Rumor

I have a rumor and I won’t share it.

A week and a few days ago I was at Knott’s Berry Farm having a grand old time riding a roller coaster called Ghost Rider and the forces of gravity reached up from the center of the earth into my jacket pocket, grabbed a hold of my cell phone and flung it off into space never to be seen by me again. Which left me disconnected from the world for days, DAYS I say!

On the long drive home that night, I called the phone company to disconnect my phone. With my niece Kate in tow, we got home and logged on to the Sprint website and started shopping around for a replacement. Considering how many texts I’ve been getting lately, I wanted to upgrade to something that had a keyboard.

So with Kate’s advice on what’s cool, we picked out LG's Rumor and wonder why I waited so long, I can check my email whenever I want throughout the day and texting or emailing is a breeze.

What’s really cool? I had a two dollar a month contact back up plan, a couple of minutes after activating the phone, I had all of my phone numbers back. That's worth a couple of hundred dollars in itself.

My issues so far? It doesn’t have a multiple text delete tab, it’s not EV-DO, (Evolution-Data Optimized, which is sort of like broadband for wireless), it uses the old regular network. You also need to buy a separate USB cord to hook it up to the computer a but even with those issues, its worlds better then anything I've ever owned.

Have a happy Turkey Day everyone.

If I don't come up for air

It's because I'm moving this weekend. Times getting short and everything is coming together, lots of stuff to get done before I go to Arizona for Thanksgiving and only little bits of time to do them in. Happy Thanksgiving everyone if I don't see you before then.

Valour IT

(this post is staying at the top till 15 November 2007)

Is an organization who provides Voice-Activated laptops to our severely wounded troops. So far they have distributed over 1500 laptops to our wounded. I know these guys personally and the entire effort is a labor of love.

This Veterans Day holiday, don’t forget the men and woman who have made the life that you live possible. Valour IT gives directly to those who have sacrificed their limbs and livelihood in defense of our nation.

When I won the Navy Milbloggie of the Year back in June and they gave a thousand dollars to the charity of my choice and I picked that the money should go to Valour IT.

Put it this way, every other charity out there gives support to people who are less fortunate, going though hard times, impacted by acts of god, have caught some terrible disease. Basically people who were just unlucky to be born where they were at, be in the path of something that swept over their home because of fire, flood or weather or made wrong life choices and need help to recover.

Valour IT is helping people who made a conscious choice to jump into harms way defending the rights of the rest of us. It doesn’t matter what your political views are or if you support the war or not, without them, the country you love wouldn’t exist. Helping these guys is really just part of taking care of our own.

I know if I had my hands blown off, I would love to have a voice activated laptop but knowing me, I would get by with a pencil between my teeth if I had to.

Changes in attitudes, changes in latitudes

Most of my Navy career, even though I was I charge of most of the medical departments I was at, I was usually following some kind of direction from the chain, there was always a higher echelon to fall on. There were tough times but usually the guy making the calls was somewhere above me. Most of my mentality was spent going with the flow but now I feel like a rock in the middle of the stream. The water is hitting me and I’m trying to wrestle it in to a smooth flow so the ripples don’t show on the surface.

There just seems to be awfully lot of water coming down that creek this week. I’ve discovered the higher you get, the more choices you have to make for those around you and most of those answers don’t seem to be the ones that you can just reply with a yes or no. I’m making it but I’m earning that raise.

Other news, I’m moving out of my place this weekend and getting ready for a small deployment to sandy desert city for 3 weeks of pre-deployment type training and in one day in the not too distant future, you’ll be reading the words that I have typed from the other side of the world.

Knott’s Berry Farm Veterans Tribute

Yesterday I went out with my niece Kate and one of our friends to Knott’s. Every year from the 1st till the 22nd of November they let anyone with a military ID or a vet in free with one guest, 12 bucks a piece for up to 6 additional bodies. Its one of the best deals for Military in Southern California, these guys take care of us. If you go, make sure to thank them.

Had a great day and made a video of it, well mostly a great day, Ghost Rider ate my cell phone, note to self, wear something with zippered pockets when riding roller coasters, 250 or so contacts down the drain so if you know my number, give me a call in a couple of days so I can put you back in and when I got out to my truck, someone had hit my mirror leaving it hanging by the wire. Oh well, it all balances out in the end.

Happy Veterans Day everyone, remember the reasons behind this holiday and next time you see a vet, thank him for his service and the sacrifices he or she made. This day isn’t about politics or about the current conflict, it’s about a group of people who believed in their nation so much that they give up their personal freedoms to give you the chance to have yours.

Here's the vid below or the direct link.

What some other people are saying about Band of Bloggers

Just a Grunt wrote this

My good buddy Kasee wrote this and then did this great round up this morning here

MoFiZix Gr4FiX had this to say

But Wait, Hearts and Hates Colby, hah.

We all know ALa loves Colby, she rounds us all up including calling me the awesome Doc in the Box and dropping a picture of her and Colby, thanks:)

Pilgrim thought they did a good job

and that's it for my round up this morning. I problem myself and other bloggers say with the show is that they didn't included the screen names nor the name of the blogs. Other then that, it was great, looking forward to the next chapter.

Well, I'm off to Knotts Berry Farm to take advantage of this months free military thing they do every year:) Have a good weekend, next showtime is at noon my time (check your local listings first).

Just finished Band of Bloggers

and am very happy with what they did. I was a bit worried about how the show would turn out but they did a great job putting us all together, it would have been nice if they had included links to the blogs so we could click on over to who the show was about but since they didn't here's what I have and how I know them or don't know them in the last few.

Of course Colby Buzzell from My War Killing Time in Iraq is here, currently he's living up in San Fran and is actually making a living out of his writing. We were both included along with Dagger Jag in September 2004 article by the AP (Dagger Jag has since shut down) and over the period of a weekend, I had 70 thousand hits. You'll notice going around the sphere that chicks seem to did Colby, if they are a fan of milblogs, his book is usually at the top of their favorite books, my wife is a big fan of his too. As far as milblogging circles go, when someone is asked to toss out the full name of a milblogger, it's usually Colby, Matt of Blackfive or me and I don't get a fraction of the readership of those guys.

I've read Rusten D. Currie of Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum since I started blogging, he's an amazingly gifted writer, haven't met him in person though.

Lt Paul Rieckhoff founder of Operation Truth, National Guard Soldier from Florida. Don’t really know much about his group.

Sgt Chris Messick A Line in the Sand he lives up by Long Beach, we met during a prior interview together and he's also buddies with Carla from Some Soldiers Mom.

Tonight was the first time seeing and reading Spc Kate Hoit from My American-Iraq Life (wonder if she listens to This American Life?), now mostly blogs over at Over and Out. Her links have crashed when she moved to new blogger, so I can't say who we know in common. What I've read so far, she seems quirky and funny.

And if you google Spc Edouard H.R. Gluck, you'll find his pictures everywhere but it doesn't show if he has a blog, I'll keep looking when I wake up more..

And my friend Won thought SPC Jeff Tanner was pretty cool (they look alike) but I don't have a clue to where he writes though. You have to remember, many bloggers out there didn't blog under their real name and it's hard bringing the two together.

The show goes beyond words, they painted images to match what the speakers are saying as they were interviewed, the words were all ours back by images and video we had given them. They channeled that and meshed all of our stories together giving a snapshot of what we went through in a fairly seemless manner. Enjoyable stuff. It's on all though the weekend if you missed it. The show goes down smooth no matter what you think about the war, good stuff.

History Channnel tonight!

and all weekend, I'll be on a show called Band of Bloggers, here's the schedule

Friday, November 09
08:00 PM
Saturday, November 10
12:00 AM
Monday, November 12
12:00 PM
Monday, November 12
06:00 PM

Happy Birthday Marines!

Tonight I attended the MAG 16’s Marine Corps Ball celebrating 232 years of faithful service to our country. Let me tell you a secret, I always get stage fright going to these things. Must be something I’ve carried over from being so nerdy in high school. I always complain about going till I get there and have without fail, have had a great time.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Navy Birthday Ball and comparing the two will have to say, the Marines know how to get down and party. This ball topped all of the other balls I’ve gone to by far, it wasn’t the biggest but it was the smoothest. Great crowd, everybody was on the dance floor and having a good time. The food was excellent and the ceremony was flawless.

Well I could tell stories but I hear that a picture is worth a thousand words, I have 68,000 words over here.

Sometimes real life takes over Cyberlife

In a nutshell, I've been busy with life, not the interesting fun kind but the dreary mundane paperwork, heavy lifting lots of driving life. And each time I come home, my brain has been drained and my blog writing has suffered. It don't mean that I'm quitting blogging by any means just that blogging has gone on the back burner while I take care of my present life.

Here's a snap shot, the housing crisis that's going on? My sister was caught up in the middle of it and then got sick and had to have a fairly intensive surgery that put her out of commission for a couple of months and she lost her house. I've been the go between in getting her set up in someplace cheaper in Arizona with her kids and helping them move. Last weekend, I drove a 26 foot U-haul full of their stuff across the desert one day, unloaded it the next and on Monday (my birthday) drove back across the desert. You have to take care of family.

My unit is about to get a Commanding Generals Inspection (which I should have worked on last weekend but was driving), so when I'm not making long long road trips, my work hours have extending far into the night plus I got pulled to work an EMT crew for the fires which pulled me away from my regular job. The records look good and I probably have the prettiest CGI binder on base but that's only because I'm actually pretty good at this stuff but they are far from the perfection that I normally expect out of myself.

I'm in a leadership position right now but for jobs like this, I like keeping my fingers in on the pulse of how everything is going, I have some great corpsman working for me but they're all have their own squadrons. They're a good crew and do an amazing job but they are already working their tails off. I'm not going to pull them from their primary duties to work on mine when I know I can do it and still make it shine.

My Chief has got pulled away by a family emergency and believe me, I'd rather be doing what I'm doing now, then be in his shoes, he definitely could use some prayers. I'm shouldering many of his tasks with the help of another Chief but even the both of us aren't quite equal to the job he handled. I'm hanging but I'm finding all sorts of moving parts that are involved with getting a MAG ready for deployment.

And I'm moving too.

This all adds up to a thin stretched out Sean who doesn't have much time to write and is sometimes a little snappish. Being in the military, there are going to be times like this, they don't last forever, you just have to hold on till its over without flying apart and if you do it good, you'll shine and it will show on evals. Like everything else, I'll get by this and go whew, glad that's over with.