1 Week!

Our last major academic type thing for OBC was the staff ride at Wilson's Creek which we did today. How exciting, all we have left is the banquet, which should be fun; the rites of passage, in which we're formally accepted into the MP Corps; and outprocessing. It's so exciting.

Bitter, Sore and Still Not Promoted

Grrr, forewarning, this is a gripe session. I'm going to complain, pure and simple.

First, my computer died last week. I mean hard core, straight up, bit the big one, do not pass go, do not collect $200 (well Best Buy collected, but that's besides the point), I lost every single thing that I had. Everything. My pictures from Cambridge, Rome, Naples, Pompeii, France. The file of my graduation. My 50 page M.Phil dissertation and all of my various papers from my master's degree. All of the music that I had legitimately paid for and downloaded. All of the programs that I need are now locked out because I don't have the product code to activate them. It's all gone. It's so not fair, it really makes me want to scream. Or cry. I haven't really vented too much about this, because I kept hoping that they could recover some of the things that I had on my old hard drive. They couldn't. I want to smash this stupid thing, I'm so mad about it, but that would really only exacerbate the problem, so I don't think I'll be taking that course of action.

Next, I ache like an 80 year old woman. We did the 15 mile road march for the German Proficiency Badge yesterday. Only because of the way they marked it out, it was really like 16 miles. Not that 1 mile is really that much more, but with the way my feet, ankles, calves, knees, hips, etc were feeling yesterday, that 1 extra mile was about enough to put me over the edge. Our class looked hilarious today because probably a good half of the class was limping around pathetically. I have never had blisters that bad before. I could literally take all the skin off my heel if I cut away the blister, but needless to say, I didn't, I'm trying to keep the skin on as long as possible or it's going to be about a hundred times worse. At least we got the gold award, and I never have to do that again... unless Drum decides to send us to Air Assault. I've learned to never say never.

Finally, today was 18 months from graduation. Translation, today is supposed to be the day that the members of the Class of '04 get promoted. Well, because of the situation I'm in, nobody seems to have any clue about who is supposed to actually cut and process my promotion orders. And when I brought this up before Thanksgiving I was told not to worry about it, because it was still a ways off and it would be dealt with in time. Well, since I didn't get promoted today, it didn't happen in time. I'm pretty sure that it won't really affect anything, because the date of rank should still be today no matter when they actually cut the orders, but I hate the fact that I was put off for so long, and everyone felt like telling me it was my fault today, even though I brought this to their attention multiple times in the past few weeks. I can't win. I just can't win.

*Sigh* That felt good to get some of that off my chest.

Counting Down

It seems to me, the more I think about it, that for the last 6 years or so, my life has revolved around counting down. Days until high school graduation, days until R-Day, days until Beast was over, days until I wasn't a plebe any longer, days until Infantry Week was finished, days until starting at Navy, days until I got to go back to West Point, days until I was a firstie, days until I got my ring, days until the Gates interview, days until graduation, days until starting at Cambridge, days until my dissertation had to be handed in, days until leaving England, days until reporting to Ft. Leonard Wood, days until OBC actually started, days until the field exercise, days until the field exercise was over. And now, it's days until I get promoted (12) and days until graduation (21).
It's funny though, because it reminds me of the quote "Life is a journey, not a destination." Yet, because of the way things have been, a significant portion of my life has been spent worrying about the minutes until the next event rather than the moments that I was experiencing.
Of course, I'm still going to continue to count down to meaningful events, because its kind of my check on where my life is headed, after all, if I didn't look forward to anything, what would be the point, but now the upcoming events are a bit more nebulous than they were in the past. Kinda makes the countdowns a bit more difficult to do, but hey, I'm sure I'll find something. :-)

Field Exercise Complete!

One month from today I'll be finished with OBC! Woo-hoo!!

Last week was a big step towards finishing all our graduation requirements with the completion of the Field Exercise. It was seven days and six nights of super funness. Well, it was that time frame, and it was probably one of the easier FTXs I've been on (not that I've been on that many), but it wasn't quite the high-speed, all things super-duper MPish that I'd been expecting. At times it felt more like a Girl Scout camping trip with HMMWVs and weapons.
Compared to WP Infantry Week, this was a campout for sure. We had tents, cots, sleeping bags, two hot meals a day, and usually had a solid 6 hours of sleep a night. It was also strange to have the HMMWVs and not have to ruck everything everywhere. Of course, I'm not complaining, it was an improvement for sure. I think I even enjoyed myself, except for when I got really sick and was throwing up with some random 24-hour stomach flu bug that was going around, and then on the last morning when our instructors decided that CS riot gas was a superb way to wake us up. Oh well, it was worth a good laugh. Most of the girls in the tent, myself included, had slept in just our underwear and polypro tops or t-shirts, so when we were woken up by the Artillery simulators, and then started to get that awful tingling in our noses and lungs that let us know it was CS, we were all sitting on our cots in polypro, underwear, disheveled hair and pro-mask. Talk about super hotness. We all could have passed for the Miss Army November calendar... or not. I'm sure we could have won America's Funniest home videos if anyone had recorded it.