The funeral on Tuesday was a full honors service. I first found out about it on Saturday when I was at the second service that day. The gentleman from the funeral home asked me if I had heard any word on the Tuesday service and I told him I hadn't. He told me that he had emailed and faxed the information to the civilian on base in charge of casualty affairs but hadn't heard back. He was concerned that we wouldn't be there and the family was asking him every day for confirmation that we wo...

The second funeral on Saturday was a two man detail. I guess I should call it a two person funeral since it was the firing team leader that came to assist me on that one and she is not a man. HAHA! The second service was being run by the same funeral home as the first funeral that day. There was just enough time between turning in the weapons from the first service and getting out to the chapel that I was able to grab a quick snack on the way. I got there before the firing team leade...

I had two funerals over the weekend but I usually wait to write about them until I have some free time at work. It helps pass the time between classes when I don't have any homework to grade. There were two funerals on Saturday. Fortunately, they were spaced apart enough that I was able to do both and none of the other NCO's had to lose time on the weekend. The first one was a full honors but the second was just a two man funeral, so I was also able to release most of the team after the...

Well, when I got back from NTC, I had an email waiting for me to let me know I'd be on funeral detail for September and October. This will be my fourth rotation on the detail. I had a couple of comp days the last week of August scheduled, so I talked to the NCOIC for this rotation and made sure he'd be OK with me missing a practice. This is his first turn on the detail and I told him that I was good to go and could do a funeral whenever he needed. I got one for that Friday. We had four...

So, it's been forever since I posted. That's about par for the course over the last six months or so. I do have a bit of an excuse for August, though. I was selected to go to the National Training Center at Ft Irwin, CA to serve as an augmentee Observer/Controller for a rotation. I got to spend three weeks in the Mojave Desert watching a rotational unit train up for a deployment to Iraq. It was a great learning experience that had a lot of variables fall in to place in my favor. Fo...

I was notified of the 25 July funeral last week. The 1SG sent an email to all of the NCO's in the company that had been on funeral detail in the past year, telling them that they were tasked. Normally, the regular detail doesn't need help for funerals, but this was an active duty Soldier that died in Iraq. So, this wouldn't be a joint service detail, nor would it be with a crew of inexperienced Soldiers. Of the 15 people tasked, 9 were SSG's and only 3 weren't NCO's. We got together la...

Well, I'm on Staff Duty again. It's been a long day. We had a Joint Language Training Exercise today. I ushered six squads through my hostage operations lane. Then I headed back over to the school house to check on the test results for the most recent unit test. They did fairly well. I get to give them another unit test on Friday. More on that a bit later. Normally, duty ends at 0800. I originally had duty scheduled for Monday and would have been off Tuesday when the students had t...

Something I've meant to post for a while but again, I'm lazy. HAHA! A long while back I wrote about Online Friend and Alumni Finder Services . Well, the result of that was I went home last year in hopes of making a 20 year reunion for people I went to grade school with. I went to a private school and most of the students attended all eight years together. We were a small class and close friends for all that time and still have some ties between us. Well, I screwed up my flight rese...

So, yeah, it's been a while since I posted any real new content. I'd like to blame it on being busy. I have been extremely busy. But it's more to do with my laziness about blogging. I seem to have caught whatever greywar caught, only I think I got it first and have had it longer. HAHA! So, on to an update! We had Language Day 2006 last Friday. Language Day is an annual event here at DLI where we set upcultural displays, teaching demos, technology demos, entertainment and have ethnic...

I got a spam email the other day that I just had to click on. The subject line read - "I stayed up all night playing poker with a tarot deck. I got a full house and four people died." I don't even remember what the spam was for but the line was so ridiculous that I had to click it to see if there was more. I was laughing. It finished with - "Borstelmanns Rule: If everything seems to be coming your way, you're probably in the wrong lane." So, not all spam is completely worthl...

While doing some preview work for a class I would be teaching this morning, I was looking up the Chinese roots of some Korean words so that I could better explain why they mean what they do. Well, I was trying to get the meaning for Ä¡ (öÇ) when I got a pure Korean word I was unfamiliar with as a definition. So, I looked up the pure Korean word º£Ç®´Ù. Well, as I skimmed the definition, I came to an example sentence - T¾¾ÀÇ ±Í±¹ ÃàÇÏ ÀÜÄ¡°¡ º£Ç®¾îÁ³´Ù. The translation of that se...

Yeah, I'm lazy about posting the past few weeks. What's new? HAHA! Here's a quiz while you wait for something more original from me... Your results: You are Green Lantern Green Lantern 80% Hulk 65% Catwoman 65% Superman 60% Spider-Man 55% The Flash 50% Iron Man 50% Supergirl 43% Robin 43% Batman 35% Wonder Woman 33% Hot-headed. You have stro...

While digging through some boxes to find something that never turned up, I found a forgotten treasure. It was a plastic baggie filled with all the pieces to a Monopoly game and box of flash cards. I knew exactly what I'd found as soon as I saw the baggie and pulled it out of the box and took it to my desk when I finally gave up my search for the original item. During my first tour to Hawaii, I was single and lived in the barracks. Some of the other single Soldiers had created a game whi...

Found this quiz on a forum site elsewhere and I thought I'd share it. I'll post my answers in the comments. I got 21 before I gave up. http://intelligence-test.net/part1/ There's also a part 2. Just change the 1 to a 2 in the address. I haven't tried it yet, though. My Ecosystem Details

The funeral on 28 Feb was my last for this rotation. I volunteered for it last week since the other NCO's had all done at least one that week already. I was told that it was a two man service in Moss Landing for a Navy veteran. There were only two Sailors at that practice and one was scheduled to do a full honors over the weekend, so I asked the other Sailor to come with me on this one. It was the same Sailor that had come with me to a funeral about two weeks back. To be honest, I'm ...