Missed the Toilet Bowl!!

In the military, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines hate few things more than mandatory fun:  events that are supposed to be fun, but attendance is required, not requested.

I missed today's mandatory fun, an all-day sports event called The Toilet Bowl.  Faculty from the Defense Information School play football against the instructors.  The services also have games--Army and Air Force versus Navy and Marines.  There is barbecue for lunch.

The event begins at 8 a.m. and ends at 3 p.m.  For Army students, attendance is mandatory.  Air Force students could attend, but if not, they had a long weekend.  

Guess who was happier.  

Two Army students were excused from the event (You could say flushed from the bowl!).  I did not have to go because my step-daughter's father's memorial service is tomorrow.  Another sergeant had a suicide in his home unit.  

Everyone else went to the TB.

I asked one of my civilian instructors if he was going to the Bowl.  He said he would, but he is also a Navy veteran and remember mandatory fun with no small amount of pain.  He said,  "I am a civilian.  I can take leave."

Finished First Feature!!!

Today we wrote a four-page feature article about our foodie instructor Peter Robertson.  He cooks foods from around the world, he knows all the best restaurants in Baltimore, and he and his wife pick their homes by which on has the best kitchen.

Like every feature, it was draining to write, but the topic was fun.  I want to go to his favorite restaurants.  His Korean fave is the Honey Pig in Ellicott City, Md.  With a name like that how could it be bad?  They have iron skillet tables and cook right on the table.  I really like th Chinese restaurants that put the hot pot in the middle of the table so you cook your own food.

Formation soon.

Photography Tomorrow!!!

Because I am in the Army, I get to take pictures of things most people never see.

Now I will learn HOW to take pictures properly when I get these oppotunities.

Tomorrow the class I was waiting for begins!!!!

Photography.

For four years I have been taking photos, nearly 20,000 of them.  And I don't really know what I am doing.  For the next three days I will get professional help with this problem--three full days of photo class.

Today was the final day of newswriting.  I am pretty sure I did well.  My average is in the high 80s or low 90s so far.  I am sooooooooooo much better at writing than proofreading.  The Army, not surprisingly, stresses accuracy over everything else in the writing process.  Be dull if you must but don't screw up.

Family Weekend Gets Complicated

Jacari, Nigel (first two, front row) and I drove to Richmond Saturday to see Lauren.

Kiersten joined the boys and I Saturday morning at Waffle House.

Annalisa went to see Iolanthe Sunday.

Lisa is in Minnesota--I talked to her on the phone.

This weekend was as a lot of fun, and I even got to catch up on sleep on Sunday, but it was definitely not a weekend to relax.

I had been planning for a few weeks to visit Lauren this weekend in Richmond.  The original plan was for my wife to drive the boys to Fort Meade Friday evening, then I would drive with them to Richmond Saturday morning and return after Lauren's season-opening football game on Sunday at 1 p.m.

Then I was put on the duty roster on Friday evening from 8:30 p.m. till 30 past midnight (Zero dark 30).  And my wife had a math meeting at 7:30 a.m. Saturday!  I thought I might try to drive home at Zero Dark 30, but that morning we got up at 3:45 a.m. for a ruck march.  By the time I got off duty I had trouble driving the one-mile trip back to my bunk.

In the morning I drove north to PA.  While the boys cleaned the house, I did the laundry.  Around 3:30pm we drove back to Fort Meade where the boys ate in the DFAC (Chow Hall).  They ate burgers, fries, cake, Coke--they were very happy.  Then we drove to Richmond.

Lauren had couches and beds for us.  The boys played video games.  I went to sleep.

The next day the boys and Lauren and Pete got up at 6:15 and played with the dog.  I slept till 9. 
We had brunch at Lauren's, walked to the River, then went to Lauren's football game.  The start was delayed by an hour so we only saw the first half, but Lauren, Pete and Pete's brother John all played well.

At 230pm we drove back Silver Spring MD where my wife picked up the boys.  She had been visting Iolanthe in Frederick VA. 

So we got to see all of the family in VA and PA.  Lisa is in Minnesota, so seeing her is a little more difficult.

Marine Knows Twitter

Got a great lesson about twitter today from a Marine sergeant who does social media here at the Defense Information School (DINFOS).

He told us to use facebook to interact and use twitter to follow breaking news.  He gave us sites to follow and told us not to worry about hashtags, they are not necessary for searches.  We can just search twitter for subjects we care about.

He also showed us good things we can learn from Yelp and other social media sites. 

The class was two afternoons and covered all of social media.  There were no tests, no lesson plan and no homework.  The oddly informal character of the course shows just how new the whole subject of social media is to the military.

The contrast was especially strong today because our morning class was about rewriting national news into local news stories.  This was the staple of weekly newspapers, but has all but vanished now that most everyone gets their news from electronic media.

We had a very formal lesson in how to do something that is very rare, and an ungraded lesson in how to do something that will be the center of all communication with young people--90% of the military.

Bathroom Stalls Get Busier at School

No, we did not have an outbreak of food poisining.

As of today, Army students are not allowed to have cell phones during the duty day at DINFOS.  We were told about the new rule at final formation yesterday. 

We are learning to be news people.  At the beginning of today's public affairs class the instructor told us we should all be news junkies and asked how we get our news.  Everyone said, "On my phone."

The Air Force is laughing at the Army again.  "You guys can't have cell phones?"

We are allowed to write a request to the battalion commander if we want or need and exception to policy.  But very few soldiers will do that.  The jokes at class breaks say cell phones will ride in back packs and magically appear in the bathroom stalls.

61 days to graduation.

Double Punishment Day

We are back from a three-and-a-half day weekend.  It was a four-day weekend for the Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines in our class, but a three-day weekend for the Army.

We had Army Values training on Friday.

Now we are back and I have two punishment sessions today.

On Wednesday last week, I got a 63 on a news release.  Anything below a 70 means remedial training.  I made an error in fact which is an automatic 20 points off, plus enough other copy errors to drop my score below the passing line. 

All we had to do is come in one hour before class officially starts and write another news release.  I passed this one with no errors.  It was not difficult, but it was another hour that I could not be doing my other work--which would allow me to get more sleep. 

And that's the difficulty with our schedule.  Because the Army (and no other service) has Physical Training at 5 a.m., which means formation at 4:45 a.m., which means getting up at 4 a.m., we are chronically tired.  At least the older guys (me and the 30 year olds) are tired. 

And at 4:30 p.m. today we will have remedial PT or drill and ceremonies because that's what we do on Tuesdays after classes from last week until we graduate. 

So the morning was an individual punishment for a mistake I made.  The afternoon is a mass punishment because some of us do not use proper form on some of the warm-up and cool-down exercises we do.  We are collectively good at the actual exercises, but because a few of us did the bend and reach or windmill with imperfect form at 5 a.m., we will practice it every other week from 4:30 to 6 p.m.

Catching Up on Sleep--Then back to the trenches

The Labor Day holiday weekend  began earlier than I had hoped.  I expected to spend most of Friday in Army values classes, but we were released from the class at noon Chow and I got a text before 1 PM that said we could sign out.

So I rode to company headquarters and signed out just after 1 PM. Wow!   I was on pass until Monday. So I went back to my room and put the laundry basket in the car and put all my papers in my backpack and thought I would just rest for a few minutes I was so tired.

At 5:15 PM I woke up. At that point the traffic in Baltimore was beyond terrible. This weekend the Indy cars were racing on the streets of Baltimore. Many downtown streets were closed and fenced so traffic on this holiday weekend was even worse than usual. So I went to chow and went for a ride and waited for some of the red lines in Google maps to turn to yellow before I drove home.

By the time I left the traffic it subsided and I made it home in a couple of hours. And I was still tired.

On Saturday I rode 22 miles so I did change my recent habit of the Saturday exercise Sabbath.   In the afternoon the boys and I went to Philadelphia to my office. I worked for a couple of hours while they played on computers.   Then we went to dinner with one of the visiting scholars from where I work and her daughter who is at Cornell University this year getting a Masters degree in chemical engineering.  We went out for Chinese food and as usually happens when the boys are at dinner people who do not know them are surprised at how much they eat. Jacari ordered two entrées  and did not have a lot of leftovers. Nigel ordered a large appetizer and entrée again not a lot left over. We did bring all the leftovers home and the boys ate Chinese food for breakfast on Sunday.

On the Thursday before this weekend my wife had an event on campus with pizza. She brought home for leftover pizzas. She and Kiersten each had two slices. The boys ate the other 28 slices. They had 10 each for dinner and three each for breakfast and to others just in between.

On Sunday I tried to catch up on exercise. I rode 36 miles:  29 with my wife in the morning and seven in the afternoon Nigel. I swam a mile at the F&M Pool  while Nigel ran and hid a tennis ball into Jacari was off at church event.   I tried to run after that and did an extremely slow 2 miles quit.

Now I'm going to go  back to Fort Meade and get ready for tomorrow's public affairs test. Long day tomorrow!!!!

Current and Future News People. . .NOT!!!

Each day we have public affairs class, Mr. A starts the class off with a news quiz.  In every class he encourages us to have news feeds on the computers at our desks.  (The other two instructors DO NOT want us to be multi-tasking when they are talking.)  Mr. A says we should know what is going on at our base, in our community and in the world at large.

He is right.

But what news do students, faculty and other folks here at DINFOS care about?  Today I was eating lunch at the end of chow hours, about 12:40 p.m.  Since I was sitting alone, I sat near the CNN TV.  Each of the five dining areas in the dining facility has a TV up high on the wall at each side of the room:  one on CNN, one on ESPN.  I was watching a speech by John Kerry about Syria.  I had to leave, so I got up in the middle of the speech.  As I walked toward the back to drop my tray, I went into the next room where about 20 DINFOS people, civilians and soldiers, were standing looking up at the TV.

For a millisecond, I thought they were watching CNN.  Nope.  ESPN was re-running bloopers from a NY Jets press conference.

Part of the reason I chose this career field was my obsession with the news, a Gussman family tradition.  This is a career field for those obsessed with the news.  It will be tough out in the fleet and field for folks who really don't care about local, national and world events.

High in the Morning: Low in the Afternoon

Today was the best and the worst day so far here at DINFOS. 

At 4:45 a.m. this morning we lined up to take our first fitness test.  The test started worse than usual for me.  I have gotten the maximum score on the fitness test for the last two years.  The first event is the pushup.  I needed to do 53 pushups in two minutes to score the maximum.  I could only do 50.

So I knew I was not going to score 300 again.  But I did enough situps to score 100 on that event.  I have not actually run since 2010.  Soldiers over 55 years old have the option of walking or riding the bike for the aerobic event.  I took the bike.  This time I decided to run since we will take two more fitness tests before we leave.  I did the two-mile run in 15 minutes, 10 seconds.  That is 12 seconds faster than I needed for a maximum score.

So I got a 297 out of 300.  Not max, but it felt good to get a top score while doing the run with everyone else.

Then in the afternoon we got our grades back from three days of Public Affairs training.  We have to score at least 70 in all graded exercises.  In the initial news release, I made an error in fact and a few small errors.  Together that dropped my score to 63 on that assignment. 

So Tuesday morning when school resumes, I have to do a remedial session before class. 

It is a relief that if I blew an assignment that it was a single large error.  In this case, I said all of the victims were transported to the post medical facility when two went directly to the hospital. 

Oh well.

On Air Test Today

Today's class ended with a mock on-air interview.  I did well at this with the huge assumption that it would be edited.  I was sincere, got my facts correct, but I was hesitant.

My classmates thought it was weird that I would be nervous on camera. 

Actually, the job of a spokesperson is a very special skill which I do not have.  I do not memorize well.  And a spokesperson has to be in full control of the facts before getting on camera.  A great memory is an important part of being on-camera talent.  And I have a spotty memory.

4 a.m. Just Sucks

After a fun and restful weekend, I had a little trouble going to sleep which led to a very sad 4 a.m. wake up.

Getting up at 4 a.m. leads me to do all kinds of things to be able to stay awake through eight hours of classes and sometimes two or three hours of homework. 

Here is our daily schedule:

Up at 4:10 a.m.
Shave, brush my teeth, put on PT uniform, ride one mile to the PT field.

4:45 a.m. fall in for morning accountability formation. 

5 a.m.  One hour of PT.  On Monday, Wednesday and Friday we warm up for about 20 minutes, run for 25 minutes and cool down for 10 minutes.

6 a.m. ride back to my room.  On Monday, Tuesday and Thursday the pool opens at 6 a.m.  So I can swim on those days.  For the first week and Wednesdays and Fridays I take a shower and sleep till 7:10 a.m.  Then I dress and go to brakfast.  On swim days, I swim to 6:55 a.m. then change and go to brakfast.

7:55 a.m. class begins.

11:30 a.m. we get released for lunch.  I jump on the bike, ride to my room and take a nap till Noon.  Then dress, ride to chow and get back to class by 12:30 p.m.

12:30 p.m. afternoon class.  We get released between 3:45 p.m. and 4 p.m.  Then we go back to the PT field for an end-of-the-day formation at 4:30 p.m.

On Tuesdays, this formation is followed by another hour of PT.  On Thursdays instead of formation we have an hour of professional development. 

Then dinner, my chance to go for a long-ish bike ride, homework, maybe swim. 

Then bed.

The Student Parking Lot

Every morning at 4:35 a.m., I roll out of the parking lot in student housing on my $800 single-speed bike.  As I ride the mile to the field where we do fitness training, I get passed by some really nice cars and trucks.  The are the cars of my fellow students. 

Rolling past me are a champagne Escalade,

A $29,000, 2013 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid with heated leather seats, even the rear seats,

an immense, black crew cab pickup truck, an Audi, a new VW Beetle, and several other cars and SUVs three years old or less.

Then there is my car:  a 2002 Chevy Malibu with 172,000 miles.  All of my classmates are enlisted soldiers around the same pay grade as me.  There cars are new, shiny and represent about a year's pay. 

I suppose this is normal in America, but living with my frugal Ninja wife and working with young people who live in Philadelphia and mostly drive old cars or no cars, it is strange to be with young people who live in middle America and own new, expensive cars.  Just another bit of culture difference when I go on active duty.

Up Even Earlier!

Today I got up earlier than usual.  Not by much.  I got up at 3:48 a.m. instead of 4:07 a.m.  But in the sad world of Zero-Dark-30, every minute counts. Today I was on the duty desk for 4:30 to 6:30 a.m.  Some of my classmates were jealous.  Being on duty on weekday mornings means you are not doing fitness training. 

So while they did pushups, situps, pullups and the other morning exercises, I was checking my email and checking ID cards of everyone who went in and out of the building. 

I am way behind on email so the time was kind of nice.  We are not allowed to have any personal items on the desk, especially personal electronics, but I can check email on the Army computer. 

At 6:30 a.m. I was released to go to class--which starts at 7:55 a.m.  I went straight to the chow hall.  Although the food here is not as lavish as the food in Iraq, breakfast is by far the best meal.  Every morning the cook who makes the eggs, Anna, sees me and makes an omelet with ham, cheese and green peppers.  Depending on the day, I  get either a biscuit and bacon or a biscuit and sausage gravy.  Sometimes home fries, sometimes grits, French toast when they have it, juice and coffee.

And for the environmental folks who read this, like my wife, we eat with metal silverware on plates and trays with cups and mugs.  Everything gets washed, not tossed.

Weekend Off: Day 2

Today was a real day off.  I was one of more than a thousand cyclists who rode 100 kilometers and around Lancaster County, Pa.  Originally, my wife and I were supposed to be part of a group of math professors from here department doing the ride.  One professor was injured, her husband stayed home with her, so our group was us.

We rode a steady pace of just over 16 mph and finished the ride close to noon.  We rode to and from the event so the total ride for the day was 76 miles, a new distance record for my wife. 

When we were two miles from home, Annalisa said "Let's run three miles when we get back."  At first I said no way, but I knew she was right, we need to practice transitions.  So when we got home, I changed clothes, she just changed shoes, and we ran.  We only ran two miles, mostly because I was so sore.

After the run, I did one more load of laundry and headed back to school.

Real Fitness Training at School

Those of you who have read this blog for a while know I have to work out on drill weekends because our training is mostly attending classes and other equally strenuous activities.

Not at the Defense Information School.  We are up every day at 4 a.m. and do an hour of PT from 5 to 6 a.m.  In that hour this week I have run 7 miles, done 240 pushups, 220 situps and five pullups in addition to the dozens of other exercises I don't keep track of.

As you would expect, I ride everywhere, so I also rode 105 miles, much of it one mile at a time on the single speed bike.  I managed to get to the pool for three workouts.  Twice I swam a kilometer, once a quarter mile.

This weekend I won't be exercising at all on Saturday and riding about 70 miles on Sunday.  And at this school, I will not be complaining about a lack of exercise.

Not My Job

In any government organization the people in charge have a defined area of responsibility.  Go beyond that area and someone will be on you like dung beetles on a manure pile.

When I went through job training as an armor (M60A1 tank) crewman, the drill sergeants who were responsible for our daily life also taught our classes.  When we did fitness training, a tank commander was in front of us.  When we learned how to align the sights of our 105mm cannon, it was a drill sergeant who was also an armor crewman who taught the class.

With academic courses like DINFOS, the cadre who are in charge of housing, food, fitness training and our lives outside the class are different than the instructors inside the class.  If there is anything that will keep me from succeeding in a journalism course, it will be lack of sleep.  We get up at 4 a.m. every day.  We are in class from 7:55 a.m. to 4 p.m.  We have a formation at 4:30 p.m., then we do homework until we go to bed.

Our instructors at the school made clear they have no influence on the detachment that is in charge of the rest of the schedule--and reminded us we better not fall asleep in class.  They teach us, the detachment trains us.  Neither group can tell the other what to do.  And they don't.

So we struggle to stay awake in class, stay up late to finish our homework, and roll out of bed at 4 a.m. for fitness training.  Both the detachment and the school say "Time management is the key to success."  They are right.  But it is clear that the two groups work independently.  Could more students succeed if the detachment and the school worked together?  We'll never know.

My Army, My Military

Our group of 27 soldiers got divided into three classes on Monday.  I am in a group of eight: two airmen, a Marine and five soldiers.
[NOTE:  Marine is always capitalized.  You can look up the fact in the AP Style Guide.  You can look up the reason on line if you are curious.]
During the first class we had an "ice-breaker" exercise.  During that exercise, I knew I was in the the part of the Army where I belong.
We each took a Post-It poster-size sheet, stuck it on the wall, and divided it in fours quadrants: Bio, Likes, Dislikes, Goals

Our class student leader is Ben.  Here is some of his answers:

LIKES:

Norrin Radd

Clubber Lang

Vita Sackville West

The Saturn myth

DISLIKES:

Fox News

The Lord of the Rings movies

Crossfit (as religion)

Ideology, particularly American pragmatism

Wynton Marsalis as representing all of Jazz

 

BIO:

31 

from Connecticut

Grad student at Trinity College

GOALS:

fulfilling employment

personal writing

learning to play the upright bass or speak a new languauge

develop more capacity empathy

Ben is a tall quiet staff sergeant who lifts weights and is a very fast runner.  

I like being in the Army, but I like it a lot more in a room of soldiers like Ben.

Good at Grammar After All--and Learning More

It's official. I got the highest grade on the grammar test in my class at DINFOS.  I got 93 of 100 right on the grammar test.  Next best grade was 90.  And I will be even better soon because we are spending the next week or so reviewing grammar.  Tonight's homework is looking up 33 grammatical points in the AP Stylebook and then editing several press releases.

It's after 9 p.m., I have less than a third of my homework done and I have to get up at 0400 hours.

More later.

First Day of School--and a Bonus Class!!!

 Today was the first day of school in our basic journalism course.   As promised we began with the 100-question grammar test.  We took the test online, so we thought that we would get the results immediately.  Wrong.   It turns out that the Army has to have paper for nearly everything so this online test is graded on paper at a different location.   Even the parts of the Army that are automated often really have a "sneaker net" behind the automation.

 Before and after the tests we were told that we must score at least 70 or we would be required to take a remedial grammar class.   It turns out this requirement is not ironclad, at least not for guard and reserve soldiers. But after the test most of us were waiting rather nervously for the results to see if we would continue in the course or start over again later after two or three weeks of grammar class.

 Since this is a military school we listened to introductory lectures  for the rest of the day. Several of them were welcome lectures by senior staff members who reminded us in various ways that we must attend class and obey all the rules. In the middle of the fourth or fifth of these lectures one of the instructors came in the class, read several names, and told those people to go to the hallway and bring their gear.  They were headed for the remedial class.  We won't see them again.

At the end of the day, we signed out and met in front of the building to get a short writing assignment from our class leader, due at 10pm tonight.  We started to walk toward chow when one of the sergeants from the cadre said we had to sign back into the building.  In 10 minutes the First Sergeant is going to teach a class in treating and identifying cold-weather injuries!

Really!

To be fair, we also heard about heat injuries, but that was only the last 10 minutes of the next hour.  For forty minutes we learned how to identify frostbite, trench foot, chill blains and administer first aid for these and other injuries.  The high temperature today was 87 degrees in case you were wondering.

After eight hours of tests and lectures in school, it was quite a challenge to sit in a windowless room for an Army Powerpoint presentation on cold weather injuries.

Hooah!!