Basically

Hello my dear friends!  I hope you're ready for the beginning of something great. Each Monday, I'll be posting for a new series I've decided to call "Basically" If I wrote all about it all in one post you would be bored to tears, so I'm going to do my best to break it up into the most exciting parts so that you can share in my experience.  I am also thinking about working up some "so you're going to BCT" stuff, but I don't know. We shall see how much time I've got.

Now, without further ado, I present Basically.

Top 5 Worst Things About Basic Training:

5)  Wind. 

 Being a plain, Oklahoma is pretty dang windy. It's possible that the wind did not stop blowing all 11 weeks I was on Fort Sill.  Standing in formation at 0400 with some serious wind chill was pure Hell. It was cold and it burned our faces. I either had windburn or sunburn the entire duration of basic. It was awful. No amount of warming layers or neck gaiters could make it better. 

4) Box Lunch.

Seriously....eff box lunch. They called them Jimmy Deans, but they were anything but. Basically a box lunch consisted of two cans of tuna salad, chicken salad, beef in BBQ, or chicken and noodles.  It had a juice box, a fiber bar, can of fruit, and bread that was nasty. Even worse? They gave them to us for dang breakfast! Yep! BREAKFAST!! It was terrible. It also meant that you'd be good an hungry until dinner chow because we'd have MREs for lunch... ick. Box lunch. 

3) Living with 59 females.

Is it necessary for me to explain this one? I think it speaks for its self. It is so hard to deal with so many women at one time. I didn't have much trouble getting a long with them, but I had my fair share of grudges, frustrations, irritations, etc. with many of them. The worst thing about it was how they all fought with each other. It made me want to say "Can't we all just get along?!" And be serious about it. 

2) Lugging around my M16...

Have you ever carried around nearly 8 lbs of something around for about 7 1/3 weeks? If you have, you get me. It blows. Even worse? Ever cycle after my class will be getting brand new M4s. I got to pick one of them up and pull the charging handle back and it was like a dream...I am so jealous. 

1) Hurry Up & Wait

This is truly the very worst thing about basic....You run everywhere. You are given 30 second to take everything out of your wall locker and take it down two flights of stairs. You're pushed onto and off of buses. You're told to be in formation at 05 when the drill sergeants don't come out until 0545. You wait and wait and wait on everyone and everything. Oh, and if you have to wait on your battle buddies, you get to do it in the front leaning rest while sounding off with "Hurry up! Waiting on you!" It's just great.

Sarcasm. 

Not great. 

  

I'm Back, Did You Miss Me?

HELLO! 

I am currently hanging out at the USO in the St. Louis Airport just waiting for my bus to arrive and I thought that I would stop in and say a thing or two before I head off to AIT and get too busy to blog about what's going on. 

First things first!

I had a giveaway going before I left that never got taken care of because I was gone. Don't worry, a winner will be picked and something will be sorted out, I promise!

Second of all. I missed my bliggity...so much. I missed all of my readers, I missed writing my witty little pieces, I missed tweeting and facebooking and all the annoying parts of bloggings all put together and I am so happy to be returning to this thing that I love so much.

I would also like to thank the awesome ladies that blogged for me while I was gone! I so appreciated them and their efforts to keep my blog from dying out. I was so worried, but I think that it was alright :) I could have asked for better bloggy friends. 

What I've decided to do with my basic training experiences, is tell you a little bit about them each week.  I suppose it will be a "Military Monday" sort of thing. Hopefully that works out as well as I think it will. 

But until then, I'll give you a few wonderful highlights. 

1) I reached one of my goals and I was promoted to Private First Class effective 12 April!  Only 18 out of 210 were promoted and I was one of them.  I am so proud of it and the extra money really doesn't make me sad at all. 

2) I was able to serve as a squad leader. It felt so good to be given some responsibility. I was more than happy to march at the front of the formation and do a few little things here and there to help out our Platoon guides. 

3) My entire family came to see me graduate! Including my wonderfully angelic niece. Meeting her for the first time was probably the best thing....ever!

And of course, there is so much more to tell and many exciting things that I got to experience. Overall, basic training was a fun and educational experience. I am really glad to be done and moving onto the next part of my training. I really hope that it's everything I hoped. 

Oh, side note! While I was in basic, my mom sent me my mail that was going to my home address. That meant that I found out I got into UNLV while I was laying on the floor in the squad bay going through my mail for that evening! So, it looks like I've got yet another great adventure ahead of me. More on that to come as well! 

I am also hoping to get a new design up and running here soon, but we'll have to see how much free time I have before that happens! I hope you are as excited as I am about what is to come!