Gripes and Thanks.

I’m munching on chocolate chip cookies that I managed to not gorge myself on which came as a result of my shameless begging for food. Oh so good. And not doing anything to help me decrease my run time. Tomorrow my brigade goes on a 4 day pass, but my section isn’t leaving because we’re in a class that goes through the pass. I think out of the 330 some people we have here, all but 15 of us are leaving. There’s an officer here who is being “left in charge” of us, and he’s the biggest pain in the rear I’ve ever met. Well one of the biggest anyway. He’s a very high maintenance Porto Rican who probably has a bit of OCD. He plays his Latin music really loud when he’s in the shower, and when he’s in front of the mirror shaving or brushing his teeth. Not only does he have his music up loud, but he dances the mambo in his underwear and sings while he’s shaving. I don’t know about you, but I try to stay pretty still when I’m shaving…. His biggest claim to fame around here is flipping out when someone else started to take a shower in the stall he wanted to use even though he wasn’t anywhere near being ready to shower, and there were other stalls open. So he tried to use his rank to make the other guy leave. Big mistake, as the other guy was another Warrant Officer who had been in the Army long enough to not give a crap about some idiot. It didn’t end well for the Porto Rican, and it resulted in him being teased about his habits for a while. And he doesn’t clean up when it’s his turn, so someone crossed out the names on the clean up roster and put his name on every day. It was all meant in a joking way to get him to realize that he needs to start being more accommodating to everyone else.
Anyway, all that was to set the stage for how he thinks this weekend is going to go. We set everything up to run smoothly without him being involved, and then he thinks he’s actually going to be in charge of the rest of us. All I know is if he tries to tell anyone in my section what to do outside of what we’ve already been told to do, we’re going to blow him off completely.
Sorry, but I’ve got another gripe… In this class that I’ve been in, I had high hopes for it, because I took it last summer in Wisconsin and learned a ton of good stuff, and it’s exactly what we’re going to be doing in Iraq. But the teacher who is teaching it here on Ft. Hood is killing us. She spent the first two days reading Army Regulations to us, straight from the regulation. If you don’t know how boring an Army Regulation is, go look up some congressional bill and try to make normal human sense of it. But anyway, we took the test over that this morning, but there were several questions which were questionable. We came back after lunch hoping to go over the test, but the teacher says she doesn’t do that, even though it’s a requirement for Army tests. So we all were wondering what the answers to the questionable questions were, and there were three people who would pass the test if they were right and the test was wrong. I spent 20 minutes arguing with this teacher that we need to go over the test so that I can see where I missed questions so I know what to study up on more. I really wanted to argue those few questions that I thought I got right. After an hour of yelling, showing her in the regulations where I was right, she finally said that she’d give us credit for one of the questions, when we had proven that at least two of the questions were wrong. I think everyone was pretty upset for the rest of the afternoon. But finally we got into the actual computer system and it got slightly more interesting. Granted it took us 3 hours to do something that should have only taken us a half hour, and it was one of the easiest things we’ll do… but it should be better tomorrow.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to these next couple weeks. The next few days it will be almost empty where I live so I’ll have peace and quiet. I’ll be in a classroom where I can do almost whatever I want because the teacher knows she’s lost me and I get the idea that she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about and just reads the pre made lesson plans to us. Then I go on my 4 day pass to the wonderful South! I get to see my parents and friends, just relax, do some cooking, watch movies, and float down a river. It will be different going home though, my dog Daisy died in late June, and it’s going to seem empty without her. My unit is still scheduled to leave around the same time that we were before even though they changed it several times since we first found out. I just want to get overseas and actually start doing my job. I hate sitting around so much.
I love and miss my friends and family dearly, and it’s hard when they all feel far away. But I just have to remember to keep my head up and have faith that I’ll eventually ok with where I wind up in people’s lives. I just want to get overseas and start doing something so hopefully time will go by more quickly. I am very grateful for all the prayers, love and support that I've gotten so far. I feel it and need it!