I was asked on Monday if I could do the Tuesday funeral services and since I had nothing going on, I said yes. I was told that the firing team leader had all the phone numbers and would contact the team to make sure they were at the meeting place on time Tuesday morning. The funeral was in Gonzales, CA, which is about 45 minutes away, so I wanted to meet about two hours before our arrival time, just to make sure we had plenty of time to draw the rifles and practice a few times before the se...

Just a quick note - My car stinks. On the way to PT yesterday morning, a skunk ran out in front of my car. I heard a solid thump as something on the under carriage hit it. By the time I got to the parking lot, the skunk spray smell was thick enough to nearly gag me. After PT, as I drove home, I noticed that there was no body in the street, so it survived at least a little while. And so has the smell. When I came out to the car this morning, I could still smell a trace of it. ...

I was getting ready for a funeral this morning when I realized that I hadn't yet cut and pasted my last funeral's post from the word document I used to write it. I volunteered for the Friday funeral at the Tuesday practice. There weren't too many details in the initial print out I got from the NCOIC, but I called the funeral home and found out more. It was just a two man funeral scheduled for Friday afternoon. I got a volunteer from the crew (one with a military license) and found out...

So, our base is fairly small, as far as most military bases go, and parking has been an eternal problem. We have lots and spaces that are designated for various categories of people here. We have Staff and Faculty, Student Commuters, and On-Post Students. Like I said, lots are marked and mixed lots have spaces that are marked individually. The vast majority of spaces in the area of the schools are for Staff and Faculty with some spaces marked for Student Commuters. The On-Post students a...

I volunteered for the funeral Friday at the Tuesday practice. I knew that my schedule between then and this coming Thursday would be pretty hectic with all the graduation ceremony preparations, so I figured I'd volunteer for a service when I knew there would be some space. That way, if any services happen this week, I can be safe in not participating without feeling like I'm not doing my fair share. I called the funeral home on Tuesday to check all the information I had in email. There ...

Well, the time has come for another class to graduate. This will also probably be the last class of mine that I watch graduate. I've been here three years and will likely move on to another duty station before the next class I get finishes this course. This class was special for me. It was the first Proficiency Enhancement Program (PEP) class in the Korean program and the entire class was placed in my department. The PEP class is something that we are moving to in hopes of producing ...

I volunteered to take the funeral on Thursday earlier in the week. Originally, the overall NCOIC wanted me to take one of the new Soldiers that had just started the detail the week prior. When we got to practice on Tuesday, we found that all the Soldiers that had been brand new to the detail the previous week had been replaced. We still had our crew of Airmen that had been with us for a few weeks but we've been hoping to get a second team trained up so we didn't have to always rely on the ...

So, yeah, not so busy day at the office today. I graded all the homework and have some spare time before my next class, so I'm catching up a little on my JU habit. HAHA! A few months back I'd seen stuff going around the net and on tv about Sudoku. The numbers logic puzzle thing, you know? It looked kind of interesting. The first one I ever tried was at a Jiffy Lube. I was reading the ESPN magazine in the waiting area and they had a baseball Sudoku. I didn't have a pen, so I just sta...

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...