One At A Time…
Well, for the last few weeks I’ve been staying with my Mom and Dad in the Baltimore area. The goal is to help them get ready to make the big move to San Antonio… but there have been some hangups.
I love my family dearly, but we can be such huge procrastinators that it’s not even funny. Just getting out the door to run errands can, at times, be an exercise in futility because someone or other is always holding things up. And by the time that person is ready, someone else realizes they’ve forgotten something. Then someone else realizes that there’s something they need to take care of and they want to come along, so we need to wait for that person to get ready.
My biggest concern, though, is the storage unit. The fee for it is throwing my family’s budget out of whack and it was supposed to be the top priority. However, to make this happen we were supposed to make room in the basement by sorting through everything we have down there and figuring out what to do with it all. (Yes, we’re pack rats.) Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet.
Now there is only five more days until the planned First Trip to San Antonio… that storage unit isn’t getting any emptier, and we need the money to finance our move.
God help me.
There have been some positives that have come from this. I now own a truck. Nothing fancy, just a nice little Mazda B2500 pickup. It’s a compact truck with a solid and reliable engine, frame, clutch… pretty much the only things to worry about are the bumpers and whether they’ll rust or not. we’ve also picked up an old camper shell for the truck and it looks surprisingly good. Up next, we’re going to get a light-weight trailer so we can bring some things of ours down to San Antonio with us on the First Trip.
Stress
Lately I’ve been having issues with my creative writing. I’ve been under a lot of stress over the past few days and I’ve had little to no time for it. You may have noticed that I stopped posting for a few days… well, there you go.
I can’t discuss all the reasons as some of them involve ship operations, but for myself I’m under a microscope right now. I’m just fortunate that I have a supervisor that likes to call it a day after dinner. Even with that, though, I’m still under pressure in how I use my free time. The CNO (Chief of Naval Operations – pretty much Word of God short of the President himself) has put out a message that the Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist qualification is now mandatory for all enlisted surface sailors. And this is at a time when the Big Navy is actively looking for reasons to kick people out of the Navy – all in the name of reducing manning, of course.
The President of the United States said that he would not cut back our benefits and that pay raises to keep our jobs competitive with the civilian job market would continue. But the fat has to be trimmed from somewhere.
Here, let me give you an idea of just how serious they are: they have begun to retire posts for personnel in the O-7 to O-10 paygrades that have been deemed superfluous. If you don’t know what that is, these people are Admirals, Vice-Admirals and Rear-Admirals. Think about it for a second and let it sink in: they have begun to retire Admirals early to save money on personnel. Normally, an Admiral doesn’t have to look out for their own ass in such a manner. They’ve earned their chops and the right to remain in the Navy for pretty much as long as they wish so long as their conduct is appropriate. But not anymore. Now Admirals have lost that level of job security and nobody is safe.
Especially not a Third Class Petty-Officer such as myself.
So now, the time has come for me where I have to make tough choices. Really, it’s a no brainer – I want to keep my Naval career because, let’s face it, the civilian job market is dog-eat-dog. The tough part is what it costs me, personally. I don’t have to like it, but I do have to live with it and I have too many good things riding on this.
Sure, I could probably throw caution to the wind, get out of the Navy… I would still have my Montgomery GI Money for school and I can go ahead and roll my Thrift Savings Plan into a civilian 401k, and then I could go to work for my family… but that leaves someone else who is depending on me on the short end of the stick: my fiance who is a Japanese National.
The process for a US Serviceman to marry a JN is a pain in the arse, but it’s even worse as a civilian – especially if you wind up having to do it back in the US, which would be the case for me since without the Navy I have no place in Japan left open to me.
As a man, I cannot and will not ask this of her.
So… my writing sucks because life sucks and I gotta knuckle-under. I appreciate the criticism, but don’t crucify me for it.
Lost in Japan 