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full Army day

Yesterday was an interesting day. It was not good and it was not bad, just interesting. I seldom get angry, but that is how I started my day off. On the final day before our oldest son was to leave for South Korea with the Army, at 9am I was wondering why he was not home. The week since we brought him back from Ft. Jackson in Columbia, SC was not the best of weeks. When we arrived after lunch last Thursday, he was home only until the evening when he newly acquired "girlfriend" picked him up in front of our house. She did not come in but parked by the mailbox out of view of the front of the house and call him by cell phone to come out to leave. On Saturday he returned to our house for a little over an hour before he took off again with the same girl for East Carolina University (ECU), where she attends. He returned home on Tuesday afternoon and said a hand full of words all day long to his mother and only mumbled a couple of words to me that evening. He looked and acted exhausted. He packed all day Wednesday and on Thursday night left again with the same girl. We hardly saw him all week and when we did he was not happy at all. His siblings also wondered where he was as they wanted to see him. My wife drove all the way to pick him up on Friday night but he said he wanted to say longer. Last that night he called us to say he had a great meal with his girl friend and her parents, which was not what my wife wanted to hear. I don't know what we expected but it was not that kind of week with our son before he left for South Korea. So when he called at 9:30am yesterday wanting a ride because his friends would not bring him home, that did not make me feel all warm and fuzzy. When we reached the apartment where he was staying with his long time bud, I decided it was time to get angry, which is something I almost never do. Probably not the best time to do so, but I had to preach to him the importance of family over supposed "friends". Who is there for him when he needs help or money? Family not his friends. Who picks him up all of the time when he don't feel like it? Family not his friends. Who forgives him always? Family. After ranting for 30 minutes I have no idea if any of it sank in. What I really didn't like was that this was the same thing we had been doing for years with him and the change I thought I had seen when he first joined the Army was gone and he had reverted to bad habits in a moments notice. Am I perfect? No. Is my wife perfect? No. That had nothing to do with it.

By the time we got home I felt emotionally exhausted and we all let him pack and get ready instead of spending time with him. My wife did not tell him that her parents had canceled their trip to our house to take him out to eat the day before and had considered driving up yesterday. They were excited as he was being stationed in the country they spent 25 years of their life. At 1pm when he asked me to help him start and file his taxes, what did I do? Because he is part of our family, of course I helped him. We sat down and completed his taxes using TurboTax in around 1 and 1/2 hours. We left the house at 3pm with hugs from his siblings. He wanted one last Cook Out hamburger, so we stopped along the way. As we drove out of the parking lot, he looked in the bag and found they gave him a BLT instead. It is hard getting in and out of that location, but he drove around and went back into the slowest line - of course. It was 3:45pm and I was getting a bit worried about the flight which was to take off in our hour. Since it was Saturday I did not have to think about heavy traffic, so I drove as fast as I could and we parked in the nearly vacant lot to the new terminal at RDU. At 4pm we were at the ticket counter with a very helpful woman as there was no line at all. Since we were the parents of our military son, we got special passes to go through security to wait with him at the gate. After 20 minutes he boarded and we were off. It was more of a relief than a tear jerking affair, which is not the way we envisioned our parting. He was after all leaving to go to the place where his mother and my wife grew up her whole life. My wife stayed up late thinking he would call her from LA airport before taking off in Korean Air, but the call never came. I was just glad to go to bed as I was tired from our emotional day. It did not help that our youngest son woke me up at 3am, but that is a whole different story not worth talking about.

A.I.T.

A.I.T. stands for Advanced Individual Training. Our oldest son graduated from his heavy vehicle mechanic A.I.T. this morning. We once again read and heard about the Army Ethos:

    I will always place the mission first
    I will never accept defeat
    I will never quit
    I will never leave a fallen comrade

We watched this film on the Army Ethos.

I like these four values as I could apply them to work or our family. How about saying "I will always place my family first"? Or how about "I will never leave a fallen family member"? How about "I will always place others first before myself"? Wow, that sounds like a Bible verse. The more I hear about the Army values, I like them. Of course no one is perfect now are any of the graduates today able to achieve all of the Army creed, but it certainly is a worthy goal.

Maybe if they hear them enough they will believe them.
Does hearing them all of the time make them true?

Yet another day of driving four hours home so for me plenty of time to think about these things. Of course today was a whole lot better than yesterday when we parked on I-95 north of Fayetteville for around an hour and a half waiting for a wreck to be cleaned off the interstate. We actually turned off the vehicle as we were at a complete stand still for that long. After driving again we pulled off the road to got the Burger King and I took over driving and when I got back on I went the wrong direction, so we lost twenty miles going north instead of south. We finally arrived at 11pm and we were all tired. We got the graduation ceremonies early at 8am and true to the Army motto of "hurry up and wait", that is what we did for an hour. By the time we got into the chapel, we discovered the batteries were dead on our camera. Fortunately, the woman sitting next to us kindly took photos of Nathan for us and said she would send them to us.

Nathan @ AIT graduation

snow

Not only did Obama become the 44th president yesterday, but it snowed over five inches at our house. Because of the snow I was able to watch the first presidental inauguration that I ever remember watching. There certainly was a lot of hype over it this year, so it was nice to watch on the TV from our living room. It would not have been fun in any way to be among the two million people in person. To see the event which was only five hours north of us when we were snowed in was interesting. It looked cold but it was sunning and bright for the big day, which was nice for them. It was many years since we all as a family had a snow day of this magnitude. I found a weather web site that shows all of the recent snows in the Raleigh NC area. We were in Apex NC for the January 2000 snow and our young kids loved every minute of the 20" snow fall. There was a very large hill outside our subdivision leading down to Highway 55, so I walked the boys down and we slid on cardboard boxes for sleds. There was no one on the road so we had snow fun for a long time. The next month we moved to Fuquay Varina and in 2002 was the next big snow. We had a long sloping hill behind our house going down to Johnson Pond below. We bought two red plastic snow boards that provided endless entertainment that year. Previously we built a quarter pipe skateboard ramp and the boys moved that to the top of the hill to launch them even faster down the hill. We were in San Antonio TX for the 2004 snow in this area, so the snow yesterday was our first since 2002. We had no hill this year, so we walked back into the woods behind our house to see the amazing underbrush and trees full of snow. Today was the second day the kids were out of school so they built a snow man to have fun. We have some really nice icicles hanging from the gutters at the back of our house which have grown even longer today. I guess this is what happens when you don't see snow or ice very often as the little things amuse us.

snow 2009

Famly Painting

For my wife's birthday this year, I had a movie poster artist in India paint the children through a friend of mine who is living in India. This is the resulting painting which is 6 ft x 4ft.

crazy day

Yesterday was a perfect illustration of a day that thankfully does not happen very often, but when it does you are glad it is over by the end of the day. I woke up at 5:20 AM to a sound in the kitchen below us. When I reached downstairs I saw my oldest son finishing off his cooking of eggs for breakfast and was sitting down to eat them. He told me he wanted to get back to his Army schedule. I went back upstairs and fell back asleep. I got up at 7:30 and started working on my autobiography, which continued all morning long. I am now writing about my experiences while in Belgium before I went to India. My writing has slowed down the past couple of days as I kept a detailed journal while in Belgium, so I am trying to summarize a few stories from my journal instead of writing from memory or duplicating my journal. My oldest son decided to go back to sleep so besides my wife I did not see any children all morning long.

For a couple of days our refrigerator was not working properly. The freezer part was as cold as the non-freezer part normally should be. We took it as an opportunity to clean the inside of the refrigerator and threw about half of the contents away. The very first thing on Monday, I called M & H Appliance which had helped us in the past with our dryer. The technician finally showed up yesterday around noon. He took off the inside wall of the freezer to reveal the coils which were completely covered with ice crystals. He got out his trusty commercial hair dryer and after fifteen minutes had the coils completely deiced. He popped off the heater part under the coils and found it was broken. Since he had a spare part in his truck, we had a working refrigerator in under an hour and it only cost me $150.

Then the children all started waking up around noon. Our oldest came down and complained about his throat being sore and his ear hurting. He asked me what he should do about it. Then after my great advice of taking proper rest with plenty of fluids, he wanted to know where his mother was as he wanted a ride to his friends to celebrate New Years's Day. He repeated the same set of questions about his sickness and needing a ride, which to both of us parents were mutually exclusive requests. Kids.

Then I get a call from a friend of one of our sons who was suspecting pot smoking and wanted to know if we suspected the same thing. Of course you want to believe the best of your kids but having lived through many teenagers, we knew that could hazardous to our mental health to completely trust teenagers in this day and time. I went to search the music shed for a missing cell phone and I found a glass bong hidden in one of the guitar amps! My day was not getting better over time. When I approached one of my other son's about it as I told him I was going to break it, he told me not to as it was his friend's. Kids.

On Monday I had taken my middle son to get his driver's license as he had lost it due to his poor grades in school. That is a good thing about the North Carolina under eighteen driver policies that if you fail any classes in school you loose your driver privileges. As a parent you don't have to argue with your children, it is the law. Well your kids can still argue of course, but we have the written law in our favor. We went to the local DMV and found out that to get your driver's license you have to have proof of insurance. I called our car insurance and of course they took him of our policy since he lost his license. I had him reinstated so we could get his license only to learn that by doing so he double our existing cost of car insurance by $100 per month. My wife and I decided that he would have to pay for that in order to get his license. Without a job he cannot pay for it. Without a license it may be hard to get a job. Round and round it goes. Then I told my son all of this and he said he needed a cell phone before he could get a job to pay his part of the insurance in order to get his driver's license. At least he had Christmas money to pay for his own cell phone. Kids.

The only good news for the day was that during this week for the first time in many years all of the kids have been in our bonus room playing Guitar Hero, Rock Band and lifting weights together. It was a shock to see them all together, but definitely a good thing. SO they can enjoy each other after all.

My wife and I ended the day trying to watch an Indian movie that was pretty bad so we shut of the movie after thirty minutes and called it a day. Life in the fast lane with kids can be tiring!

18th Greek birthday

Yesterday was our middle son's 18th birthday. We try to eat out so my wife does not have to cook a special meal for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We have eaten in several different places. One year while in Arizona visiting my mother in Tucson, we searched everywhere to find some place open where we could eat. We finally found an authentic Mexican restaurant that was open and enjoyed the food a lot. One year while in San Antonio we ate at the best Thai restaurant in the whole city. It is the best Thai food I have ever eaten. This year, our son wanted to eat traditional southern cooking, but we could not find a place that was open. We decided at the last minute to eat Greek food. I had heard people at work talk about two of the best Greek places to eat. The one closest to work was not open so we picked the other one. We were a bit sceptical when we arrived at the restaurant as no one else was there, but we were early since we wanted to attend the Christmas Eve service at church later in the evening. It was fun eating something none of us had had in an authentic restaurant. We topped off the meal with one of the best desserts any of us had eaten, which was a raspberry cream cake. It came with a single candle on it. The name of the place was Mythos Mediterranian Bistro.