Alphabetical Posts??

     Good morning everyone!! It is Saturday and we are up and at it again. I got a decent amount of sleep last night. According to my little Samsung Gear watch, I got 9 and a half hours of sleep last night. The kids decided that 0730 was a good time to get up this morning. I'm letting my beautiful lady sleep in since she has had a really rough week. She has gone back to full time at work and she has been working her ass off. These last few months with her not really working has really killed our budget, but it isn't something that we can't handle. Just have to move some things around and we got it. Another story of life with a few bumps in the road to teach you a few lessons. 

     Since it is Saturday, you all know what is about to go down tonight. Bohica2k Radio will be live on air tonight pumping out the tunes for you to enjoy. So get some +Chuck in your EAR!! I will be there tonight listening it up with the rest of you. I'll be "drowning" kids tonight so it is the perfect time to tune in. Now to just get through the day so that we can get to the tunes. Not that I want to rush a Saturday, but Pandora only goes so far, you know? This post might take a while to complete because I will be back and forth with all of the chores and such so that I can make it easier for my wife tomorrow. She theoretically has the day off tomorrow. I do think that she wants to pick up some extra hours though. I'm not really sure. We haven't been home together long enough to really talk about it. 

     As Chevelle starts playing on Pandora, I sit here at the desk and I'm sort of lost in thought because I lost a shipmate earlier this week to a heart attack. Don't grieve for me. Grieve for his wife and grandchildren. I will leave the name out of this post for the privacy of the family. I'll just use a letter associated to him so that you know something. J, as I will call him, was a wonderful person, mentor, and friend. He was a fellow submariner that I had the honor of serving with during my time on the USS Nebraska. He was a gruff individual with a tender heart. You would know when he showed up to work because you could hear the yelling throughout the boat. He wasn't always yelling at somebody, he was just a very vocal person, kind of like me. I can be very noticeable when I want to be and that is how J was. J was also a senior enlisted guy. Part of the Khaki Belts as we like to call them on the boat. J was always there to give you what you needed. Whether it was an ass chewing because you weren't being the best that you could be or the time you asked for because you wanted to learn something from him. He seemed to always find the time to help out us young sailors with anything that we needed. J was also a very funny individual. He would crack jokes that took you a second to get. We were on the Maneuvering watch one patrol and a friend of mine had stepped down to the galley. He grabbed a cookie and took a bite out of it. From Sonar (2 decks up) I heard, "Hey! We don't eat during the Maneuvering watch!" My buddy had a deer in the headlights look on his face as he made a split second decision. He jammed the cookie in his mouth and ran from the galley with a second cookie in his hand. I could hear J laughing from Sonar. He was intimidating, I'll give you that, but if you could get past the gruff exterior and know the J that I knew, you would have loved him. J had a nickname that will stick with us forever. We liked to call him "78". If you look through my facebook friends, you will see a lot of them with a profile picture of the number in remembrance of him. He stood a watch in control called the Diving Officer of the Watch, or DOOW, for short. Standing DOOW was something that J did exceptionally well. You always knew when he was on watch too. The boat was always level and whenever we went to PD, all you could hear was "78" about every three or four minutes. Classic line, "Dive, Mark your depth." "78 feet, coming back to 78 feet". We never laughed so hard in our lives. J wasn't at 78 feet, but he was damn sure coming back to it. No matter what depth he was at, J's response was always 78 feet. My experience with J was a notable one. It was roughly my third year on the Nebraska and my 5th patrol there. I was so ready to leave and I was pretty much done with the Navy at that point. Every day, I would see J come into work. I tried to avoid him because I was in a rather dark place at that point. My first wife left me and I was in the moods of just not giving a flying F about anything or anybody. J was gruff with me because he knew that tough love was what I needed. He would yell out my name and I would get aggravated because I really didn't want to talk to him. He would look at me with caring eyes behind the mean mask and yell at me about actual important things. Like the fact that I was always behind on qualifications or that I wasn't looking like a clean cut sailor that he knew I could be. After about a month or so of this treatment, I finally pulled my head out of my ass and became the great sailor that I am now. I'm still rough around the edges, but that is just who I am. I like to see what limits I can push. I loved J like the brother that he was. He was a Khaki belt and I was a lowly black belt. He made sure that I learned the things that I needed to learn to be a better sailor. I will miss my Khaki brother and I know that he is in a better place. He will be command handing whoever is with him in the afterlife telling them to go clean the bilge or something. It's just who he is. May he rest in peace.

     The title probably has you wondering why it is that I chose that title. Well, I will answer your burning question. I like to give you the suspense and all, but I think you want an answer. I had this brilliant idea hit me square in the face this morning while I was taking out the trash. I was thinking that it would be a good idea to have at least 26 posts about something random that wasn't me rambling on about my days. Put simply, "A is for Afternoon" could be a possible future post. I'll just talk about the afternoon. I'm of course going to put more thought into it than that, but right now I am typing on the fly and that is the first thing that happen to flash before my eyes. Not my life, just the title of a post. Funny how things happen yeah? I'm weird I know, but it will give you something to think about while I work on getting you guys your next set of reading material. So go out and enjoy the Saturday while I spend mine doing things that I have been neglecting for the past week. Go on now... Get out of here... Hang up the phones and put them away. Go spend time with family and/or friends. 

Seriously, get out of here. You can read this later. I gotta go. See ya!!

Wickid