BJ's AnD S&M

BJ's AnD S&M


	Named after the creator, Mike, four most frequent posters, Brittany, Jason, Anna, Sarah and newest member Dorothy. archives Friday, October 29, 2004 Hope everyone has a nice Halloween weekend. I am going to dinner tonight, a costume party tomorrow, and I'm daring the Castro district in the city on Halloween night after I get off work. Should be good times. posted by Anonymous 3:27 PM Tuesday, October 26, 2004 Thanks to math, I want to die. posted by Anonymous 1:19 PM Sunday, October 17, 2004 I'm around. And dating a new, older guy. School is insane with 19 units and three jobs makes it so that my internet time is next to nothing. I also have Mike chasing me around for a birthday gift and I don't have it ready, so I'm avoiding places that Mike goes. posted by Anonymous 11:00 AM Wednesday, October 13, 2004 1. Where the hell is everyone? 2. I spent about 2 hours today reading about torture and public execution and how those forms of punishment evolved and have changed. Lots of gory details too. I feel kinda sick. This Sociology of Punishment class is rough. The teacher is boring, this book with all the torture is going to give me nightmares; at least I find one of the books interesting. posted by Jason 9:51 PM Monday, October 04, 2004 This post chronicles my weekend at FT Lewis. Friday afternoon I arrived at the Connolly center ready to go, and tried to manage my squad and the Platoon because the PLT SGT was comming late, and as 1st SQD LDR, it fell to me to run the platoon until she showed up. The bus ride over was uneventful, and when we arrived at the barracks, we dropped all of our stuff and marched off to chow. I was in charge of marching the platoon within the battalion formation and calling cadences which I've been practicing for a while now. It went pretty well, apparently I have a knack for cadences. Now I just need to learn more of them. Any way, after dinner we ms3's had a class from the 4's on how to do yellow cards (part of our evaluations) and then got advice about camp. Saturday morning, up at 0500 for PT, and it was cold as f^k. I only barely passed pushups, and while that wasn't good it was the first time I did pass at LEO Lab. Pushups I scored just 3 reps short of maximum points (with 75 reps), and I did max the run with a time of 12:56, beating my prior best of 12:58. After that we marched off for breakfast, then back to the barracks to change into BDU's. Then it was time for a road march, which was about 2.4 miles long I believe, in BDU's with a ruck and ballistic helmet. Good times. I actually fared pretty well, and wasn't too tired for the confidence course. I was very happy with my performance on the confidence course, as I was able to complete each event on my first try. Even the event called "The Tough One" which involves climbing a rope, walking across thin planks that are about a foot apart, then up a ladder and down about 3 stories of cargo net, went by easily. My squad bonded very well during this time, even the girl who has already developed a reputation among the 3's and 4's for having a bad attitude. After that it was time for a lunch of MRE's. Lunch was followed by the obstacle course, which has a group of challenges that while not as difficult as those on the confidence course, come back to back in a timed event. Things like crawling under wire, climbing over a fence, climbing a rope, jumping pits, balancing over logs, etc... My squad attacked it first, and was the only one to complete the entire course because the squad behind us had one person fall off the hardest obstacle ("the mini tough one") from a height of about 12 ft and they didn't let any other squads try that one. That obstacle took my squad about as long as the rest of the course took, and so every other squad had about half of our time on the course. We wound up winning tshirts (the prize) on the grounds of being the only squad to complete the whole thing. We could have tried again on the shorter course but my squad was tired and hurting (one girl wrapping her knee) so I said no. Trying again would have been asking for an injury, and we wouldn't have won after our first trip through. After the obstacle course we marched back to the barracks on the same route. Then dinner and back to the barracks. At this point, the Ranger Challenge teams broke off from the rest of the batallion for weapons training. We went to the armory that we use for SQD STX (I guess one of our cadre members knows the NCO there) and were issued 6 M16's per team. We learned how to disassemble then reassemble the weapon, as well as how to perform a functions check, and then had 1on1 races between the teams. The girl I faced had me totally beat for the longest time because I couldn't get a pin out, but then dropped something twice and had to fish under the table and I was able to draw within 5 seconds of her by the end. It turned out that I won though, to the great joy of my team, because she had failed to check the chamber before she started disassembling. My team wound up losing the competition 5-7, but that was mostly because near the end the match ups were unfair; some of their best went up against our worst. After that it was back to the barracks for sleep. I actually got away without doing firewatch friday night, but had to do it saturday night from 0030-0130. It seem as long as it could have because I was with a guy I like from my class and I was shining my boots which took a beating on the obstacle course. Sunday morning we woke up, cleaned the barracks, then had breakfast. After breakfast the ranger challenge teams practiced Rope Bridge for a while and then demonstrated them to the battalion in a race between the teams. During the practices my team was faster than the other, but in the race one of the knots got stuck and we lost. The place we were practicing was a ravine with a stream at the bottom, and the rope crossed via two trees near the middle of the ravine. The pull team (who pulls the slack out of the rope after it's tied) had to climb up and out of the ravine onto a road while pulling. I'm on the pull team, but after the slack is out, I have to run over to the knot on the near side to twist it, allowing someone else to tie it off without losing all the tension (this rope gets freaking tight, let me tell you). I earned some fame by sliding all the way down the hill from the road above to the knot below, just missing a tree near the bottom each time by inches. They said I looked out of control, but it took me back to sliding in baseball and didn't seem like a big deal. Anyway, after that we practiced grenade throwing a bit, and I need a lot of practice with that. After that we had lunch, followed by an award ceremony. I won an award for my GPA spring term and one for being on Cadet council, both awards that I have won several times before so it wasn't a big deal. Then we headed home. I wasn't as tired as I have been in past years, but I slept well that night, and woke with a lot of bruises. I felt that I had done mostly well as a SQD LDR, and identified my weak spots. I enjoyed the trip a lot. Time for bed. jason posted by Jason 11:09 PM Friday, October 01, 2004* This year in ROTC I'm acting as an NCO. It's going to be reallyhard but I like it already. I just ran my first PT session this morning and I think it went really well. Things are going pretty well so far this year for me. I got drunk for the first time last saturday at an Orientation advisor party. Good times. I hope school/work/life is going well for all the rest of you. posted by Jason 8:27 AM