Decommissioning

I reported to my first ship, the USS Benjamin Stoddert in February, 1990. I worked in the mess hall for three months, and made one deployment in 1991, standing three-section watchstander duty (which is worse than port and starboard duty, imo). It was an older ship, and it was decommissioned in December, 1991.

It's something only a crewmember can understand, having worked onboard, watching a ship, essentially die. I get a little worked up at times like those. I don't really remember much about the ceremony, I just remember being on the pier for it.

I've also been at the commissioning of a ship, my brother's, the USS Port Royal, in Savannah, in the summer of 1994. It's a very inspiring ceremony, and dad and I enjoyed it. So I've seen both sides.

Today, I said goodbye to an old, reliable friend. My old 1999 Chevy Cavalier finally went belly up last week. We'd spent over a thousand bucks fixing it last month, and the starter and battery cable it would need required another 900+, which we weren't willing to spend.

So this week, we cleaned out my car, took a few pictures and took off the license plate on the back and the custom UTEP front license and sold it for 300 dollars. That car took me a lot of places-- we saddled up and drove to Levelland, Hobbs, Big Spring, Clarendon, Midland, Odessa to broadcast basketball games in 1999, to Woodward in 2001 and Clay Center in 2002 for jobs, to Manhattan from 05-09 to see my girlfriend and to Alabama last year for a new life. Lots of stories, countless burgers and gatorades, and 133,000-plus miles. I didn't get all maudlin or anything, but it is the end of an era.

This week, we bought a new red Honda Fit for the wife. She really likes it, and has already named it Scooter. I get her Honda CR-V, which does have cruise control. It took me about an hour to reprogram the radio stations. So I go from being a Chevrolet man (1990 and 1999 Cavalier) to being a Honda man.

Heartaches, Hard Knocks and Things I Don't Know

I'm a fan of Garth Brooks' music. I'm not hard core, fawning over him, but I do like his songs a lot. The title of this post is a lyric from "When There's No One Around," a song off his Sevens album. He talks about a man so immature but he's still my best friend, just one of the boys who gets lost in the crowd, and how it's four in the morning and a tape of his failures playing inside his head.

This song reminds me of me, a lot. I'm bad about lying awake and thinking about everything bad, wrong or embarrassing I've ever done, and how I still fight the battles of 25 years ago. I can still get worked up over things that happened eons ago, thinking of what I wish I'd done, even though the healthy thing would be to let them go and focus, really focus, on the future. And before you know it, it's time to get up and your blood is still boiling over something that's long since out of sight. And everyday it's a challenge to let go of the past, to release and forgive myself and live.

Which brings us to our learning experience of the week.

Wednesday morning I chose to drop my pre-calculus class at UA. It just got to be too much. I thought that throwing time at the problem, it'd work itself out. But I never seemed to get very far in terms of my assignments in relation to how long I spent on them. And I'd not had a math class or looked at algebra rules (GRE buildup notwithstanding) since 1994. In addition, all this was being thrown at me three and four lessons at a time during lecture. Not a lot of time to soak up lessons. When you add in that I'm working 40 hours a week at the Census office, it was more than I could take. I got home Tuesday night at 9:30 after work with three homework assignments and three quizzes to bang out, plus study for a test the next morning. I was tired and defeated.

We'll look at some things and rework the plan and move forward. I have the best woman on the planet in my corner, who is uber-supportive as I look for a direction to go in. If I could learn to fly, I'd never touch down.

Imaginary Numbers

I'm a week and a half into my first college course in 13 years, and my first math class in nearly 17. MATH 112, Pre-Calculus, at the University of Alabama. Imaginary numbers is a concept I learned about this week-- i= negative square root of 1. Because real numbers didn't provide enough torture.

The idea was to take pre-calc in preparation for full-blown calculus in the fall. But re-learning math rules, and grasping new concepts in a condensed, fast-paced, four-week class is proving to be a challenge. Everything is done on the computer-- homework, quizzes, practice problems, even tests, but the tests are proctored and done at the math lab only. It's a really snazzy program. I just wish I picked things up a little faster.

So it's an uphill struggle right now-- it's an 8 am course (all they had-- ug), plus working 40 hours at the census office. And running. Doesn't leave a lot of time for much else. But I'm up for the challenge.

And at the census office-- more police work... Figuring out which set of info to believe. Things have thinned out there a lot-- people being released for lack of work. Thankfully, I'm not one of them. I still have a place to go, and people willing to pay me to be there.

So-- work and school, all wrapped up together. Busy times. It requires much giving of effort.

Bring it on.

Catching up

It's been an exciting couple of weeks around here-- much to say and much to catch up on.

I'm now enrolled in my first college course in 13 years... Pre-calculus, MATH 112 at the University of Alabama. It's a sort of warm up for calculus in the fall, since I've not taken a math class since 1994. I'm not even sure if 2x3 still equals six. Right now, I'm an accounting major, but really I'm throwing things at the wall and trying to find something that sticks. If we find that I don't like accounting, we'll try something else. But a new adventure, and new adventures in math, begins next week. It's an 8-9:45 class, so coffee, lots and lots of coffee will be needed. And some painkillers too. I'm reminded of taking honors trig as a senior in high school, and getting a 59 on the final to get 5.9 points and get semester credit by 0.5. I'll have an excellent tutor, and more motivation (not by much) than I did in 1988, so I think things will go better.

And speaking of new adventures, two of my best friends from college, and on the planet, came through Tuscaloosa two weekends ago. Drew lives in Houston, and through the magic of facebook, reconnected with his former girlfriend Heather. Things have progressed rapidly for them, and Drew flew up to eastern Ohio to move her down to H-town to live with him. They stayed with us on their way south, and we had a great time-- good food and lots of stories, some of which are actually true, some of which are aging well with time. I'd not seen Heather since- 1996?- and Ann had not met her. Those two kids look great, and look so happy they seem to glow these days. It was great getting caught up and reconnecting with old friends.

Heather and I have things in commmon these days-- leaving a stable job with decent pay, picking up and moving to a new part of the country, with a lot of uncertainty. Granted, there's a lot of stability in both our situations, but much change as well. I strongly suspect she reacts to change better than I do. But I think we'll all be OK.