From Civilian to Sailor

The past two weeks have been a blast. My best friend Stephanie flew into see me from Minnesota the weekend before last. Last weekend Brandon and Ashley flew in from Ohio to see me. Next week my mom is coming to visit for graduation, and by Friday I hope to be back in Ohio for the following week and a half.

I have been on grad status, which is amazing. Grad status means no physical training, no silly musters in the morning and afternoon and also no duty! Section leaders get two weeks of it, so I've been living the high life. Waking up anywhere from seven to seven-thirty. 

On the down-side, I have been working on out-processing. Getting stuff signed off on, getting shots for overseas duty and bla bla bla. It's such a hassle.

Next week is the final event though, the field training exercise. FTX is where we do everything we have learned the whole course through. We will spend two days on site staying overnight and everything. Other than that I have no clue what goes on, other than we get night vision!

I made the class graduation program, along with Green. We also made individual class books with samples of our work and a course description. So in honor of that I'm going to post up samples of everything I've done and have a little review sometime next week. I want to put up some pictures from FTX as well. So be on the look out for that!

I am about 19 days from graduating I think. I have been through the graphic design course, and now I have moved on to production. Printing, cutting, folding, and stapling books and packets and such. It's alright, I actually worked at a print shop with my dad before I joined the Navy so a lot of it is very familiar. We're pretty much wrapping things up. My friend Green and I are working on the graduation programs right now, and we're all working on our own personal class books. That's one of the good things about this rate we make all this stuff ourselves.

Anyway, as of right now the plan is, I will graduate on the 30th and fly back to Ohio on the next day or as soon as possible, where I will stay for about two weeks. I will be in the negative for vacation days but I don't care, I'm not going to be flying home very often for about 1500 per round trip. I will be working with my recruiters in Chillicothe for 5 days I hope, that way I don't lose too much of my leave time. So if you're reading this and want to see me let me know. I'm going to be gone for a while probably.

After leave I'm returning here to pack my stuff and I'm out of this country! Off to do video broadcasting in Sicily. How crazy is that? I will be stationed there until June of 2010, after that I see a ship in my future. I couldn't have asked for better orders honestly.

Ok, that's enough for now. It's almost chow time and I'm still in uniform, I need to change in to my civilian gear!

(Oh! Also I have a new Navy blog in the works, it will most likely be the same address and I will move all the stuff from this blog to a new address. So I will let you know when that's going to happen)