Burning Calories - (Korea) Day 199

Walking along the far side of Han River heading towards that bridge you
see in the distance to head back to the base.

PT this morning was at 0545. We had another ruck march (with body armor and assault pack) across the Han river, then made our way along a path down the river to another bridge where we crossed back. We ended up coming back through Itaewon which looks so different in the day, I just can't believe it. The whole thing was a little over 6 miles and by the end my legs felt like rubber. We climbed up a long flight of stairs and I could see my legs moving, but I couldn't feel them anymore. When I got back to my room I was totally drenched in sweat.

I got ready and ate breakfast in my room before heading to work at 0830. It was a pretty mellow morning with no meeting scheduled. In fact we had no meetings scheduled all day long. The first thing we did was re-clean the colonel's office. We did a bit more of a thorough job this time, even taking off the glass from the desktop and cleaning underneath. The new colonel is coming in this Sunday. I then checked my email and such for a bit. Some medical folks came into our conference room to pick up a lot of their stuff they left behind yesterday. The master sergeant was grateful for the work we did (which is the same for every meeting), but she hasn't had any meetings in our conference room before. She presented us all with a coin which was a very nice gesture. Sometimes people don't even notice everything we do to try and help everything run smoothly.

Shortly after that my sergeant asked me if I was going to play basketball. Holy cow…I wasn't sure how much I would have left in me, but I went anyways. It was about 1115 and I headed to my room to change really quick. There were some guys from honor guard there as well as the air force master sergeant, Seaman, and a ROK soldier in our sister office that wanted to come. The teams turned out kind of strange with all the young athletic black dudes on one team and all the other people on the other team. I can say we beat them the first time, but their athleticism won out in games two and three. Full court can be a great workout. I think I'll go pass out now!

I headed to my room to shower and eat lunch. As much as I wanted to, I didn't fall asleep. I was afraid I wouldn't get back up. I packed up a box and a letter to ship out, then promptly left my room without them. All that working out fried my brain I guess.

After lunch each day I've been trying to set aside some time to do IMO (25B - computer stuff). Today I was able to help our NCOIC get one of her secret accounts setup. I also got ready to do some more inventory, but Special K needed me to run some errands with him. We took the office car to get dispatched (checked out for another week). We also picked up a sergeant from the command group and drove him around the post to a few places for some of his errands. Once done we dropped him off and headed to the education center. We both had copies of our college transcripts. The education center will take those and create a memo telling our S1 shop how many hours to put on our ERB. I had my Associate's degree put on it, but I didn't realize the number of hours was important as well. While I was attending the junior college I did almost twice as many courses as I needed for the degree because I just kept going after I got the degree to further my personal education. The number of credit hours you have on your ERB factor in to how many promotion points you receive, so the more the better.

This entire process of errand running and going to the education center took the rest of the day. When we got back to the office we basically just wrapped everything up and left. I had dinner in my room and then was finally able to log into the University of Phoenix website. They had some major issues the last couple of days, but it looks like everything is back up and good to go. I received a few letters during the incident assuring me they were working on it and then finally letting me know it's fixed.

I then sat back, relaxed and watched a few TV shows to wind down the night.