and it’s about time.
We’re about ready to leave again for another patrol and I’ve spent all of one day off the ship. Tomorrow I plan to sleep in nice and late, go for a bike ride perhaps, at least workout, and then stand some duty. I had quite a long day today taking on all kinds of ammunition for all different types of weaponry, which ultimantely leads to a lot of heavy lifting. Between shlepping ammo from here to there, figuring out the numbers, and working out on top of all of that… I’m fried. I always feel satisfied with hard work, but the day in day out is wearing on me pretty quickly. It feels like on my best days that I’m operating on 75% of my mental capacity, and I feel frustrated, but continue to put my body and mind on a semi reliable auto pilot if you will.
I’m beginning to assemble a nice gift package for my dear friend Ashley. She has been kind enough to send me all kinds of stuff, from cds, to tasty treats, and it’s about time I reciprocated her actions. The whole process is going a lot slower than I’d like, but I suppose that gives me all the time I need to make the gift special and meaningful.
I hopped into bed last night and even though I’m going to bed around 10 to 10:30 nearly every night I said to myself, “I don’t spend enough time in here.” Of course I refer to my bed, and I certainly plan to address this issue tomorrow by sleeping in as best I can.
Well congratulations to me for surviving a whole month and five days here in the middle east. I’ve been very busy, but I’m already getting the hang of how things are running here. My qualifications onboard are coming along very nicely. I took my oral board and I’m now an inport OOD (officer of the day) which is left in charge of the ship inport while the commanding officer and the crew are off on liberty well deserved. I have a few more watches before I consider myself competent enough to be a full fledged quartermaster of the watch, who is essentially in charge of safe navigation of the ship underway.
The first patrol was fast paced, demanding, and had an absence of good rest. We pulled in just the other day and I was already thrust into the inport watch with only 2 hours of sleep from the night before. I must apologize as I read back into this blog, I’m a bit tired, and scatterbrained. Anyway the patrol proved very very interesting having worked with Iraqi Marines, British Royal Commandos, U.S. and Australian Navy etc. One of the days a certain Aussie vessel offered to do what they call a crossdeck where each ship essentially swaps a few crewmembers for a tour/ meet and greet. I got a really cool patch out of it from the engineering department fellas, hung out for a few hours, exchanged sea stories, and just hung out. Other interesting notes from the patrol:
- Launching flares at boats called dowhs for being where they’re not supposed to be
- Doing quite a few boardings
- Visiting Kuwait
- Seeing places that contribute to you filling up your gas tanks
- Getting bit or stung by some nasty middle eastern wasp, I then judo chopped it and stomped on it.
- Shooting quite a bit of my arsenal onboard
- Having more responsibility than I ever have in the Coast Guard
I can’t think of anymore at this moment, but that’s the gist of it.
Right now I sit on my new macbook, listening to my new itouch, wondering how the hell did this all happen. I’m very glad that I’m doing what I’m doing. There’s a lot of growing pains going onboard right now with the command, but I’m sticking it through a lot better than the rest of the crew. Quite frankly it’s nothing I haven’t already experienced already, so I’m doing my job of informing the rest of my shipmates that we need to stick together and watch our mouths, deal with these problems constructively, and perform they way we need to perform.
I’ve been talking to very few people since I’ve been over here. I call Ashley on a regular basis, then my parents, and I shot a call to John Z the other day. I keep trying to reach my friend Matt, but it wasn’t until this morning when I checked my gmail for the first time in a month that I found out he was in in different country as well working for the Coast Guard temporarily. To all my other friends that I haven’t got around to calling, I’m really don’t want to have to validate the reason for not calling, I’m busy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss you.
