Archive for February, 2012
My new tablet
There’s only one word to appropriately describe it: awesome.
A buddy and I traveled all around the Jacksonville area going into Best Buy, CompUSA, RadioShack, and Gamestop before we finally decided to check online. After a minute of researched we found, called, and verified that a Gamestop over on San Marco had a few left in stock. So after a 30 minute drive and $577 later, we’d successfully returned home with our Asus Transformer Prime. I immediately sped home and updated to Ice Cream Sandwich, downloaded my nook app, and all my books. I took a jump on the Hunger Games books, after I sped through the first book in less than 3 days I bought the other two and I’m pretty stoked on reading them. I also decided to start gathering books on the Appalachian Trail, so I’ve been intently reading Average People, Extraordinary Trail by Mark “Bison” Allen. Its been extremely interesting and its quite insightful for someone like me who’s deeply interested in hiking the trail when the time comes.
I’ve been chalking up a rough schedule of my contract ending around August of ‘14 and my ability to start the trail on time around March of ‘15. It’ll give me plenty of time for tidying up my finances and get all the supplies together. Once I finish my hike I’ll already have my school and courses figured out as well as my GI Bill ‘headache’, that way I can hop off the trail and onto the campus. I’m pretty excited about the whole adventure, I’m pretty confident that I can finish it within 5 months. Hopefully my buddy can join me like we’ve been planning and it’ll be a great opportunity to decompress and forget about all the morons I’ve had to deal with over the past 6 years (at the time), plus it’ll be a great story for some bullshit English 101 class I’ll most likely have to write a report for.
Charleston, SC
I’m writing this as I stand my second 5 hour watch this fine duty day at 2:30 in the morning, wishing of nothing but being nice and warm snuggled up in my sleeping bag. Its not as chilly as we were expecting earlier when we discussed the weatherman’s report of a sudden drop in temperature overnight, its actually quite nice after being bundled up like Ralphie from the Christmas Story. We’re mored across the harbor from the old WWII aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV 10), and just within sight of Fort Sumter which is plainly illuminated by the moon in the pretty clear sky.
I wasn’t too entirely excited about pulling into this port, main reason being that I’d much rather be back in homeport Mayport where I have my nice warm queen sized bed and my own refrigerator, but this underway has provided me with a few more positive changes to outlooks on certain aspects surrounding my life at the moment. I’ve become increasingly humble and accepting of getting and remaining underway for the majority of this year (as of me typing this we will only have 64 more days in homeport this entire year), as much as I truly hate being locked up tight in this ship with nothing better to do than to watch the same old 8mm-quality movies repeatedly day in and day out or sit and watch as my RF out meters kick back and forth on my radios, I have a huge list of things I want to accomplish/take part in before I kick it and I want to be able to do those things as financially comfortable as possible and being underway like I have been and will continue to be is making those goals more and more possible to achieve. I’m planning quite heavily on the plans of getting out and immediately pursuing a 4 year degree in engineering (either computer science or electrical), I have been dreaming pretty hard about hiking the Appalachian Trail first though but I haven’t figured out how all of that will run together. I’ve been looking into the University of Florida, although after looking around the USC campus i’m convinced that I need to do a lot more shopping around before I commit to any school. The beauty of the 6 years of dealing with the plethora of incompetent people who are in charge of me and all the erroneous bullshit that comes with the gig, is that the GI Bill wits me quite comfortably with most (if not all) of my college tuition paid for, a housing allowance, a relocation per diem, and a yearly book stipend which is accountable for almost all of the deterrence most people my age now have for not going to/finishing college. On top of all that beauty, I’ve been trying to keep things as frugal as possible this past year or two and toss as much savings as I can into different investment accounts at different levels of interest, I’ve passed my $10k mark before I got back from this last deployment (and paid my car off) and I’m pretty comfortable with throwing in almost another $10k before I ship off for this next deployment. Now this deployment in June will be unique because there are hardly any port visits which means i’ll have no reason or means of really spending any of my monies, which I’ve figured that I could walk away with any additional $12-15k added to my current pot.
These are just some very important yet small details that keep me trucking, as well as making gains in the gym and the prospects of a 6 pack before I return home from this next (and hopefully last deployment).