Hero Of the Day

Today, the Powers That Be decided that several of us needed to move. We've sort of been existing between where we lived for the last 8 months, and where we'll live for the next year, and most of us have been transferring stuff a backpack-load at a time, with the understanding that we need to be done with this sometime next week.

Or, y'know, a week early, that's cool, too.

Grouse grouse grouse. I have about four more backpack-loads - and we refer to my backpack as "The SUV of all backpacks." It would look appropriate if I were, say, in full battle rattle and headed somewhere Very Important in one of the 'stans. Here, when filled, it looks like I'm walking home from work with a little black Mini Cooper strapped to my back. Four of these, I had expected to get home over the next 4-5 days.

Also tempting is the urge to feel sorry for myself for not having the use of my left arm. Home is about a 20-25 minute walk, so it's not THAT bad to have to make multiple trips, but there's this Really Big Hill. Most of the time, I am quite fond of the Really Big Hill. It's pretty, and affords me a beautiful view of Rainier, and a pretty walk through the trees with holly and ivy and big pines, and is really a very relaxing way to transition from work to whatever one is doing after work.

That's when one is carrying a backpack or less.

I am at this point rather frazzled and frustrated. And in deep need of a shower. The Gentleman gets off work a little earlier than I do this week, and shot me a text - I basically wailed my despair (fortunately contained in the dignity of text).

His first response, "What can I do to help?"

Oh.

Well, that puts a different light on it.

And then along the way in my mad digging, I come across my "garment bag." It was originally designed to hold dress clothes, but I've been known to stuff just about anything into it.

And someone points out that I don't need another backpack - I could probably fit two backpack loads in a really big trash bag.

And the Gentleman quietly waits at Red Robin (not only do they have bottomless fries, they also have a bottomless root beer float), studying the section of Proverbs we're on tonight, waiting for The Powers That Be to inspect my work and allow that perhaps I can go home now.

And then he waits as close as he can to the gate (and gets reprimanded by a police officer for his troubles.)

And immediately lifts my SUV-backpack off me as soon as I'm in range, and carries it easily to his trunk (I'd been laboring under the thing.)



And waits for me to make a second trip so I can get everything out.

And has country music playing for me when I get in the car.

And makes the pretty drive up the hill, not the speedy one, all the while talking of happy things and his family (he knows I like his family...and I definitely like that his family likes me :P ).

And parks and hugs me, even though we both know I am filthy from work and need a shower - he's just happy to see me.

Then we get out into the bright sunshiny day, and he goes around to the trunk, throws my giant backpack on his back, grabs the trash bag (I had to set this thing down every 200 feet. It's kind of heavy.) in one hand, and the garment bag in the other, and RUNS up the dirt/gravel hill.

I got to carry his waterbottle. He said he can't run with it in his jeans pocket like that.

Then he slowed and waited to walk up the stairs with me.

And talked some sense and perspective into me, so that I realized I didn't have to unpack and put everything away RIGHT THEN - that had been one of the major stress points.

Then before I did anything with unpacking, he helped me find Viking's keys (I'd forgotten to bring them back to her Monday, and had work all day Tuesday - she wasn't able to find them in the room, either. Of course, silly us, we never once thought to look inside my running shoes.)



And talked with me while I unpacked one bag, just hanging out and discussing happy matters.

Viking came over, and we all went for Subway (since I'm in serious need of groceries).

Then we all stayed up, studied Proverbs, and sat about swapping work stories and legends.

And at the end, it was a really, really good day.

I wonder if it's just because he always decides to see them that way.

Well, I was about due for something like this.

The Ranger is a sort of rumpled red. It was less rumpled when Hammer owned it, but when Hammer transferred to a little island in the Pacific, he sold it to my dear friend, Viking. Viking maybe wasn't quite ready for her first vehicle to be something as big as the Ranger, but in time she learned how to take corners without taking them OUT, and it really does suit her personality.

That was about a year ago. This summer, we came back to hauling the rumpled red Ranger everywhere. We like it. This weekend, Viking had to work, and permitted me the use of her truck so that I could get a couple of the girls to Bible Study Friday night, and generally tool about with it all weekend.

Saturday afternoon, went to go see Oz the Magnificent (the message of which I actually really needed then, so, beautifully timed), and was lounging in the back of the truck, waiting for a friend, and observed a candy bar wrapper skittering across the parking lot.

The Gentleman's mentor, MedDad, has a saying about convictions - that a conviction is a belief you're willing to die for, or at least it's something you live out. You can argue about a belief without it ever showing up in your life - conviction does. I suppose that means I have a conviction about litter - it falls under, "If you see a problem, and you're able to FIX the problem, why wouldn't you?"

So, the plan was to hop out of the truck, capture the errant wrapper, stuff it in my pocket, and return to the truck.

The plan did not figure in one foot being slightly less committed to that hop than the other.
So I fell sideways about 8 feet to the pavement. Fortunately, training kicked in and I rolled, taking off a lot of the force of impact from my right shoulder. Unfortunately, situational awareness ALSO kicked in, and while I rolled facedown and could have continued to my left, I was also aware of that being the traffic lane, and I used my left arm to stop progress.

That may have been a mistake. Had there been traffic, would have been the right move, but there was not, and my arm wasn't strong enough to stop that much force without some serious damage. (And the Gentleman's appreciation for building physical strength to prevent injury suddenly makes much more sense now.)

What followed was pretty graceless, but I made it back to the truck.

Later that night, the Gentleman and I were joining friends for a cookout (read: throw a dead tree on a fire ring. Stuff some branches underneath. Set fire to it. Let hot dogs and marshmallows commence.), and while helping to clean up, I made the disastrous decision to lift a bag of marshmallows with my left hand.

That was about a 7 on the pain scale. (My pain scale has 8 as "curled up on the floor in the fetal position.") Hrm.

Monday morning, take my beautifully bruised (y'gotta see this one - it's a piece of work) arm down to medical. Our medical is a little goofy - just about anything but sheer stupidity is all covered under our work insurance, but if something isn't life-threatening, there are only specific hours when you can get it checked out. Weekend is not part of this.

X-rays say nothing is fractured. The nice friendly medic and I were both, "Yes, we already know THAT," owing to how it was performing. I can use the hand fine, I just can't rotate my arm or lift anything over two pounds (I tried lifting a filled waterbottle out of the Gentleman's sink the day before. It was a little humbling.).

The theory is that I have bruised/strained the tendons in and around my forearm, and managed one BEAUT of a bruise (this is probably my new record for bruising. As far as I can tell, that's not from the pavement at all - it's from the bones and everything else hitting the INSIDE of the skin really hard.) inside my left arm. The rest of me's got minor bruises and scrapes, but an unusable left arm has me a little queasy about the upcoming Tough Mudder on the 15th. We'll see what develops.

Return

Blogger is one of the sites blocked by the servers at work. This may mean I'll be changing blogs again at some point in the future. Or that I just won't post while we're traveling.

It's said that everyone loses their mind on an aircraft carrier on deployment, but that no one really notices because they all get it back within a month of returning home. I'd say this is true not in the sense of Cabin Fever from Muppet Treasure Island (I have heard of such things happening, but they were much longer and less challenging assignments than this), but rather that I found myself forgetting WHY the things that were important to me were important to me.

This is nicely ironic, because before we go, there's a mindset of , "Great, I'll be on deployment, I'll be able to get all kinds of work done without distractions!" I would say that one is physically capable, yes - focus, once one forgets where it is that one finds joy in life, focus is pretty much gone. It's possible to try to scare people into doing work (we call this, "fleeing a negative, pursuing a positive;" the concept is that if people only have one direction to go, presenting a negative for them to get away from as a motivator can work for a short time; boot camp is mostly based on this principle. The issue comes up because usually it's only for a short time that there's only one direction to go to evade the negative - techs are some of the most creative people I've met for evading what we don't want. So, while it seems harder, it's actually a lot less effort to make whatever it is that you want your people to do something that THEY want to do. I have one superior who gets this concept, and one that really doesn't.)

Upon returning, it was a few weeks before I managed to get my mental state back to anything like normalcy...and then I just got very quiet. I'm honestly not sure about blogging anymore; I feel like I don't have all that much to say. But, this one just started as a way for those who like to keep tabs on my up-tos to do so. I have a history of forgetting to let people know what I'm doing, believing on some level that since I know, they must of course know. I don't know that this is particularly interesting, but I think if I try to be entertaining, it's not going to happen.

Underway, it made sense to keep a sort of weekly log, but I think I'll just pick something to share from each day. Whenever I get my internet-tomfoolery attended to, there might even be pictures!

Rust In Peace

Ran across a facebook profile.

Former acquaintance has moved to Florida and we will likely not be crossing paths again - "Well, he seems to be doing well. Good for him."

Same former acquaintance's absolute beater of a Honda (he's probably had it since he was 18 if not 16) has finally died. "What?? No!!"

I form a rather strong attachment to cars with "character." 

Coffee

"On deployment, some of the female sailors have boyfriends, a few have girlfriends. I have decided, next deployment, I'm going to date the coffee machine."
"...?"
"No, it's great. I always know where to find him, nothing about his lifestyle puts a crimp in mine, and he's got at least a 97% success rate on making me happy whenever we have time together."
"Yeah, but you're exclusive. You'd still have to share it with 2000 people."
"....there is that."




So, over the last six months, I have developed a lovely and apparently quite permanent ("stable" may not be the best term for it) relationship with coffee. This was originally developed of necessity - half my days underway are 16 hours long, some are 20, and a rare few run to the 27-30 range.

I usually lose sanity during a week of the latter.

I take this time as an opportunity to experiment with my physiology, basically see how long I can keep running on various forms of alternative fuel - working out, playing with hot vs. cold showers, these particular foods make me feel heavy and sleepy, these others keep me pretty stable, eating every six hours, eating every two hours...and of course, the experimentation of coffee.

Despite the popularity of the "Monster" energy drink, this isn't considered an option. There was an experience in my Apprenticeship school. Apprentice School was a time when, 5 days a week, we were in class from 4 pm til midnight, covering a week's worth of material every night. The proffered Monster seemed like a good idea at the time. That is all that will be said on the subject.


How much coffee. How often. Try espresso instead (in me, we have found that espresso produces more lasting energy, gradually ramping up to peak, while coffee spikes and then drops a bit to a manageable plateau for about four hours). Mix coffee and cappucino. Mix with plain milk. Drink an equal amount of water (this, interestingly, seems to yield the best energy results, but as long as I maintain it, requires that I go find a bathroom about once an hour).

I really like coffee. More specifically, I really like the emotional spike that I get from it. The two people who most suffer the results of this, however, are my friend Lance and my supervisor. At one point, my supervisor actually forbid me from ever having coffee during work hours again. Considering that at the time, I seem to recall being four inches off the ground, vibrating like a 180-pound hummingbird, grinning madly, and unable to put spaces in between my words, he was probably justified in his assessment. Lance is my very married buddy on the ship - his attitude towards me seems to be a sort of enduring bafflement and amusement. The coffee runs fuel much of the second one.





One of the other women I see sometimes, as I have to run paperwork through her office, asked me the other day if I was all right, that I didn't really seem to be myself anymore. I was taken aback, since I was pretty happy and didn't feel as though I'd been putting on any kind of front. She referenced the way I'd been when I first arrived, and I thought about it, and realized that she was referring to a sort of happy innocence I projected. I'd become much more serious over deployment.

Everyone has some issues wrestling with life on deployment. You miss real food, time to think, seeing someone other than the same 30 people every day (yes, the population of my ship is almost exactly that of my hometown, but the ones I actually WORK with are a more select sampling), your loving schmoopsie-poo back home, real food, hot showers, privacy...etc. This was my first experience of life on a ship, so the transition may have been a little rougher for me, I don't know. You only get one chance to do something the first time. But, of necessity after one's first deployment is a psych eval. They concluded that I had some issues with anxiety, and then investigating my lifestyle, decided that I drink too much coffee and should limit myself to two cups a day

Pooh.

Lance learned at some point that I'd taken some creative liberties with this. Not in the sense of redefining a cup (as was proposed by one of my girlfriends, "You just need one of those quart-size mugs!"), but dividing it up a bit. Now, I could fill up my travel mug...or I could put 2-4 oz in it 4 times a day, cut it with milk or something, and just ride a series of little spikes the whole day. Yes yes yes. Medical should be happy, I am happy, as long as I get my work done my supervisor is happy, and Lance retains his source of entertainment. Brilliance.

I was talking with my Mom about this, who by astonishing coincidence has known me longer than anybody, describing with amusement some of my joyful spazzes with Lance (eg, "It'srainingit'srainingit'srainingit'sraining!" "Sophie, we live in the Pacific Northwest. It rains 4 days out of 5." "It'srainingit'srainingit'sraining!!"). She made an observation that I'd clean forgotten about - that persona isn't at all unusual. Up until Apprentice School, and honestly a good chunk of that time, that's exactly who I was - overhappy joyful spaz celebrating the most menial things.

It seems that coffee simply cuts through all the grey steel of the lifestyle that's weighing everything down, and shows who I really am without the influence of the ship.

I'm very okay with this.

Scent of Rain

Getting out of the car for an early morning McDonalds stop. Breathe. Breathe again.
My Dad refers to McDonalds as, "a fine Scottish restaurant!"
I have experienced rainstorms in Singapore and Malaysia. Around Seattle, three consecutive days without rain is very uncommon.

But the rain here smells different. It's a scent I'd forgotten, that I didn't know I'd missed. Rain everywhere else just seems to be falling water. This, this is HOME.

It helps a bit that my home state is significantly inland by comparison to where I live now, so during the summer months it's much warmer (and during the winter, a good deal colder). Engages more of my senses. 78-degree thunderstorm. Nice.

Coming in, I noticed the absence of mountains. Started thinking about the way I love MN, vs. the way I loved the Bighorns and Olympic Peninsula. I love seeing those mountains, there's so much promise of challenge, interesting places to explore, big quiet to get lost in. MN, feels like I know everything already, there isn't a challenge there...but it's because I know everything well that it's home.

I had a friend who went to both Baghdad and Afghanistan a few years ago. He told me that the reason he could take on the chaos there was because he knew I was a "safe place" waiting for him back home. He could carry the thought of that safe place with him, keep him a little sane on the field, and he could fight to protect that safe place, because the chaos there must not reach here. And maybe that's how I feel about MN. I can go all over the world and take on these big challenging things, while MN doesn't exactly challenge me. Actually, MN's the opposite; here's where I can sit back and breathe. Get my air back, my mind back, so I can go charging up another mountain somewhere else.

Halfway There!

So, just after the halfway point on this deployment, we visit Dubai!

As this is what's referred to as a "working port", rather than a "liberty port," for my division, I cannot say that I've seen very much of the country. But, I've had land under my feet, worn civilian clothing, eaten WAY too much food, and been able to call home.

The last six weeks...well, I can say I've learned a lot. It seems, however, that the more I learn, the less I talk. Part of this is also because I'm a little concerned (somewhere very deep down) about my social skills. I think I've come to the point where I can interact fairly well with the people in my shop, just fine with the people throughout the ship, and decently with anyone else who's been in the military...but I apparently have some sort of sector-specific Asperger's when it comes to civilians.

I don't get the nuances. I don't know what's okay. I tend to be very serious when I do talk, except that it's laced with irony. Very deadly things are funny, because that's just how we deal with them. It's not that we're making light of them, we're acknowledging that they're serious by being funny about them.

I think this might actually be akin to what I think of as Irish humor.

So, the fact that you have cancer? Humor fodder. The fact that you are dying of cancer? Well, we'll first cautiously evaluate how you feel about that from a line or two after you drop that announcement, and then it's great fodder for humor (as long as you're cool with it). We are also the same crew who will all take you to the bar to get socially wasted on that news, if you want to take your mind off it and have a night out with friends who are there for you. Or, we'll stand staunchly by you and knock out anybody who takes it flippantly if you're reeling from it.

Divorce? Yep. Radiation leaks? Definitely. Finding out that thanks to your years of service you can't have kids? Hilarious. Because you're already laughing on it. Because we've got this idea of, "Well, I can't change it, I might as well find some humor in it, and, *expletive*, that actually is pretty funny!"

I have some distant memory that such things were NOT as funny among me and my friends before the Navy. In fact, I think I was one of the people who was always ready to get offended. So, I just sit, and listen. Plus, I'm probably taking in memories to revisit later in my bunk like chocolate-chip cookies*, and don't want to interrupt. My two cents are not needed.

*not that I eat cookies in my rack. That would be messy and gross. But I can revisit the memory of cookies, and my imagination is now very good at generating such things.

So, when I DO talk, it's sometimes very serious. And this, I think, might also be awkward. It's a sort of, "If I don't get the chance to talk with you for another year, or ever, I want to have at least said this to you."

These might all be the result of 1st year on a ship. Maybe in 2 years, I won't notice any of this. :)

This is the first time I've had relatively open internet in months. On the ship, videos take too much bandwidth to allow, and blogs are considered unnecessary for work, so I'm catching up with these. My youngest sister is kind enough to email me her blog posts, so first priority is in fact a friend of my middle sister's, who plays guitar and writes lyrics that I hang on. Also, Ursula Vernon, whose art, comics, and words I've been following for about seven years. I will likely never meet her, but I love reading her and her art is a lovely whimsy (or sometimes a savagely beautiful whimsy). Forgotten pleasures.

Subway. In the words of Gollum, "We forgot the taste of bread." Oh, but I love fresh-baked bread. I might just go in there and order a foot-long honey-oat loaf for supper tonight. I haven't decided.

Caribou! Okay, to back up a hair, the USO in Dubai has a place just off the pier referred to as "The Sandbox," or "The Oasis," sort of an open-air plaza of everything we've missed most. There's a coffee place, a pizza/grill place, Subway, two electronics/music stores, a smoke shop, some sort of salon, a massage parlor, the list goes on. We are, however, forbidden to take pictures here - this seems to be a common theme through most of this area of the world when we visit. Anyway, I am now fortified with that divine blend of chocolate and espresso that makes my euphoria sing.

I have hit an interesting revelation (because apparently we're not done with introspection yet). I don't want a relationship. I do, on the level that I've ALWAYS wanted to be the Princess pursued by the Knight, but really, right now, for what's going on in life and for where I am emotionally, I really want...a dog.

Seriously. It just occurred to me last week that I have been dreaming about a guy as a dog-substitute. I want a buddy to play with, a running partner, someone who's always happy to see me come home, who I can hang out with and not have to talk to, but whose presence just reminds me of what matters to me.

But, having a dog requires having a house (all right, yes, admittedly, in an apartment, I could have a SMALL dog, but I want an Aussie. Or a Goldie. Or a Bernese Mountain Dog. Actually, I found an Aussie/BMD cross on petfinder last night, and had to fight to remind myself that a) I am in the middle of the North Arabian Sea right now, b) I still live on the ship, not yet a barracks, when we get back to homeport, c) even if I do get to live in the barracks, I can't have a dog there, and most importantly, d) I spend about 3/4 of the year out to sea, and should not get solo custody of so much as a Siamese fighting fish right now.), and suddenly I launch once more into what's been called my "Point A to Point D" thinking, where I cannot afford a down payment on a house right now, so I should start saving, and also intensify my focus on my nursing degree and landing work at Mayo as soon as I get out, and what's the housing market like along this particular road I like near Roch...oh right. I'm still in the Navy.

But, all my limbs are attached, most of my skin is still on, I have received some sleep and still retain a sense of humor (it might not look the way it did before, but it's there!) and am grateful for many, many things in life. I may or may not get to call my family again tonight, and I am scheduled to be back in the States in a few months. Is good life.