Woohoo! I just got my DOD decal for my car, which will make life a lot easier this weekend. I had heard it usually takes about a month for them to process the request, and since I turned the paperwork in on Tuesday, I figured that there was no way it would be done in time. I said a small prayer, and it worked:) Now I won't have to worry about the long traffic lines in the non-DOD decal lane when trying to get back on post.

Loving the vitamin C.

Alyson is a great person. She's kind, easy to get along with, a great roommate, but sometimes she share's a little too much. I say this because she has decided to share her cold with me. Ever since I got back to school I've been taking a multi-vitamin and drinking a glass of OJ at breakfast in hopes of avoiding catching anything. The period after a break is prime time for catching colds, because everyone brings back all the bugs from where they've been over the break. Alyson caught a nasty sounding cold last week that has left her voice sounding more like a frog than a human. My plan of avoiding getting sick was working until I lay down for a nap this afternoon and I noticed a little pre-cold tickle in my throat. I've spent the rest of the evening drinking water, eating oranges, eating Ricola vitamin C drops, and going for a run, in hopes that I can fend this thing off. So far it doesn't seem to be working. The runny nose started during my hw, and my head is starting to feel more and more cold-like. I figure I'll know the answer for sure tomorrow morning after crew practice.

Ring weekend begins the day after tomorrow, or in 1 hour 10 minutes, tomorrow. YAY!!

It seems that recently I've been having more and more aches and pains. My foot last semester, my shoulders, stupid cold, and also my elbow. Grrr. According to Alyson, who is a Chem Life Science major and applying to med school, so to me her diagnosis is as good as a doctor's, I probably have a pinched nerve in my elbow. No clue how that happened. I noticed it on Monday when it felt like I had a rather painful bruise, but I couldn't find a bruise. Then in the evening I noticed my elbow was a bit numb. It feels like it is getting better, although every now and then I put my elbow down in a spot that touches off whatever is causeing the pain, and it shoots through my elbow. Ah well, life wouldn't be interesting if we couldn't feel.

People probably find my blog rather annoying to read, which I don't mind in the least. The fewer readers, the better, because then I don't have to wonder as much about who is reading it. In any case, my entries rarely are written very well. Grammar, spelling, paragraph flow, and that other stuff and junk, I choose to ignore while writing. When I write it is basically a brain dump for me. I passed EN302, with a lot of prayers I should add, so I do posses some knowledge of how to write correctly, but that takes time and energy. Time and energy happen to be precious commodaties here, and I'm not about to spend them on this, although it does annoy me when I write something and I know that the grammar or spelling is wrong, but I rarely bother to go back and correct it. I'd rather remain annoyed and have the extra time.

There is a plebe in D1 who has the same name as me, except her first name is Katie. So far I've gotten 2 of her emails, and one laundry bag of hers. She tried out for the crew team, but I only saw her at the first day of tryouts. We've met once.

GO USA! The USA mens olympic 8 took gold in the rowing finals. YAYAYAY! The USA women's 8 took silver.

I finally won my battle against American Online. I called them today and had about a 15 minute argument with the sales guy as he tried to argue that since I wasn't paying for the account for one month I should wait until OCT18th to call and cancel. However, if I waited until the 19th, I'd be billed for the next month. I just kept repeating over an over "I don't care if it is free. I'm not using it, I don't want it, I want to cancel my account." I think the highlight was when he told me "Don't get upset. Have a glass of water. Have a glass of water." In reality I found the whole thing both frustrating and amusing. The other highlight was when I told him "I go to a school that is like a prison." I think that finally conviced him to allow me to cancel the account. Afterwords, Alyson said the whole conversatin sounded like a nightmarer, and she couldn't believe they were doing that to me.

The air outside has the cool, crisp feel and smell of an autum night. I love being able to stick my head out my window and see the hudson river and the hills sourounding it. It's so much better than looking into north area.

It's raining
It's pouring
I had an APFT
this morning.

Since it is an A/C weekend this weekend all of the regiments had to do some sort of PT. My regiment decided to have everyone take a diagnostic APFT. Due to the rain, however, it ended up being held indoors, and the run was canceled. On Monday I took an APFT for crew tryouts, minus the pushups, and did 75 situps in the 2 minutes. Today I only did 62 situps. The drop in situps is a bit puzzeling.

At 1030 all of the firsties had a DMI military branch briefing. I think I've changed my first branch choice to Military Intelligence. I have to input my order of branches between 4 OCT and 8 OCT, and then on 14 NOV I find out what I'll be doing for at least the next 5 years.

Last night Leah, Celio, Anne, Annah, and myself drove over to New Paltz (spelling?) and had dinner at a Thia resturant. It's so nice to be able to leave on weeknights. Right down the street is the sushi resturant that Leah has organized for us to go with our families fo lunch next Saturday. I suppose I should inform my family of this fact, since they will be up here. I can't wait to have them up here agian :)

Yay! Thunderstorm. The only bad part is that my car is still up in the lots, and although I'd like to get out of here this afternoon, I don't want to run up and get my car in a thunderstorm. Reading and sleeping, here I come.

This morning I went to orthopedic sick call so that an orthopedic surgeon could look at my shoulder. I had gone on Monday afternoon to have it checked out, and they started me on rehab and told me to come back Friday morning to have them checked out some more. This morning the surgeon basically told me what I was told on Monday. I have multi-directional something or other, and surgery won't help me. Instead, they put me on a finely tuned rehab program in hopes that it helps. It was not a great confidence builder when the orthopedic surgeon called all of the other officers in the room, as well as all the trainies, over to take a look at my shoulders. He told me that what I have is level 3a something or other, and that high level swimmers, gymnasts,and baseball pitchers are usually the people that it is seen in. Kinda odd since I am none of those. Anyway, I'm not on profile, but they are going to watch me closely throughout the year. Basically I have to strengthen my rotator cuff muscle, because all of my ligiments are too loose to do me any good in trying to keep my shoulders in their sockets.

For crew tryouts today we had to do as many leg presses as we could do until muscle failure. I did 818 leg presses in a row with an average leg press of 57kg, or aproximetly 125 lbs. The reason I stopped was not because I had reached muscle failure, but because I had reached boredom failure, and Ana accidently running into my machine and causing me to stop for a minute gave me an excuse to stop. Kate and Ana both made it to 1000, but I was going slower than them. I feel like I should have kept going. When I got off the machine my legs felt fine, but my butt hurt from sitting for so long. Since my group was the first to go, we had girls who only did around 200, and then some poeple who did 1000. I don't know how the second group did.

Robin Sage:

The short story is that I was a guerilla names Star who was an orphan. I joined the guerilla band because the UPA's kicked me out of Pineland State University because I wouldn't join them. That was that story for the character I played during the exercise. Pineland was the country we were in, which actually covered abotu a third of North Carolina. The two base camps my group stayed at were between Ashborro and Greensborro NC. (wrong spellings)

Since I was a guerilla, I had to pretend that I didn't know anything about the military, being tactical, or any common knowledge. It was pretty fun playing stupid, because it made the exercise very relaxed and easy. Christy, aka Toots, and I shared a tent together. There were 6 of us girls, all West Pointers. Our names were Star, Toots, Gwen, Trixie (previously Baby), Conception, and Daisy. We were supposed to play the role of COL Ricco's girls, except I didn't know how to play that role very well, and gave up at it after the first morning or so. After that I was just another guerilla, and became a squad leader. The other guerilla fighters were ROTC cadets and enlisted soldiers. There were about 25 - 30 of us total. COL Ricco was our leader. He's actually a retired SF soldier who now trains SF candidates.

The SF guys were pretty cool, and I felt bad for them because they were all extremely tired and hungry, and we had to be uncooperative eith them, and not give them any food or anything. The first 2 days were basically camping in the woods. No guard, camp fire all the time, everyone does their own thing. I had some really good conversations with a ROTC guy named Phil (G-name Luke) during that time. Then the SF guys arrived and we had to start pulling guard. The night after they arrived we were attacked by OPFOR. Baby died, and so the SF guys were ordered to dig her a 6 foot deep grave by 6 am the next morning. They didn't get any sleep that night.

There was a ton of down time during the day, and at night we went on missions. I went on a raid to a cememt factory. It was pretty cool, and the SF guys taught us room clearing tactics for it. We were issued M4's and AK-47s with blanks. During the day and at night we pulled 2 hour long guard shifts in pairs. It was very relaxed guard, and gave me time to talk to the other G's and also the SF guys.

For food we had MRE's, and then the SF guys brought us beans and rice, along with some spices. Since we had to pretend we were starving, we weren't allowed to eat the MRE's in front of the SF guys. Plus, since we had a low supply of them, we were alloted one a day. That meant I ate about 1.5 - 2 meals a day, which really wasn't that bad. Later we got live animals that we learned how to kill, skin, gut, and cook. The animals we got were rabbits, goats, geese, and a pig. I didn't do any of the killing, i couldn't handle it, but I did help skin and gut the pig. Toots and Daisy did most of the cooking. One night COL Ricco brought us marshmellows, and we roasted them over the fire.

I was suprised at how clean I managed to stay. A lot of it was due to the fact that we didn't have to wear camo or a kevlar. We were issued 2 pairs of black bdu's to wear instead of our regular bdu's. Every day I had about an hour of hygine time in the morning, and an hour or so in the evening. At our first base camp there was a river that we went to bathe in twice. I also took canteen cup showers, washed my clothes in the canteen cup, and the SF guys built us a shower were I took 2 Qt showers. The girls were allowed to take 2 real showers at a fire house across the street from the woods our second base camp was in. That first shower was after about 5 days in the field, and it was heavenly. The second shower was the day before we left. The guys didn't get to take any real showers, but they washed in the river.

I thought the whole experiance was pretty fun. Definetly a very easy MIAD. There was a lot of sitting around doing nothing, but it was what you made of it. I met some awesome people, and was trained by SF guys. It was definetly the highlight of my summer.

Quotes:
Gwen to the SF guys: "Welcome Americans." "Remove the blindfold"

Me to Lando: "Pants are a good thing!!" (he was dancing around in whitie tighties)

Luke to me: "I like you"

Magic to me: "You are going to make a good officer."

Gwen to me : "You chop wood as good as the guys"

COL Ricco to Toots: "How's my favorite girl?"

Trixie to me: "You don't know how to act like a slut."
Me to Trixie: "Maybe I can act like a slut, just let me try." (It was for a mission, I ended up giving my spot to Daisy, because Trixie was right, I don't know how and Daisy would do a much better job.)

Trixie to an SF guy: "What's a pace count"
Me to an SF guy about pace count: "What if you only have one leg?"

Toots: "The pig is loose."

Luke and Lando: "This one time at advanced camp..."

Lando: "I ate a dead bird's head"


Fun times...

The A-day parade just finished. I can't believe that I am one of the people who stands in the back wearing the red sash and carrying a saber instead of a rifle. It hasn't sunk in yet, and I don't know if it will ever sink it.

There was a SAMI this morning, but since Alyson is the CO, nobody came and inspected our room. It's nice having a couch and a mini-fridge in the room. Yay for being a Firstie. My class schedule looks much better than it has in the past, although I should probably wait until classes actually start to make that asessment. Amazingly, I only have 16.5 credits. I've never had that few. I kinda feel like I am a slacker because it is so light.

Classes:
CS484 Computer Networks
MS401 Transitoin to the Officer Corps
IT305 Theory and Practice of Military IT Systems
IT485 Spec Topic in Information Technology
IT460 Information Warfare
CS401 Software Systems Design I
PE424 Golf

I'm the Information Systems Officer for my company, and the S2 for the Crew Team. My Information Systems Sergeant, Ryan, has been amazing this past week. Since I didn't get back to school until Thursday afternoon, he has been doing all the work. I've tried to help now that I'm here, but I feel like I am really behind the power curve and trying to catch up on what is going on and what needs to get done.

Back at school. My room is a mess. I have no idea how I'm going to get it ready for a SAMI on saturday. I'd write more, but there is a new lights out policy for everyone. No lights on after midnight, not even computer screens. It's midnight now, so I must go.

I stress myself out way too easily. I'm not even back at school yet, but i'm already stressed. Set up room, clean room, get schedule, get books, TDY settelment, POV registration and inspection, and random crap.

Robin Sage was fun. I'll hopefully get around to writing about it, although every time i say I'll write about something later, I generaly don't get around to it.