I have 3 weeks off for summer leave (down to 2) and figured it would be a good time to blog about my life after TEEs.
Grad week is one of the most miserable weeks of the year at West Point. Every morning starts early (as early as 4:20) and after breakfast you drill until noon. Drill consists of holding an M14 and (basically) marching in circles. There's a lot of standing maneuvering all to prepare us for the 3 parades we had that week. Oh, one more thing drill is big on, people passing out from standing still too long in the heat of the day. Fun :)
The afternoons aren't bad, you just have to deal with stupid policies such as ensuring that everyone is 100% moved out of their rooms by Thursday night when nobody is allowed to leave until Saturday. Mostly the afternoons were spent watching movies and sleeping-nobody really started moving out until Wednesday night/Thursday morning.
On the topic of moving out- our company is somehow missing a storage room. This means that there is not adequate room to store all the junk we have to have, let alone all the stuff people just want to have. I was one of the unfortunate few who had absolutely no storage space. The Firsties graduating and moving out meant an entire room completely emptied out so I eagerly moved in and stowed my stuff in a locker, just in time to be told that we are not allowed to move in there until after the Firsties are completely moved out. What?! The locker is empty, why can't I use it? Especially since my stuff has to be out of my room by tonight! Great! Not a big deal, I can wait a little longer, right? No dice.
The entire company goes down and cleans the lockers out (completely ignoring the lockers of my fellow plebes who were too lazy to move out) and I promptly moved back in. Later that night our 1SG for next semester goes down to inspect the room and sees that there are a bunch of plebes that had moved in and demanded that we vacate the room so that next year's plebes can use it. NEXT YEAR's plebes, the ones who won't even need the room until NEXT YEAR. Surely we can at least use it until they need it? Nope! This kind of stuff continued until I finally managed to get a locker 5 moves later (there's a lot of stuff to move, it gets old after a while).
It was a long week but it ended well. Friday morning, before the final parade of the week, the plebes got recognized (became non-plebes and therefore one step closer to human) and the next morning everyone got promoted over a breakfast of Belgian waffles and vanilla ice cream. Yum!
Graduation was amazing. I wish I could have seen it live but took a guard shift for a buddy who had family that was going to be there so had to watch it on the internet but it was still impressive. Got to go to a "Bar-pinning ceremony" and see some of my friends from church get commisioned and have their 2LT rank pinned to their shoulders. What an amazing afternoon! Then a group of upper-classmen took me to dinner at Prima Pizza in Cornwall, famous for delivering pizza anywhere in the US by way of overnight shipping. The one that invited me paid my share of the meal cost to celebrate my promotion and freedom from plebedom. Stuck around for church on Sunday and headed home (about 12 hours going through Salt Lake or 14 through Vegas).
Since I've been home I have scraped, painted, repaired, helped people move, cleaned out a barn, visited people, camped, etc. Its a wonderful feeling to be home but the time is going too fast just like it always does.
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