On the Way

So things are finally starting to look up after weeks and weeks of twiddling thumbs.
Bubba, looking forward to seeing the house. Don't know when I'll ever make it back home, but looking forward to it. Still looking for those pictures you are talking about.
MMMmm Crown. =D How I could do with about a glass.
Haha @ the monster.
I know it's been almost a week and I haven't blogged anything. Should be like a daily thing huh?? Guess I need to get to some serious work then. Well, it's 9pm now and just finished with my last "chore" for the night on the list of things that I have to do everyday. It's been a boring and head pounding of a week with the studying I've been doing. I'm up for the E-6 advancement on the 4th, so I'm defiantly looking forward to that so I can get my pay raise for all of my hard work.
Working on keeping the rumors going of when I'll be back in the VA area. Sad to say, yet glad to have something, we might actually make it back before the 20th of the month. Which is good because I'll get a bit of extra pay for being away from homeport/Virginia (225$). Good stuff huh? Applies to any married military person's who are away for 30 consecutive days. So doing the math if I'm still not home by the 14th it'll be 450$ extra that the military will have to give up.. Times that by the amount of Navy personnel that are here.. A LOT OF FREAKIN MMOONEY!

I've gotten all the packages that have been sent!! THANK YOU ALL!!!!! Rhonda - don't worry, lol, it was worth it. Next time though, the actual tracks instead of the links will be awesome =P I'll be sending your stick back on Monday when our post office opens again.

So like I said, another long week, and still at least two more to go. Just more of the same stuff. Lara has us looking at houses in North Carolina. Just the sheer size of the lots alone is worth it for the family (and the damn dog). It will add an extra 20minutes to the drive home, but in the long run it'll be good. Maybe a good idea for a new car that I know won't fail me at random. GO VW!

I'm missing all the good stuff with the kids =( Eli is starting to crawl now and drink from a sippy cup. Phia's hair has grown a good bit in the past month. =( Defiantly missing the family out here. At least this is just a surge for us and not a deployment. Thankfully that's not scheduled to happen until next May. I'll miss every one's birthday next year, even mine. Hopefully the pictures I just attached will upload with the post. Lara sends me a few every week =D

So.... Daily Motivation for me... And I'm so happy that I have this on Vinyl. THANK YOU HONEY!!!!! Talk about just a jamming tune.
High Contrast - Days Go By
Yes it's an old remix of a rock song I'm sure, but it's definitely motivating for me.

Anyway, another night of watching movies and hoping this will all end soon. Enough twiddling of the thumbs and get back to where all the real fun is.

Moments

So since the morning started i've been working out diagrams of all the area's on the ship that my command occupies while onboard. My whole task for the day has been to map each item in that space; couch, chairs, tv's, CAT5 drops for the internet, desk, ect.. So i've been taking my time with it since it's the only thing I really have to do.(not to bad for a days work huh?) There is only four total area's that I have to go and map out, so not too bad. I've accomplished getting all 4 area's mapped out for the most part, and I have been working on locating all the drops in each area. Now it's after dinner, and was hoping to call it an early night and watch a movie or something before 10... Well, needless to say, i still got my work-out in and had dinner.
Not too bad of a work out either. I run from the well deck area where they store the LCACS and other misc Hum-v's (basically bottom of the ship almost), up the first ramp to the very back of the hangerbay, then up the other ramp that takes you up to the flight deck, two laps around the flight deck, then all the way down again. Did that about four times. Good sweat that's for sure. I'll be under 185 before I know it. Then it's all back to muscle building.
Hope things are going good for everyone else. We have had internet back for a few days now so really happy about that. Can't get enough of textfromlastnight.com awesome stuff.

Daily Motivation

I try to use these for the motivation that I find here, but I want to answer some questions that have been in the comments first.
Food inport or out to sea is always the same as going to another country. It tears you up for a few days, and then you get use to it. As good as the bakery is here onboard I do try to not dive into the sweets a majority of the week. So we've been gone for over a month now, and I’m sure half of that time or close to it was chicken, tonight was meatloaf. Wednesday is a hamburger/corn-dog sort of day for lunch, and then between fri-sun they try to do a steak and crab leg meal for us.... what the ship wouldn't have for R&R???? hummm movies that we could rent for a day. lol Now for the most part there is always somebody that has a stack of movies in a dvd case or on an internal/external hard drive.... I've got a guy onboard that has over 1tb worth of movies on his external hard drives. Last night I got to sit in the shop and watch Crank 2-High Voltage for the first time (a bit lame that one). The best thing you can have while out here though is laughter and comedy. You just have to ask around to see who has what really.
Ok so daily motivation: Flapjack_20100130.
I go through a bit of music everyday, but it's what started my day... And through constant networking while I’m out here, I met another E-5 that has a pretty sweet job for this out-to-sea period. So he let me download two mixes that night at about 50kbs. lol REALLY FUCKIN SLOW!!! about 12 to 15 minutes for each download. At home I grab these at about 45secs a download.
Another day down and going pretty smooth now for about the past week or so. Just like an everyday routine for the most part. Getting a good hour work out in about five days out of the week and just about all of it is on cardio. I can always do with losing ten pounds, so I’m making my best effort of meeting that goal since we are going to be out for a bit. Besides, I can't just stay in this office all day. Hope all is well with all of you, thanks for reading, putting in comments and helping me stay entertained.

Daily Motivation

Normally when i'm on shore I can get up, get coffee made, and drive into work. And for the next 30-40 minutes driving to work i'm focused on the bass and the taste of fresh coffee that's helping me wake up to do another day. This one was an early morning starter for me today and I played it loud when i hit the gym earlier tonight. Just a big tune for getting motivated and making the day worth while!!! Out of everything I am a fein for, stuff like this is a big, big high for me.

Utah Jazz - Survival Of The Fittest
Might have to request on Vinyl if it's out. Good tune.

Ez DeTrend&Amy, to Ruffride, to the one known as Sunset
TTUUNNNEE! Keep the decks spining

*mostly everything I put up you can pull from www.youtube.com
**WARNING** I can almost promise it will be drum and bass. =D

Ready for the Weekend

So the start of the morning goes to a fresh cup of coffee. Thanks mom for the package, gotta love the fresh coffee!!!!
I stopped my iPod in just the perfect place last night to start a new day of motivation. www.dnbradio.com>podcast>Mayhem and Ruffride_101809 and then fast forward to 1:03:35. That’s right. 1hr, 3mins and 35secs into the mix with dubplate sound from the man Ruffride up in Canada. Awesome tune to start another Saturday out to sea off the coast of Haiti. Still waiting for another package from Rhonda that should have a ton of mixes on it..!! Can't say thanks enough for the love and support! Big love to the 12 followers of the blog! Thank you guys!!
Starting to see a big decrease of HA/DR(Haiti-Disaster Relief)pallets being taken to shore. Most of the work right now is to ensure that the NON-NGO(non-government)/non-profit folks can take care of things on their own with the help from the department of defense. And I’m talking about people from all over including Canada and France. Still no end date on when they will call this operation finished and I’m sure they will do some kind of Enduring Foreign Humanitarian Assistance.
Apologizes for not updating the blog the past couple of days. Really keeping myself busy with studying for my upcoming exam in March. Nothing like a promotion to make you feel better!! And besides, being told I can’t say certain things at my current pay grade even though someone should is stupid. So a lot of time during the day is spent trying to remember as much as possible from the past exams that I have taken.
So this entire time we've been out here i've been using one of the commands extra laptops to play music and yesterday someone I work for copied a few movies over for me. So big plus there. Still waiting for my netbook to get here. Then I can move everything over to it and put a fresh image on this stand alone notebook I’ve been using.
So not really anything big going on. I'll have to find some photo's of the LCAC operations that we have through-out the day and post a few pictures. Wasn't really thinking we would be out here this long so i didn't bother to bring my camera. Think it's time to invest in a nice Nikon.
As always, Enjoy some crown for me!! Cheers!

Boredom

Ok.. so if you could only use google and wikipedia what would you look up?

Shit Happens

Ok, so first I want to shout out to my boy Chris a.k.a. DeTrend. Mad respect to his Tears of An Angel mix and Break the Windows Out of your House. OFF THE CHART MAN!!! Hope you guys don't move before I get back.. that shit would be No F*in Bueno!
Due to not having Internet I can't check out the site but here you go: http://www.wix.com/detrend/detrendradio Big thanks to Jess for sending me the link, to bad I can't use it till I get home, when I get home, if I ever get home. =D
So we all know, or should know or heard by now, the military in any shape/form is one huge F*in drama hole. Indeed this is true.
So every time the military does a mission of whatever the case may be they like to do a "Lesson's Learned " report. And in these types of reports everyone who is involved would put in one or two comments about what could be improved for any future evolutions. WELL.... And I really want to say I learned this from an extremely awesome person in my life, that has always been my number one.. My mom =D <3 U MOM!!!!! (don't worry dad i love you just as much!! always have)
So in my report, being the person that I am, that my parents taught so well, I didn't put just two thoughts into my report. And since I was so bad at school I think I'm making up for the shit now. LOL. Anyway, I put five.. Yep.. Five. And they said to focus on the "mission" for the most part of what could be improved, well, i decided to put in a bit about everything i have been trying to adept to in the past three months that I have been here. Needless to say, I sent my report to my boss, who then took it and put it into the report, that went on the share drive, for EVERYONE to read. All the way up to my Commanding Officer..... and you know the weirdest thing, only two people have mentioned it to me all day long. =D!!!! FML
*** CAN YOU REMEMBER-ER-ER ***
Also... I encourage everyone to put up a comment on every post they feel like putting a comment on. Please help keep me entertained =D Thanks to everyone who is checking this out daily and keeping tabs on me. and I hope to see everyone's comments so i know what is going on with everyone else! Cheers! Have some crown for me.

Things To Come

With still no internet access, no source of the outside world other than email, any .edu or .navy.mil is the only thing we can do. It seems that somebody on the marine corps side said we were sucking down bandwidth which caused for a ship wide halt for everyone's internet access. Even for your most common bill paying sites. Completely unreal on the hoops you have to jump through for the smallest shit. And you know the weirdest thing, is that from the data that we are getting from our servers, we are only utilizing stuff like foxnews.com, navyfcu.org (bank), and stuff like USAA.. I mean seriously, whatever happened to the phrase shut up and grow a pair, and stand up and tell someone they need to shut their mouth and stop complaining. And it all started shortly after we left. Real amazing when people that are in the lead of things (in charge of many people below them) can't tell someone TOO FUCKING BAD!
But we are really doing good things out here, helping all of these people in the poorest country in the world. giving out tons of food, water, medical supplies and help. We even brought aboard a 90yr old women last night and a little kid. So.... we are giving alot of support. We still have sailors and marines ashore everyday to help build tents, and hand out stuff. Alot of word floating around on returning before the first of march, and then coming from the big dogs we will be out here until almost april. And it all comes down to what it will take to have the non-profit organizations able to do this on their own. There is little to no threat out here, and it's just about the same as being in some other poor part of the neighborhood. Except here, and as far as i've learned that this government hasn't put a stop/and or law to rape and beatings of women among many other things. These people are really bad off and are in need of a governement to standup and tell them what is right and wrong. Here is some positive coverage:
The Navy received positive coverage in Wired and Popular Mechanics on communications technology used in Haiti
US Navy received positive coverage online via MTV News reports on USS Carl Vinson and Univision/La Razon reports on USS Bataan
The first few weeks there was a ton of media coverage out here on just about everyship, and now they are pretty much completely gone. So hopefully in the next few weeks of floating in the same spot we will see an increase of the non-profit organizations and the Haiti government standing back up.

For the Day

So ever since we pulled out of Norfolk, which I believe was on the night of the 13th, I've been going from 6am until normally around .... well it's 11pm now, so yea. Makes for a really interesting day that's for sure. By the time it's time to call it quits; feet are sore, legs hurt from the ladder-wells (stairs) and the drink that you keep thinking about is out in the distance.
Today was a pretty normal day, a few calls to fix some minor issues, put a nice new copy(image) onto a few notebooks that we own, and even re-did my inventory for accuracy. Nothing like running back and forth a hundred yards a couple of times a day to help some one you work with. Most of the day was spent with a new guy that just checked in who recently returned from a 7 month tour in Iraq. With the rise (need) for more forces overseas there is an abundance of navy/marine corps stories. Very interesting stuff to me and sometimes even a bit traumatizing.
We had another vert-rep today, which just means we took on a lot of cargo (food/supplies/ect) via Helo. I think we did somewhere over 200 pallets worth or so that will be going ashore to Haiti. I believe the call on the ship for that working party was 150 personal that were E-5 and Below and 200 Marines as well. Out here we all share the work. We did get a slight schedule change now that might land us back in Norfolk around the very end of March to possibly mid-April. Kind of depressing for me, and really depressing for the crew of the USS Bataan and the 22 Meu as well. Both crews just returned 3 months ago from a seven month deployment. So being out here for another four after only a month off wasn't the best thing to happen. Still a good number of people down here with us though. A lot of non-profit organizations on shore trying to get things set up and stable, which I believe is the reason we are still here.
After a long day, it was ended by helping take down the laundry for our small crew of guys. If there was ever a place to sweat and loose weight, it will defiantly be in ships laundry if not in the engineering spaces. One bad thing is, you have to take down so much laundry (35lbs+) or they won't take it. The other is that for some reason, it's never completely nice and dry. O, you have to go up one flight of stairs walk about 75 to a 100 yards, then go down four flights of stairs. Now over the years I’ve gotten smart about when i put my dirty clothes into ships laundry. I learned very quickly that the best bet you have is to always add a full cap of liquid laundry detergent to some piece of clothing in that load. You figure when the ship is doing laundry, they also put in about 5 to 8 bags of other people’s clothes. =D So, about 2 hours later after dropping off the 3 bags of other peoples clothes I go back down to pick them up. Luckily for us it was only a few hours instead of at the end of the day. Now in the 30 minutes I was down there I could almost swear I dropped a good 2lbs in sweat. But, more than half of my whites still came out of the dryer a bit damp. I’d almost like to assume that when we get underway, those industrial size washers and dryers are turning most of the day. I also learned that most of the people in the Corps get a pretty penny when they re-enlist. Even the grunts can get up to 70k for their service. Now I’m sure after last year and the budget cut to the military that it has all changed, but still interesting to know those guys who really put their life in the field get paid a bit of money for it.
Not to bad for one day in the life of the Navy. Big ups to my man DeTrend and the Breaks!! Never a disappointment when you tune in. Ya’ll should check out the show he streams every Friday night: www.wix.com/detrend/detrendradio
FEELIN LIKE I’M SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD!!!!!! YEA YEA!!!

Daily Motivation

Now there comes a time during the day that I step back and say to myself, what am I doing this all for. Through all the bullshit, all the hassle, the walking back and forth a hundred yards to grab something, down 4 flights of stairs and back up again for something random.. Now the correct answer is of course, for my family, but what is it that really picks me up all day long to keep me going, happy, and satsified... Music of course. So here's today's:

J Majik & Wickaman ft Kathy Brown
( This track is one of the Best, Most Uplifting, Motivating tracks i've ever heard. Hopefully i can catch it on Vinyl )

mostly everything I put up you can pull out of www.youtube.com
**WARNING** I can almost promise it will be drum and bass. =D

Bit of Trust

So what does it take for an ignorant person to trust someone? Do they have to be blonde? Do they have to have high class glasses? Some people were just not to be a technican and for the past two weeks, i've narrowed down all the one's i'll avoid at all cost on a daily basis.

the wrong people

Now come to find out, there is an official order that states any of the 22meu and anyone attached to them will receive 225$ special pay no matter if they go ashore or not in support of Operation Unified Response. Why is it that the Navy is going to sit here and debate tiny details of that order after being told to leave at a moments notice of 36 hours?? Someone please tell me the greater good of packing your shit and leaving in 36 hours and not know when you'll be coming home. What the hell is there to debate over?? I'm sorry, but from the ships perspective, after coming back from a seven month deployment, having a month off, then leaving again and recalling people that are on leave to do this?? tonight I'll be thankful for a podcast I downloaded from Dnbradio.com for helping me keep my sanity over political shit!

Back to January 12th

While at home one night with the family back on 12 Jan. I receive a text message from someone at work and it said: We might be on the hook for the Haiti relief effort, be at work at 0700 for a brief. So, i look at my phone and think to myself: O this is just what I need after being on shore duty for three years, and instant underway period after I transfer. Well, the next day we go into work and we all sit around a table in the office. There was about five of us at this meeting, and it was basically told to us that, we will be leaving tomorrow on the USS Bataan to support the Relief mission in Haiti. Start packing up all of our gear, you have until 11am to get it to the flight deck to be craned down to the pier on a flat bed. Once everything is on the truck, we will have someone move it over to the Bataan. Well, they were right about one thing, everything was on the pier by 1pm. By the time things were said and done, we had our equipment on the other ship,and our people moving the 70lbs boxes to the right place on the ship. By around 8pm that night I was still at work finishing moving peoples .PST files to an external. Amazing how fast we can just pack up and move. Note to self: Always keep a sea bag with the essentials packed: bathroom supplies, your own linen's, and eight days worth of cloths.
The morning of the 13th was an all night event for me thanks to what time I got home. I was hoping to come home, spend time with the family, help my beautiful wife with getting the kids to bed, and lay around on the couch with her for an hour or two. Instead, I ended up going to walmart at 2 or 3 in the morning to buy stuff like extra razors, and some other misc. items. I believe I got two hours of sleep and woke up around 5am to leave the house. We were slated to leave around 11am, which then turned into 6pm, which then turned out to be like 11pm. Still plenty cold outside, we made our way down to the Carolina's to pick up the 22nd MEU the next morning. Slowly but surely eleven hours later, we made haste at about 21 knots along the coast line all the way down to Haiti. Thanks to being a computer guy, I've seen alot of the briefs that have gone out as well as a few video telephone conferences. For a third world country, and although it killed thousands of people, the worst part is the loss of lives, and medical care. And i know that might sound a bit off with the way I'm saying it, but these people really didn't live on much to begin with. Even the humanitarian rations are being sold along the roadside. Not to mention the people that are using these bottles of water to wash their cars with. Atleast that's from our people (Sailor Ashore Mission -SAM) have been saying. So who really knows how long we could be out. Maybe we will be lucky and leave mid-month, maybe we will depart around the first week of April.
And now here I am, three weeks later, had a three day venture with no showers, still have little to no internet and everyone knows we are down here. I mean, what else could a person ask for? I vote Crown

Missing my man

Alright honey. Its time to come home! We miss you! Your babies are getting bigger right before my eyes!

That Asshole

We just had a four-star admiral come onboard from norfolk. He told us: "I was the one who sent you out here". There had to be a yell from the 2500 or so people onboard: WHERE IS THAT BASTARD!!! You want to talk about wanting to throw someone over the side of the ship. There is a good possiblity that we might see a bit of home here at the end of the month. They pulled tons of people off of leave from the Christmas/New Years holiday both navy and marine. The sadest part is that both the Bataan and 22 MEU just came back from a seven month deployment overseas. Talk about giving people a good pat on the back eh?

To the Winds

Now this will be a bit easier if everyone follows my blogs. Of course there is the navy.mil site for everyone to take a peek at. You also have the half stories of CNN. I choose to tell you that the Haitian's are indeed back to there own way of life now. These people are literally taking the rations we give them and selling them in the market.