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.

One Year Ago...

This weekend last year, 2009, was the first weekend my wife and I spent in Alabama. It was a house-hunting trip, and a way to dip our toe in the pool. It was a pretty wild trip-- we left KCI Thursday morning at 6 headed to Birmingham and then Tuscaloosa, and we hadn't even made it onto that plane before we were told that we'd be delayed in DFW. Our plan was to be on the ground in Tuscaloosa at lunchtime Thursday, but Mother Nature wouldn't allow it. We stayed in the Dallas airport until about 5 that afternoon, at which time we rented a car and drove as far as Shreveport, after stopping near Tyler at a Wally's for essentials such as shirts, toothbrushes, etc. since our stuff was already checked through.

So we made it to T-Town Friday after lunch, just in time for our first Alabama gully-washer, and our dinner companions told us power went out at their house. We found an apartment we liked (still do!), and went back to Kansas and got married two weeks later.

This weekend, I've caught myself thinking on that four-day span... Thinking of what we were doing one year ago tonight, whether it be actual house hunting, attending church, sitting in the grocery store parking lot waiting for the rain to stop... you name it. But that was an entire year ago, and I've also pondered where we (and I) were last year, and where we are now. We were on the cusp of a great big adventure-- me quitting my job and Ann starting a new one, moving out of my apartment in Clay Center and into her house in Manhattan and further... and of course that whole getting married thing.

I know I get a little introspective around New Year's, thinking about where I've been and what I've done and where I am, and it's much like what I'm feeling this weekend. I had some good things a year ago, and I don't have those things now. But I do have a wonderful wife who makes me happy beyond words. And I have a lot of options in front of me, and chances I likely wouldn't have had if I'd stayed put. I don't know where the road will take me, and I'm pretty nervous about that, but it means I'm trying something new. Different variables mean different results. Who knows where I'll be a year from now.

In other news, I mourn the end of another playoff hockey season. I love the Stanley Cup playoffs, and getting my picture taken with the cup is on my bucket list. I love the passion and the urgency teams play with-- they used to play three or four overtimes and nobody would give an inch.

Something special I saw before game four at Philly was someone coming out to sing God Bless America. A Flyers tradition is to break out that song whenever the team needs a big win. Since they were down two to one in games, it fit. But what got to me is that they meshed Kate Smith's version (recording) with the gal who was singing. That was it. I just came completely unglued. Smith's version is associated with the team, and their winning percentage is astronomically high whenever they play it. It's tradition-- it's the urgency of the situation-- it's the 'we can't go down 3-1 in the series' feeling. It was really awesome to see that. And ya, Philly won to tie the series against Chicago, but the Blackhawks got past the jinx and won at Philly in game six to win it all.

And we're still running-- 28 miles last week, including a treadmill ten Saturday. It's officially hot in Alabama, and I don't see a cool weather outdoor run in the foreseeable future. But we're getting it done.

Oh yeah-- on the way back to Kansas the following Monday, our plane was delayed out of Birmingham, and I had to change a tire at midnight in the parking lot at KCI. Still steaming hot outside. A nice gentleman stopped by and shined his headlights on the event so I could see what I was doing. We got back to Ann's about 2 am. Ask us anytime-- we've got a million stories from that expedition.

Back to the Phones...

My job as a bean counter with the census office has evolved into working the phones. People who didn't return a form by mail got an in-person visit so that they could be counted. Between 5 and 10 percent of those people get calls from people in my work group, checking on the door knockers in the field, making sure they did their job properly.

It's the calling thing that's, well, a bit of a hang up. Some folks, for whatever reason, don't take too kindly to being called by the government and pumped for information and make sure we know about it. The question isn't about the info they provided, it's about whether the job was done correctly. But some of the time it doesn't matter. Sometimes they hang up on us, other times they get po'd.

That's part of the problem for me. I don't handle things like that too well. I guess I only see my side of things-- being a guy who's just doing a job for a few bones an hour. The other side is someone who's having a bad day, maybe is already mad at the government or whatever, and has a representative of said government on the line. The thought of making these calls and asking these questions positively paralyzes me-- that these things could happen to me and ruin my day doesn't really appeal to me.

They tell you not to take these things personally-- that it's not me they're upset with. And I understand that. But it doesn't help much. It's a bit of a dagger to watch my coworkers do this work seemingly without such fear. I've done some calling, and it helps me to do it, since I consider it to be the 'heavy lifting' that has to be done right now. I don't want to let my coworkers down. There's still other work to be done, so it's not like I've done nothing, but I feel like this is my Everest right now. It's something for me to learn and to overcome, so I hope to get somewhere on this.

And in the news... I'm back to running a full schedule, after a few low-mileage weeks. 26 miles on five runs last week, including a nine-miler back on Saturday. I don't know if I'll find a half-marathon this summer to use as a training tool for the full marathon I'm planning on for December, but I'm running well and losing weight and looking and feeling great.

Found out last week I've been admitted to the University of Alabama for the fall 2010 semester. Still looks like accounting, since it's more of an absolute and less of an abstract sort of thing. Plus, I think it leads to more opportunities. Maybe broadcast is still in my future. Who knows. But this chance for more knowledge cannot be passed up.

Another Road Trip

Last week, my wife and I put 1768 miles on her vehicle, as we drove back to Manhattan so she could walk in graduation ceremonies at K-State. I was excited for her, although not for all the windshield time. Ann, on the other hand, was more relieved than anything, as a five-year weight was lifted off her shoulders.

She picked me up at work Wednesday at 5 and we were on our way directly. Stopped in Olive Branch, Missippi (yes, I know that's not how it's spelled, but it *is* how it's pronounced in the South) for gas and to Jonesboro, Arkansas to stop for the night. We listen to a lot of podcasts on our trips, so the time goes by, and it was nice to listen to Cardinals/Astros when we drove through Memphis. Tuscaloosa is a dead zone for bseball on the radio, so I was excited even to listen to the Cardinal game, even though I had no vested interest.

We were on our way to KC by 8:30 next morning and got there by 3 or so, listening to more Cardinals baseball, though I didn't know there was also Royals game on. Wild thing is, the Royals fire their manager the same day we get to town. I thought it was spooky, anyway... Next morning, A got an early start, since she had logistics to tend to, and her mother, nephew and I headed for Manhappiness by 9:15. We went to our favorite restaurant, where the chili is as good as it has always has been, then to Bramlage for commencement. We had a great time seeing our friends and seeing the sights and consuming large quantities of chocolate milk, as we toasted the good doctor.

But as with most things, time travels too fast. Back to KC the next day for our niece's open house graduation thing. She's headed to KSU in the fall. We still think she's not a real teenager, since she's so (unusually) poised and thoughtful for a kid her age. We made it as far as West Plains, MO for the night. Pretty wild that we're starting to know this route from KS to Tuscaloosa so well. Got to listen to some of the Royals game on the way, though there was a rain delay and we were an hour further down the road (and further out of range) by the tme it came on. There's just something melodic and soothing about listening to Denny Mathews talk about a baseball game. We stuck it out as long as we could on the radio signal.

Her uncle Emory (whose wife Jean passed away in April) has a building named in his honor at Missouri State-West Plains, so we stopped for a photo op and then got back up the highway. It was cloudy most of the day, but the rain didn't unload on us until we were five minutes outside of Tuscaloosa. Made it tough getting the rest of the way, but I completely trust Ann driving.

So it was good to catch up with great friends, celebrate old times and get Ann graduated, and to listen to all our episodes of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me (our fave!). But it was also good to get home.

I use a Runner's World training plan for my running, and the 16-week plan I was on ran out a few weeks ago. Last week and this week I've been sort of winging it (21 miles two weeks ago, 12 last week and prob 21 this week on five runs) since then. But next week we ramp it back up, as we start a plan that gets me into the mid-30's for weekly mileage. Still looking hard at a winter marathon in Huntsville, Alabama. I feel great about my running these days, and my body reflects it.

And we're also trying to ramp up the job search. A spontaneous (announced 11 hours in advance) midnight training session, plus trying to explain to family what I'm up to kind of lends a little urgency to things. I'm not sitting on the couch eating ice cream and watching the Price is Right, but I expect more of myself, and it stings a little to tell folks what I'm doing.