Henry's Web Log

Finished up our second week of Ordnance education at Aberdeen. This week has been all about ammunition (right stuff, right place, right time). I missed one question on the final exam.
Now I'm looking for a ride so that I can meet Lisa down the road, and help her drive the family to Aberdeen late tonight. After the boys have done their trick-or-treating, of course, which means it'll be pretty late.
Still no news on our confirmed assignment, though. UGH! It'll be Monday, at least, before we learn anything.!
But I did get a ride to Union Station, DC. Nice! I had my eye on a train to Staunton, VA, which would intercept Lisa nicely, but I was too late. A close second is a train to Lynchburg, just 30 minutes out of the way. We'll just stay in Lynchburg for the night, or longer!
In the mean time, I had some time to kill while waiting for the train. I took a walk to find a CVS photo printing station and got some nice prints to share with Lisa and the boys. I also snapped a quick photo of our capitol building, and of course found a wifi spot to work email, complete another online training course for medical logistics administration, and tweak the blog!

I have uploaded ALL my October 2008 photos to my Picasa web album account (HenryBassACI).
There's some overlap with the McCrady folder because McCrady is a subset of October 2008, created for my fellow soldiers that were with me at McCrady.

Lisa and the boys are definitely visiting this weekend! This marks 4 weeks apart, and it's a great time to get together. Last weekend was a reconnaisance mission for this weekend!

We were supposed to be joined today by 5 more McCrady graduates...but they didn't show at the last minute. It seems they couldn't get orders in time on Friday so they were held over. Sound familiar? Our boss here just can't understand how that could happen. It only takes 5 to 10 minutes to cut orders. Inexcuseable, in my opinion.

So we drive on. Thomas and I started the ammunition course this week. Newer officers get this as part of the Ordnance Officer Basic Course, so this is refresher for them. It was a separate deal when I went though. No problem- we're already deep into the material on the first day: fire hazard codes, federal supply class, DoDIC, CIIC, etc. It's all manuals, handbooks and regulations. We do that in engineering all the time. Too Easy.

Wheels make all the difference! Saturday we drove to Baltimore's Inner Harbor, with some help navigating by both my iPhone and Thomas . We visited Fort McHenry ("Oh say can you see..."), and several display ships, including a diesel submarine. I'm hoping to show this to my boys next weekend...but only after watching "Up Periscope" to get a real sense for diesel subs!
Speaking of Kelsey Grammer movies, we watched "Pentagon Wars" Saturday night. If you've not seen it, it deals with the prolonged development cycle encountered by the M2 Bradley fighting vehicle (shown). This was part of our inspiration to stop and visit the Ordnance museum, right on post. They have a fantastic collection, both indoor and outdoor. Inside is small arms, an Eniac computer (one of the first computers, for computing artillery tables), the WOW (women ordnance workers), and exhibits on the development of shells and Explosive Ordnance Disposal. Outside are rows upon rows of tanks, artillery, missles, and vehicles from many countries.
We finished the day with a drive to Havre De Grace. It's a very well-to-do town with a nice marina on the bay. We enjoyed a $9 crabcake dinner at an outdoor spot near the boat ramp.
I'm very excited about the prospect of Lisa, Eric and Ethan either visiting me next weekend, or me going to them. It has now been 3 weeks since we said goodbye.

The week's training wrapped up with an exam on maintenance management. This is all coming back to me, because I was the first one done and scored perfect. Too The day's training wrapped up with a couple of hands-on lessons on FBCB2/BFT, the Force XXI Battle Command Brigade-and-Below Battle Force Tracking. A long name for the Army's GPS: but with visability of your other friendly units, any identified enemy units, air support, artillery, and satellite imagery. My kinda toys!

We were able to convince some classmates to give us a ride off post for lunch: our first off-post meal all week! We enjoyed way too much stromboli, then got dropped at Enterprise. Their half-off weekend deal is our ticket to seeing the sights around Baltimore and Aberdeen!