Packing (again)

Well, it's been a really fabulous 44 hours at home, but there's a 0730 flight with my name all over it tomorrow.

[sigh]

I am off to another lovely vacation spot in the American South, this time for a bit of professional military NCO education. It will be, I am certain, absolutely fucking fascinating.

[puts on big girl panties, stops whining]

If it hasn't become obvious, I'm desperately trying to fufill the educational requirements for the next pay grade before...anything happens that might make going to schools impossible. KnowwhatImean?

It's a pretty short one, and at a far more civilized location than the past couple of outings have been. I truly, deeply and honestly believe that I'll be able to keep sharing my sunshine with y'all during this one.

Now, to finish up packing. I'm missing my Army Mandated Pre-Execution Checklist, which I completed at last drill and brought home and which is now...somewhere in this house, in one of the fifty gazillion manila folders we keep tucked in high places so Jack doesn't eat them.

I totally missed this

You all will have to forgive me for recycling old news. I was hanging out in Michigan a week ago when, it seems, Sen. Clinton was throwing a few back in a bar in Indiana.

I have got to admit, I got a kick out of that. Particularly when I asked the Mister, "did that actually happen?" and he replied, "Yep. And she looked like a pro."

...although Clinton is no stranger to late night drinks with the press and her staff, she usually prefers red wine or the trendy wheat ale Blue Moon with a slice of orange, not the watery light beer in the glass mug she waved in the air so proudly as the crowd chanted her name.

Now, of course, this is all part of Hillary's last-ditch attempt to connect as the "regular guy" Democrat. And I think it's pretty effective, particularly when contrasted with Senator Obama's pathetic record of public beer drinkin'.

...the Illinois senator mocked Clinton for taking a shot of whiskey in front of TV cameras. But it's not that Obama hasn't made attempts to connect with voters in a bar, as well — On a bus tour stop on March 28, Obama had a few sips of beer with [Penn. Senator Bob] Casey in front of the press. He did not finish the beer. Emphasis added

This campaign really is getting more entertaining by the day.

I now return you all to normal blogging, which is not based on week-old news.

Just an aside...

My guard dogs suck. I came home at 0410, opened the garage door, pulled in, got Jack and one bag out of the Jeep, shut the garage door, and opened to door to the house, while talking to the puppy.

Did I get barked at? No. I did not.

Were my legs ripped off by my G. Shepherd? No. They were not.

I was in the kitchen turning the light on before Sparky came blinking out of the bedroom. My fierce, wardog Marine husband? He finally woke up after I shook his knee for several seconds.

And Casey woke up when I turned the bathroom light on. She got petted, then promptly went back to sleep.

Although it's probably technically impossible to successfully invade Bad Dog Central, it seems you can do whatever you want here in the middle of the night as long as you don't drop any plates on the floor.

Look what followed me home

No. Not another dog. No way in Hell.

[shudders]

Anyway.



Cousin Randy won this, I think, at an NRA banquet or something. He goes to a lot of those. He doesn't need it, I might be able to use it, and so it came home with me, with only the vague instruction to see if I could find "something kinda like" my ProCarry to send up to him. Eventually. Someday. No hurry.

I guess that means I can keep it and send him a pistol, or trade it for a pistol for him, or sell it and buy him a pistol, or take no action for quite some time.

I think Randy mostly wanted to send me home with a rifle of the sort I'd told him I was seeking.

It's a Remington 700 in .308. The scope is a Nikon, and I have no idea what the heck the story is with the bipod. Front and rear irons are in a little baggie, along with some sort of green Remington locking safety doohicky. It hasn't been fired.

I was looking more for a .270, but there's not a thing in the world wrong with .308, and it is in fact what the Mister's open-country scoped rifle fires.

It's in the gun room, hanging out with its bipod extended. The Mister ought to be home soon (your tax dollars bailing out of work early!), and I think we'll stand around and scratch our heads and try to figure out its fate.

Home!

Depart Hastings, Michigan at 0840 Thursday, arrive Bad Dog Central at 0410 Friday. 1,234 miles in...20.5 hours.

Total cigarettes consumed...roughly 23 in Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. Another 16 were needed to make it across Arkansas and partway across Texas.

Pushups done at rest stops in order to get blood flowing, roughly 80.

Powdered donuts vomited on the dog bed in the back of my Jeep - 3. But that wasn't until within 100 miles of home, so I just dragged Jack up front, told him it was OK, and put the pedal down.

I know driving that far in one swoop isn't ideal, but when I don't get tired until after the thousand-mile mark, there's no way I'm stopping.

It's nice to be home, and to have slept whatever there was of the night in my own bed, surrounded by the rest of my pack.

Everybody

likes motels.



Not only was he allowed on the bed (which never happens in normal life), but interstate motels are chock-full of neat smells.

I was a little intrigued by what might have caused him to sniff wildly at the edge of the bedspread, but I decided I didn't really want to think about it. Sometimes, I think we're all glad that our noses can't tell us as much as dogs' noses tell them.

Hanging out with the fam'

My first morning up here, I did Mandatory Breakfast with Gramma. Her routine involves a 0700 sharp appearance at the Big Boy restaurant in the next town over, and was mildly put out that my Dad insisted a 0800 departure.

Gramma is a Big Boy frequent flier - the other breakfast people all know her, and she has a "usual" order. She waited tables for about 100 years, and feels entirely free to offer helpful input to the breakfast waitresses. Although there is a "please wait to be seated" sign, she ignores it and heads directly to "her" table upon entry.

Yes, she is the Terror of Big Boy.

But it's a community, and she enjoys participating in it. She won a quilt in a cancer benefit raffle there a couple of years back (after her brush with esophogeal cancer), and paid that win back by knitting an afghan for their most recent raffle.

Gramma is a...brisk woman, and although I wasn't there when she donated the afghan, I can imagine her thumping it down on the counter and directing the nearest staff member, "You's can use this in your next cancer raffle," then heading out the door with absolutely no further discussion.

Small towns and their gathering places are wonderful because there's a place in them for every character, even the afghan-knitting Terror of Big Boy.

Holy crap!

I'm a smoker. I can count the number of times I've interacted with smokeless tobacco on hand and have several fingers left over.

However, if I had any confidence that this sign was anything but an odd arrangement of words, I'd buy stock in Copenhagen



I mean, c'mon. How cool would that be?

Sign courtesy of one of the fine gas stations of Wayland, Michigan.

What happens in northern Tennessee...

I'm 720 miles from home, rolling around in a motel bed with a handsome black guy. The downside, of course, is that he's neutered, has a tail, and requires frequent reminders that there's no ass-licking on the bed.

I'm well past the halfway point, which always makes me happy. I added about 50 miles to my trip by refusing to drive in either Oklahoma (which has been trying to kill me with its weather for about eight years now) or Illinois (because I don't think there's any way on earth to make my Jeep groovy with their firearms transport laws, and their gas is expensive).

I did the always-fun search for the rattiest available motel, and found one that didn't care if I wanted to bring a donkey into my room if I didn't mind paying the $5 pet fee.

Average mileage per gallon over the first 557.5 miles of travel was 17.17, which isn't bad considering I'm around 3000 rpm at 73 mph (my preferred speed of travel). I probably lost some off that average battling the wind on the last leg, but I won't have the numbers until I fill up in the morning. Unleaded regular ran me an average of $3.292/gallon, but two of the three fillups were in Arkansas, so that number is going nowhere but up.

It's late, and one of us has been pretty nervous, so he probably needs one more "out" before we call it a night.

Weather

I do not normally wake up for bad weather. But a band of storms came through last night that had me catapulting out of bed around 0330.

All is well here, but I did note one thing... I got up, peered out the windows, muttered "Holy shit...." Then I heard some sirens start up.

I was farily sure that meant something bad, but I figured it was possible they were sounding because it was
A - a severe thunderstorm warning
B - a tornado warning
C - a flash flood warning (there are several "low spots" in our immediate area)

Satellite TV is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine in heavy rain, so I hit a local news website to find out what the story was. That proved entirely useless, offering some random imagery of a band of heavy weather, and NO INFORMATION on warnings or watches.

Fortunately, weather.com is always there for me, and as soon as I entered my ZIP code, let me know that we were under just about every sort of warning one gets in Texas, tornado included.

Seeing as we don't have a basement and neither of us felt like hiding in the closet, I went back to bed and to sleep at that point. But it was nice to know. Cheers for weather.com, and a big boo-hiss to nbc51.

Incidentally, there was more heavy weather out there last night. I'm taking off on a road trip today, and the other end of the evil weather was in the county next to my destination.

Could be a fun drive.

Note to self:

The day after running an Army physical fitness test may not be the best day to get range time. Because it's awfully hard to hold a pistol at arm's length for any length of time when one has spaghetti arms as a result of pushups.

[sigh]

We're off for a couple days of fishing. The laptop is coming along in case there's internet access.

Woo-hoo!

27 days on orders for the Wart Yolk evolution, followed by a regular weekend drill. That's 29 days of early mornings and uniforms.

So this evening, I'm watching a Star Wars marathon with the Mister and catching up on some of the beer I haven't been drinking when I've needed to be present and coherent before sunrise.

Extra bonus for tonight - a quick shot of the infamous "Wire Moment," or, at least, the aftermath a few hours later. Not so bad, really.

Easy fixes

So there I was, driving to Wart Yolk. I was getting a very strange vibration out of the Jeep's bass.

I was not happy. The Jeep is not a quiet ride, and I like to drive with music I can hear. But I was getting a buzzy rattle. Or a rattly buzz. Something uncool.

I got home, pointed out to the Mister that I'd like him to take a look at the speaker. I have another, longer, road trip coming up, and if I needed to replace a speaker, I wanted to know.

"You probably blew it," he said.

I shrugged. I dunno. Couldn't remember cranking the volume real recently, but there are a lot of things I can't remember.

Last night he got around to it. We went out in the driveway and skipped around on the CD until we found something with some bass. He turned the volume up, cocked his head (kinda like Jack watching TV, now that I think about it). Listened. Turned around and gave me the Oh God My Wife Is Retarded look.

He reached down next to my seat, extracted a manila folder with eight or ten sheets of spare Army paperwork. Turned the volume way up.

No rattle. No buzz.

"You want to keep things from being, you, know, like pinned up against the speaker."

[sigh]

My hero.

Home

Is always a nice place to be. Particularly when the Mister has made fresh coffee and swept up the excess dog hair.

Life is good.

Ahh...civilization

I am out of the woods, and back in the relatively civilized "rear" area of Wart Yolk. My group has another day or so of turning crap in before we actually leave.

"Turning stuff in" is always excruciating, but we're progressing. I already had the single most painless vehicle washing experience of my military career, when we pulled into the washracks and found...a herd of privates with power washing equipment. How about that?

The internet access point shares a space with a fast food eatery, so it's packed. It is, however, not packed with my soldiers, which is kinda nice. I love soldiers, and the Army, but it doesn't take long before you beging to crave being not talked to. I had an especially talkative bunch this time. Two of the three were in capable of embracing silence. It got painful.

I shall probably return tomorrow. I have lots of things to catch up on, and the fast food is calling my name.

About the wire...

Ok,ok! About the wire. Sometimes, you need wire and do not have gloves. Hands heal. However, I will be adding a pair of heavy leather gloves to my bag in the future. My time in the woods here at Wart Yolk is nearing its end. Fortunate, because I need internet access, a cold beer and some not-Army companionship. Unfortunately, those things will most likely come in that order.

Things that make you say, "DUH!"

Because I am a slow learner, I yet again handled concertina wire without gloves. Ouch.

Too much fun

I did not forget my boots, and the trip down here was as much fun as a convoy of civilian vehicles traveling 62mph down the interstate can be. Ugh. It's embarassing to be passed by those houses being pulled behind semi's.

I had envisioned the internet to be easier to find, and Blogger to be harder to get to. Instead it's the opposite.

The training evolution we're participating in sounds pretty interesting, but it hasn't really hit full swing yet. I will give the Army some props - they are doing a tremendous amount of research to try to keep their training updated and relevent.

That said, I should probably bail out and return to the parking lot that is our unofficial company headquarters. Actually, it's the hood of one humvee. But we like it, and sit around drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and bullshitting while leaning up against it.

I love this stuff. I can't believe they pay me to do it.

Ready to go (again)

Hitting the road again tomorrow for more motivating training.

I don't think I'll be entirely off the map - I should be able to reach out and post a couple of times. We'll see. I may also look into testing some posting-with-the-aid-of-others options.

Tonight was packing. I love packing.



Yeah. That's the "at home" version of the gear layout. I don't know if I'm forgetting something major or if I'm just less inclined to tote along gear I know I won't use (e-tool? I am not dragging an e-tool around anymore), but it didn't seem like much stuff at all.

It packed up nicely, too.



There's room in all those bags, and, since I forgot shoes earlier this week, I am imagining all sorts of stuff I may have left out.

But the important stuff is there: helmet? check. armor and gear? check. cigarettes? check. shower shoes? check.

Everything else will work itself out.

Wow.

I have absolutely nothing to say today.

I could give you a recap of today's pre-training training with the Army, but it was pretty dull the first time, and believe you me, you are not interested.

I did manage to show up in PT gear, participate in PT, shower and partially change before I realized that although I had a complete Army Combat Uniform in my bag, my boots were tucked neatly under the end of my bed. At the house. Forty miles from the Reserve Center.

The only thing better than being the Daily Dumbass is being the Daily Dumbass who wears her slightly-rank PT uniform all day.

[sigh]

If we can't serve as a positive example, we can always serve as a warning.