1 Month to Go

In one month I will be going off to Montreal. I just bought my plane ticket to Quebec for the Canadian University Rowing Championships. I fly from YVR to YUL on the 28th of October where I will have two days to practice in the olympic basin. On Hallowe’en day I have my Time Trials and then on the fridged day of November 1st I will be racing in the finals (hopefully the A final) in the Canadian University Rowing Championships.

The following day I will have to bounce to London as I will be racing there on the 3rd of November for the National Rowing Championships with the 4th being the finals of that regatta. I am going to try and re-do my 2km and 6km erg tests this week so I can make Provincial Development and thus get more funding to go.

I also found out that the military has an option where I can go to grad school right after I graduate. This would mean I would get two more years at university and two more years of rowing. I would not be limited to SFU so I could go to a school with a full rowing team. I would have to decide if I want to stay in BC or go outside. If I went out it would be a school such as McMaster, UWO, Queens, UofT or Brock.

If I say in BC my three choices would be UBC, UVic and SFU.

UBC would allow me to stay in Vancouver, with a great rowing team, amazing academics but I would really have to pull up my socks this school year and study to get in.

UVic would require me to move with average academics but an amazing rowing team that would allow me to move farther in rowing in my future with the potential of the national team for 2012 and the London Olympics.

SFU would be the easiest to get into, with the best CS of the three schools but still rowing would all be self motivated and more importantly, self funded.

So while I think about that I am going to go work on my CMPT-412 assignment on computer vision.

All You Did Was Save My Life

Today’s the first day of the U23 World’s. So far Canada is doing decent, but to me the most important race is the Women’s Lightweight Single because a girl from Burnaby Lake, where I row, is representing Canada in that category. In the first day she had heats and came second to Great Britain, but she is moving on to the Finals.

July is coming to an end, which means classes are coming to an end, I just need to finish off the last two assignments. Das Rowhaus is coming to an end as my two roommates are moving out soon and I have no idea what is going to happen next. I know I will be living here and I will need a roommate.

Rowing does not stop though, when finals are over I will be doing three workouts a day and finishing off Froshweek stuff. At BC Champs, I came 3rd in the Mens HWT 1x which is great for me, I still need to be stronger to make the provincial team this year to go to Nationals and then rep Canada next summer. I found out next year U23s will be in Belarus, in Brest.

But on a topic outside of rowing, something is interesting with the military. Because I live in a high cost area I get what is called Post Living Differential (PLD) which almost doubles my pay. Now the military has realized they have been giving it to some other ROTP students who are living with their families, the shouldn’t be getting paid. So now the military is taking back what they paid to my buddies through their pay, so they won’t be receiving their pay for the next long time, maybe for the next year or so.

That really sucks for them

Work

It really seems like no one actually does any work on this campus. The construction workers in rez are always sitting down and talking. The people working in the dining hall are always sitting behind it and smoking. The secretaries in the residence office and the girls at the bookstore are always gabbing away. The janitors are always sitting down and drinking refreshing carbonated beverages. Professors still don’t have half of the assignments marked from the year despite the class being over. Students are chatting away in the library with no studying to be seen. The volleyball team does a lot of standing around and talking with no actual work outs and same as the softball team who just sits in the dugout. The rec staff are always sitting on equipment having social hour instead of taking care of said equipment.

The only thing people seem to be good at is bitching (yes I know this is ironic because I am currently bitching in a rant), but that is the only thing I ever seen get done on campus.

This is one major difference between the military and a left wing civilian university which is that very little work seems to get done. In the military if you are standing around doing nothing in gym class then you are clearly not working hard enough, so they up the intensity. If you are taking a nap at night time, then you have more than enough free time on your hands for a new ridiculous task. And don’t even bother trying to look bored in the field because there is always some shitty job that you can be given.

Oh well, there’s nothing I can do about it so I may as well go back to studying for CMPT 307 and pray I pass it.

Semester in review is soon to come.

Remustering

I’ve been watching (aka torrenting) this show from Discovery Channel called Combat School. It is about a platoon of soldiers from the Royal Canadian Regiment as they prepare to go to Afghanistan.

Now I have been thinking for about three years now about changing trades in the military because honestly, Communications and Electronics is quite boring.

Before I was thinking of going to Military Police because that is something that interests me. However, now I am considering going to infantry. They get all the cool toys.

Bad idea?

What the fuck…

The bitch cheated on me when I was in basic…

… what a fucking whore.

Plus de faire l’aviron.

So I have been thinking about what I am going to be doing next summer because of the military and wanting to compete in summer regattas and still stay in shape for the fall semester.

I have came up with a list of what is most likely going to happen and in the order from most to least it is:

Go to Kingston, Ontario for eight weeks to do my phase training as a communications and electronics engineer. Then on the weekends and some weekdays I can row at the Kingston Rowing Club with the crew from Queens University. Then upon my return I would be living in Chilliwack working at the base there / rowing with the UFV crew.

If this is not possible then I will probably end up in Esquimalt where I will be doing my second language training. This would allow me to row with the gorge rowing club or the university of Victoria.

Of course if I am not training then I might be able to do a summer semester at SFU, this would allow me to keep rowing at Burnaby Lake which would be my preferred option.

Of course worst case scenario is that I don’t have training and they don’t let me do a summer semester. I would then row with the UFV crew all summer while working at ASU Chilliwack.

There are some bigger regattas this up coming year I want to go to as it will be my last year of rowing next year, at least with the university. We want to do Head of the Weasel next October in Calgary on the reservoir, as well as the Alberta Opens on the same waterbed over the summer. Finally we want to go to the states to do a race, maybe in Seattle or Oregon. California would be nice but we may not be able to do it.

All I have to do now is wait and find out what the military is wanting me to do.

Jimmy

I learned a lot about my trade (Communications and Electronics Engineer) this summer and it is a lot cooler than I thought. I am definitely glad I choose it. That is until I heard that now us CELEs and Air Logs have to do CAP. For you non military folk, CAP is a ten week long course in Gagetown where you learn all the basics of infantry-ness. Stuff like: Conducting offencive and defencive operations, conducting recce patrols and live range practises, using the C7 rifle with an advanced scope, navigating with map and compass and GPS in tactical environment, supervising army PT training, fieldcraft, firing a C9 machine gun, throwing grenades, afv recognition, mine awareness, using radios, firing a pistol, calling for artillery and supervising personnel.

Basically it is cock to the utmost level. I am air force and I should not be doing this. I am never going to combat so I am not too impressed that I have to do this course. As a result of this I am thinking about trying to change trades. My three choices are Pilot, Military Police and Construction Engineer.

I passed all the pre pilot testing so I would be able to change easily to that. To military police I would still have to do CAP which is what I am trying not to do, and Construction Engineer also has rumours of having to do CAP too.

I am going to need to think about this some more, or admit that CAP is not avoidable and just get ‘er done.

Now Back to your Regular Programming

I write this now from my hotel room in downtown Montreal. Yesterday we finished course officially. We started celebrating on Wednesday night by having a big mess dinner. Basically we wear a modified version of our dress uniform and then all the officers go to a big fancy dinner full of many many traditions. All in all the night was very fun. I can’t wait till my next mess dinner in the future, as long as I am not the one planning it.

Thursday we all got dressed in our dress uniforms, finished packing and left our rooms. After breakfast we got our certificates and course reports and I am glad to say it was very good and had nothing about the “challenging authority” b.s. incident. We then took fancy photos in our dress uniform. You can see the two samples here and here. Of course here is me parading and my entire platoon.

It was definitely a fun day. But as soon as we were done the parade I said my goodbyes and I hightailed it out of St Jean as I never hope to go back there again.

I will be in Montreal till tomorrow where I am going to be off to NYC. Next thursday I come back home to Vancouver and then on Friday I will be back on rez.

Vimy

I came back from our final exercise a few hours ago from Farnham.  Basically we do missions non-stop 24 hours a day.  Each person takes a turn as the person in charge of a section (a group of 8-16 people) and must write orders and then execute them. 

A lot of these missions were really fun and there isn’t enough time now to write about them all.  We lived in mod tents so we had a hard floor under us all week and the weather was not too horrible.

Since missions ran for 24 hours a day we basically have gotten almost no sleep since Monday, so tonight when we all celebrate at the mess it won’t cost too much money to “have a fun time”.  My mission was from 0400 – 0800 on Wednesday morning, I had to defend the camp.  Basically set up a rotation of front gate people, roving patrol and the Obervation Post.  Our element of surprise that they threw at me was a suicide bomber came to the gate and blew himself up.  I passed on the first try and so did everyone in my section.

On our first mission I an ejected casing from my fireteam partner’s rifle got stuck between my neck and the collar so now I have two nice scars on the back of my neck and a cool story to go with it.  I can say I was ambushed on a pressence patrol by a belligerent and then there was a firefight.

No we are done, next week we do admin stuff, return kit, ship kit home.  This weekend I am going to relax, go to Montreal for the night tomorrow and clean up my kit to return it.  Next Saturday I go to NYC which I am excited for.  When I return to Vancouver I want to buy a mac laptop, plus a wireless router.

I also am thinking of going to Seattle for a weekend and maybe going to see a Mariner’s game as well as going to their cheap McDonalds and real Taco Bell.

As well my first female cousin was born last week.  But then she got sick and had to go to the Children’s hospital and ended up getting open heart surgery.  She is fine now so I can’t wait to meet her when I return.

Now it is time to get my drink on (as well as eat some non-ration pack food, which I managed to bring two boxes home of).

Pre Vimy

So last week we were in the field to practise for Vimy which is next week.  The week is called Pre-Vimy and basically we spend the week sleeping on the dirt, receiving orders, writing orders and then executing them.  Next week in vimy we do this all week, in four hour blocks and we do not stop doing missions till everyone has passed.  This means next week we will not get any sleep for a week.

The only good thing about next week is that we get to spend our time in a mod tent and we have cots.

During the week in the field we eat IMPs, basically food that was made five years ago and sealed so well that you can still eat it now.  They give a whole loaf of bread in each meal that has been compressed to the size of a deck of cards, so you do not have to go to the bathroom as often.

We also had some classes on section attacks, on roadblocks and setting up OPs.  We played with pyrotechnics and the most exciting thing was that we got to do rappelling down a 35 foot wall and zipline across a river as well as run through the bayonette course.

One more week of course then grad week and I am done.  I will be of to NYC and then back to SFU. 

Although I noticed on my go.sfu account that I am paying to live in Tower D but I got accepted into townhouses so I have to figure that out ASAP.