For all of those that want to keep up with my life as I go through Officer Candidate School, this is the place to be! I'll do my best to update you on my life as often as I can, whether this is when I'm bored in class, have a little bit of extra free time, or on Sundays.

Right now I'm sitting on my floor procrastinating studying for my first exam (on leadership and military justice) while listening to some pandora (Fryderyk Chopin station, very enjoyable piano for studying).  Later tonight I have to go around and check on my squad (9 great males and females). I have to check their rooms to make sure they're up to standard, make sure their compasses all work, grab some paper work, and make sure their poor little feet are doing well after our four mile ruck march this morning. Afterwards I'll fold clothes and then move on to my true passion: Game of Thrones.

I hope you all are doing great, email me or text me if you want to catch up!

P.S. One story from basic before I go! It was the last Sunday before graduating from basic training and we were just given a whole hour to call our family (this was amazing considering we had only been given two ten minute phone calls in the last nine weeks). At one point during the call someone from another platoon started cursing "f*%k first platoon" at one of my platoon-mates who was talking to his family at the time; said platoon-mate then went on to curse out the other trainee and then told the drill sergeant about the whole incident (this guy was 28 and still couldn't hold his tongue or have a civil conversation, the Army is a colorful bunch of people). One of my drill sergeants (DS Leblanc, a 24 year old crossfitting female combat medic, think the princess from the movie brave with tattoos and more curse words).  She called the whole company to attention, did her best to get the whole story from both trainees, and then spent the next ten minutes calmly telling these grown men why they should respect one another and why cursing each other out is never the answer (all the while stopping every seventh word to stop herself from cursing). After this very nice and rare moment in which a drill sergeant didn't make anyone do push ups but used conflict resolution, another drill sergeant, DS Savage (yes that's his real name, picture a bald infantryman with the voice of batman when he's angry) had to put in his two cents.  He walks in front of the company, says "Well that was nice.  I'm more of a visual person." He then proceeds to calmy walk over to the guidons (military flags, each platoon had one) and separately threw each flag at least thirty feet. There's something about a pissed off grown man throwing flags that I'll never forget.  I'll also never forget his speech after that: He went on to talk about his time right after basic training.  One week after he completed basic training he was already being deployed to Iraq.  One week after that he had to clean up a commander's tent which had been hit by a friendly grenade.  His description wasn't pretty, please take my word for it.  He went on to talk about how in the Army you have no choice of who your coworkers are, and chances are at one point or another you'll be stuck with them for 9+ months in a space no bigger than a queen sized bed where you keep all of you equipment and also sleep.  Basic training had a lot of fun moments, it had a lot of hard and frustrating ones too, but I can tell you that this one was special.  To see both of these DS's try to teach us in the best way they knew how, not how to fire a weapon or how to march but how to be better people. DS Savage was a man of few words but he bore his soul to the entire company because he sincerely wants us to be good and reliable soldiers, able to handle the tasks which we'll be given. This is one of the moments that I told myself I'd lock away and never forget.

I had planned for this blog to be short and sweet posts but I guess some stories deserve more than that!