Here we go again...

Well, today is my last day in the world of the free and the sane. I suppose that sounds a bit pessimistic, and actually I feel rather excited and confident about beginning my career in the "real" Army (as opposed to the strange world of training). Tomorrow I'll fly to New York, spend the night in the Syracuse airport, and catch the Greyhound the next morning.

Linds is NOT happy about us being apart, but she's being tough and is looking forward to being with her family. Her grandmother died 2 days ago, and she'll be a huge help and comfort to her mother and the rest of her family. It sounds like the funeral will be late on Wednesday, so we're going to try to get her back in time for that.

Bonnie and Harry gave us the biggest blessing of a gift I've EVER gotten. We needed a kennel to put Frank (the Rott/hound) in for his airline trip back to Detroit. And we couldn't find anything his size for less than $80. Bonnie and Harry don't have big dogs either, but somehow they had a kennel that fits him exactly and they gave it to us. That was the most stressful thing that we've had to deal with, and they took care of it so effortlessly. It was incredible.

Well, I'm going to go to bed now. Tomorrow should be a good and miserable day of travel. Laters,

Trey

I made a Calendar!

So a couple of days ago I decided to start another website on a free server, so that I could post all of the wedding pictures. Blogger is great, but just isn't equiped to handle lots of photos. And after I got the pictures up, I decided to try to write a Calendar application. I THOUGHT that the sever had PHP or something, but after a bit of research, I realized that it did NOT in fact have anything of the sort. So I wrote the whole thing in JavaScript. Yup, I have WAY too much time on my hands. After about 6 hours of work, I present to you my calendar. And believe it or not, it's actually not even that hard to update.

So here's the new website (with wedding pictures):
      http://werockout.atspace.com/
Here is the source code for the calendar app. (Needs a bit more documentation...):
      calendar.js

You'll have to deal with any quirks, the code comes as is. I never got around to checking for the year of the event, because if you plan less than a year out, it shouldn't be a problem, but the data file is set up for it anyways. I didn't implement a system to check more than a month ahead of time, but the actual calendar function is fully capable of doing that, I just didn't want to mess with cookies or passing variables through an URL. Call me lazy, call me sane.

Trey

Wedding Pictures

I've started posting wedding pictures at another location. This blog just isn't set up for it, so I put everything in a new domain http://werockout.atspace.com/. Enjoy the pictures, I'll post more as soon as I get them!

Oh, and sorry that it looks so crappy, I'll work on that later.

Trey

Trey vs. The Oregonian

The Oregonian is a JOKE of a newspaper. All writers have their own views which shade their writing, but this whole paper is full of pseudo-news. "News" that isn't news at all covers the front page. Whole headline articles about an opinion, presented as news, when nothing new has actually happened. One particular article attracted my attention. It isn't really about anything that just happened, but expresses concern about National Guard deployments. News would be something like, "The Oregon National Guard deploys on Tuesday...." But this was more of an opinion/editorial based on current events, and it was THE MAIN HEADLINE on the FRONT PAGE.

After reading the article, and noting that it was the second in a three part series on the National Guard, I decided to write a letter to the paper. Unfortunately that was a catastrophic mistake, since the editor rewrote my entire letter and published it without making any mention of their changes, all under my name. I'm aware that there are probably no more than 20 people who will ever read this site, and that only a fraction of these people even live in Oregon, but I will use what voice I have to be heard, thanks to the ultimate tool of equality and democracy, the Internet.

While the Oregonian may have published a bastardized version of my letter, here is the original copy:

SIR – The recent article concerning the role of the National Guard depicted it as a local AmeriCorps. It should be noted that the full name of this organization is the Army National Guard, which reflects its primary purpose as a reserve component of the Army. While the stateside activities of the National Guard are very important, we must keep in mind that these citizen soldiers are not community service volunteers but rather soldiers with duties to both their state and their country.

Army Basic Combat Training is required for all Guardsmen, and teaches them to survive in the modern battlefield and to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemy in close combat. Some of these soldiers go on to become Infantrymen, Scouts and other combat related specialties. Needless to say, this training does not have anything in common with their civic tasks in a time of crisis. Your article described the loss of equipment being sent to Iraq, which you find necessary to perform these community services; night vision goggles, machine guns, trucks and radios. Perhaps a future article could explain how some of this equipment is necessary for fire fighting and filling sandbags, and what these “stay-behind units” could possibly use them for.

In summary, for years we have paid the National Guard to prepare for war and the time has come for them to serve their country as they have sworn to do. While their civic functions remain important, it is a secondary duty. Plenty of local clubs and organizations such as the Red Cross and Volunteer Fire Departments exist solely to assist in times of crisis. The National Guard is not in crisis; they are being deployed to fight the battle that they have trained for.

PFC John Merrell
Cavalry Scout – US Army

I'm back, married, and ready to move!

Cake at the wedding!

Well, Fort Knox is now a thing of the past, thank God! The last week of training was chaos and I didn't write anyone. In fact, the last two weeks were chaos. We spent a week in the field doing day and night exercises, in which the more "experienced" inserts kept getting everyone lost or killed. And the last week was 20 hours each day of cleanup. We cleaned so much STUFF that I may never clean anything again. It was completely ridiculous.

After graduation I jumped on a plane and came back to Portland. I did two weeks of hometown recruiting, which was interesting. Basically it was my job to hang out in public places and talk to people about the Army. It sounds like most people don't really do anything at all, but I actually worked on it quite a bit. Portland is such a difficult place to recruit from, and it was extremely frustrating. What amazed me is that the Army hadn't figured out a better way to use us. It would have worked WAY better if the recruiters had taken us to schools and places like that. Instead, we just wandered through malls all day.

Oh, and my truck decided to die. On the way down to Woodburn to check on our wedding rings, the water pump went out, it split the radiator and broke the exhaust manifold. We had the truck towed to Chuck and Jaira's, fixed it, and then two days later, the alternator died. So I fixed that in the driveway. After all that work, the truck had better last a few thousand more miles.

Lindsey's grandmother nearly died, so Lindsey went out to Michigan for a few days. As soon as she got back, it was non-stop wedding preparations until the 19th, when we got married. I'll post another posting on the wedding, because I just got back from our honeymoon, and have quite a bit of stuff to do. But thank you to everyone who was there and everyone who sent such supportive cards and thoughtful gifts.


More later,
Trey

P.S. I will be maintaining this site now that I'm back, so you can all expect more updates!