Sunday was kind of a reflective day ... ok, that meant nothing got done ... lets let that go
Good morning! It’s me. We’re up on schedule, but Rich is ahead of schedule this morning. We saw him off a few moments ago and it’s only 5:30 am. I think he’s going to be leaving at 5:10 am every morning for the next 6 weeks to be at his new consulting job at 6 am. I guess that’s when the birds catch the worms. Hmm, make that Union worms. Yeeks! Today his goal is to hang around and check out people, plus he’s got to clean his office. Hmm, you think that’s something THEY would do before he got there. Eh, I guess its not that way though.My baby look bushy-tailed this morning … He was up for the task. His immediate new boss will be back tomorrow so he should be more assertive that day. Ahh, not only did the sneaky bum steal my cookies last night, but this morning he turned off the air. We just opened the front door to let inside the morning coolness. Missy said thank you. And, is now contemplating going out. She’s cuing in to her strategic advantages of being out there. Hmm, some kind of work machinery started … maybe they are working on the new shopping development at the other side of our main artery. Just seems like a worker turned on his truck.
Missy is nonchalantly giving herself a bath. I guess that’s one of her morning tasks. I was thinking that if I did the same that I could have a straight through period of time to write. Hmm, that’s a consideration. Anything I need to think out first and immediately? Think we don’t have too many Thom thoughts. Most likely he’ll be up in about 20 minutes. His schedule says
Combat Hunter 0545 – 0715
Day Optical Dev 0715-0930
Night Opt Dev 1130-1330
PT/Combat Cond 1330-1530
Land Nav 1530-1945
I could see breakfast before 5:45, but I’m not reading in their stop and take an hour for lunch and dinner. I’ve heard though that they get more MRE’s, which are their packaged meals. Maybe they are then eating and running. I don’t really know what combat hunter means, but I’m thinking they are going to be chasing down inevitable illusionary bad guys. Seems they’d be taking the aggressor role. Day or Night Optical Development seems like they are going to be looking through some strange lenses. PT is of course physical training and combat conditioning … that seems just hard. And land navigation would mean they’ll be looking at maps, or using compasses or some such thing. All in all it seems like he has kinda a busy day.
Up ahead of him for the week are a few McMap sessions … that’s his hand to hand combat/karate. And, it looks like on Friday he’s got a 10K hike. Those are usually loaded down with all kinds of heavy gear. Hmm, let me see what I can figure there … It appears the red writing might be weapons. There’s a ton of it next week. Looks like M203 is the grenade launcher, AT-4 is the Rocket Launcher, CM then would be probably the basics of combat marksmanship. M240B would be a medium machine gun and IED would of course be an improvised explosive devise and M249 would be a squad automatic weapon. I’m also thinking that BDR is some kind of a briefing, because they hold it most mornings. FT seems to have something to do with assaults … oh good they are teaching defense too! Week 4 starts with tests, and then I think they are into an outdoor experience that’s listed for 3 ½ days as battle skills exercise. Some nights they are not ending until 2000 or 2130, which seems to me to be 8-9:30 pm. I guess bad guys don’t stop at the end of daylight. Those sure are long days to put in.
Ok, that’s good with me … what’s your kids doing this week and next? Gees, I’m sure glad my other boys aren’t putting themselves out there with needs to be learning this kind of stuff. Joe’s Karate includes weapons, but nothing like grenade launcher or anything. More like Numchucks, swords and poles. Well, that could be pretty gruesome too I suppose … let’s concentrate on Maury. AHH … only thing that could happen there is that some crazy Chicagoan driver could hit him, or set their unfriendly dog on him … EEKS what have I done in raising kids? You would of thought they’d just be sitting in a nice air conditioned office? No such luck.
Maybe I better get in that shower. None of this is making me entirely happy.
Ahh that’s better … I took a shower, took my medicine, and got the bag ready to go.
I’ve earned myself 25-30 more minutes. Missy is a little discombobulated, but other than that we’re set to go. Ok, ok … that’s enough of that. We gave her a real good pet.
Let’s see anything happen over the weekend we haven’t written about yet? Hmm, we didn’t spend too much time writing. We did watch a psychiatrist show where he talked about the brain. His name was Daniel Amen. Not sure if you’ve heard of him, but he seems to have capsulated the effect of image scanning the brain – and from there he does a lot on telling you what makes a healthy and an unhealthy brain.
Most of it is like take multi-vitamins, drink water, exercise, do fish oil, green tea, etc. Nothing too startling on that end. He was a good presenter though. You could tell he had the whole thing memorized and had honed it after many previous speeches, but it was informative and interesting.
I didn’t want to hear him the second time they presented the same material. You could guess this was PBS and they are on a fund drive. I bit the temptation to get the cool stuff for $356 dollars. I did look him up on Amazon, but didn’t want to go as far as reading him. I was guessing that I already had his best stuff through the talk.
I did end up spending other time at Amazon though. Actually, I went in through my connection at MarineParents.com. I ordered 9 books for a total of $82 (including shipping. The shipping was the hard part – without it the books would have cost only $50. I was getting books for $.01 and $1.99. There might have been one book that was cheaper through Amazon, but the others we got through their Marketplace people. That seems to be a pretty good deal. I can get a very good price and usually I order books that are like new or new. I’m not disappointed.
The books I got were books on Marines. I took the top layer of Marineparents top choices. I decided that if Thom was going to go into the Marines – and is actually there already, I’m going to learn as much about the war as I can handle. I think its going to get worse as to things that Thom can’t tell me about. So, I’m going to need getting my information from this other source. There are a variety of books.
There are about 70 other books on Marines behind this first set. Whatever they got to say, I’m going to be figuring it out. I’m not sure Rich is going to be real happy about that, but I need more information than I’m getting straight from MP.com. I think actually that Tracy Del Vecchio the founder spends a lot of her time reading war books too. She has a list of them on the site that she gives her personal comments toward. She’s been around the block. I think she must be a terrifically smart person. I think she’s in her 40’s. She has a son who went to war and then came back, so she’s got to be at least that. She seems young. I’m a little frustrated that they haven’t picked me up for a volunteer, but I’m not going to push that for a bit. I think I’m going to do some reading so I have more an idea of what’s going on. There are a lot of military things I don’t know, like I don’t know the difference between a 3/7 or 1/5. I think it has to do with battalion and platoon numbers, but there are a lot of things like this that are mentioned and I feel clueless. It might come after a while.
There’s so much to be learning.
Other than that there wasn’t too much more on the night. I ended up watching some of the gymnastics tryouts and after that watched one of those shows where they spend 2 hours getting to the point of whether the person is guilty or not. Sort of … they try to leave it a big mystery in saying did she get off scot-free or was she innocent. I didn’t like the main interviewer or that they went over the same thing so many times. It was on when Rich came home about 8:30-9:00 pm. He was really tired. I think he had a good time, but he didn’t talk too much because of the tiredness. He lay down on the couch and let me rub his feet while he drifted in and out of sleep. That worked until the end of the show. My poor baby…
That gets us to about now. Nothing much going on here except I need to get myself dressed and to work. *Sigh* It’ll be ok, right?
posted by Ann Marie @ 6/23/2008 06:42:00 AM
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