasant, he came early.

But waking up and going up to go see my beautiful sister, and having a quiet morning with the rest of my family...little slice of Heaven lives here in Byron. :)