War Story Wednesday: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome

So I really do want to write an essay-style post about my personal experiences with female service members and my outlook on women in the military in general. Still, it is a difficult topic for me, on which I am emotionally conflicted. I'll work on organizing my thoughts, outlining what exactly I am trying to say, and get it written up in the near future.

For now, I was thinking about doing something topical, though hopefully not too politically divisive. In the final presidential debate this past Monday night, one of the topics discussed was military spending, with Romney advocating for increased defense spending and Obama pressing his view that it is unnecessary. Romney's contention is that in an increasingly unstable world, with the U.S. apparently stuck in the role of world police, our military needs to be even larger, stronger, and better equipped. Obama in turn spoke to a change in the nature of modern warfare and emphasized the efficient use of resources to obtain the maximum capabilities at the least cost.

This reminded me of the make-do attitude prevalent throughout the Marine Corps. Almost from the beginning of its creation, the Marine Corps has been a target for critics as unnecessary, outdated, or redundant. As a result, Marines get far less funding than other branches, often relying on Army 'hand-me-down' equipment and vehicles. I found these charts to help make my point:

First, we have a breakdown of the composition of the military by branch:

A little bit out of date, but if anything, the size of the Marine Corps has decreased since 2007. I believe the figures I heard recently were drawing down the total end-strength of the active-duty and reserve component of the USMC from roughly 220,000 to 190,000 Marines, roughly. I think the other branches may have had force reductions recently as well, but the ratio is probably the same.

Now, here is a breakdown of military spending by branch; notice that the Marine Corps funding comes from the portion allotted to the Navy:

A quick division problem shows us that the Marine Corps' $24.9 Billion makes up a paltry 4.8% of the $515.4 Billion in total military spending. So, while the Marines make up 14% of our total armed forces, they receive less than 5% of the money. How does that work out? Because Marines pride themselves on doing more with less. I mentioned army-hand-down equipment: The M1A1 Abrams tank was the deadliest and most survivable tank the world had ever seen when it first came into use by the U.S. Army, though the Marines didn't get them until a few years later. Since then, a newer version, the M1A2, has replaced the older version in the Army. Not so for the Marines, who have inherited the old army tanks. And, rather than buy brand new M1A2 tanks from the manufacturer, the Marines did an extensive maintenance overhaul to keep their tanks in top form (known as 'Service Life Extension Program', or SLEP). 

More recently, I saw the Commandant of the Marine Corps (their top man and representative to the Joint Chiefs of Staff) talking about prioritizing new Marine Corps spending in light of reduced budgets, around the time of the debt-ceiling debacle. During my time in the 'Corps, the hot new vehicle in development was the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, a replacement for the aging fleet of amtracks. Even though this new vehicle was the stated number one ground-combat priority, the Commandant voluntarily recommended that the program be cancelled. While there was pressure to reduce all military spending, since the EFV program was the Marine's highest priority, they could have kept it. But, it was already starting to run over-budget, and the Commandant instead opted to put off developing a new amphibious assault vehicle while in the meantime the current amtracks, you guessed it, got a service-life extension re-fit. 

If the Marines, the Few and the Proud, can get so much done with so little...if they can be so few, and get fewer dollars still, yet remain proud...maybe the rest of the military could try as well?

"Naw, I cannae work that, no way, naw..."

Life has been busy, getting everything ready for all of the celebrations surrounding my college graduation. We got a fancy new camera, which I am still learning to use, though most of its controls are fairly intuitive. I think I have a good enough understanding of the controls, and that it is a good enough camera, that I can run my mother through some of its cool features and she'll be taking good pictures. I messed around and took several hasty panoramas of the loft; these are the best:

I also got some good shots of the chickens. Here is Mother Helen (her namesake is the Reverend Mother Helen Gauis Mohiam from Dune), cleaning up with a nice cool dirt bath:

I am off to continue cleaning, rearranging, and preparing for this weekend. I have an aunt flying in this afternoon to pick up from the airport, also. I might even take some more pictures along the way - they can use their "1,000 words" to do the talking, and I can be lazy!

"...Until the birds return for Spring Cleaning"

Quite the busy holiday at our house. Over the course of about the past three years, Frog built a very sturdy workshop shed (I helped), and we are now completing the final finish work. Yesterday, with Mom having Memorial Day off from work and being home to help, we painted the shed:

 

 We also finished painting the back of the main house, and below, we painted the workshop's smaller cousin, the double-tall-deluxe chicken condo:

In the preceding days, we did a lot of spring cleaning, getting the space around the buildings clear and generally whipping the property into shape. Saturday we cleaned off our far back patio, by the chicken coop, and uncovered the brick path back to it. Our potato trench is right next to the path, and when planting the potatoes, I dumped a bit too much of the trench dirt right on top of our main brick walkway. The potatoes are all doing great, though, and the dirt we scraped off of the path filled the trench nicely. But potatoes are a post for the future...

Urban Chickens

We have nine chickens now. We originally purchased twelve chicks, but one died almost immediately. We've lost another two in the couple of years since, both found mysteriously dead. Still, the nine remaining provide us with the most delicious eggs, and are really fairly easy to take care of. I am of the opinion that if it is legal where you live, you should look into getting a few chickens. Just look at those silly birds, lounging in the sun!

As I mentioned, we purchased the 'girls' as tiny chicks, and kept them in the house in a box with a heat lamp for several weeks. By this time they had grown substantially, although still definitely not full grown birds. We built a pretty heavy duty coop for them from some left over wall sections from a large shed we had built the prior summer. This is the largest part of the work of having chickens; building them a coop. Otherwise, the care and feeding of these flightless birds is fairly easy. It is simple enough that my college added five chickens to their small organic garden, and the garden club had no trouble tending them, despite most of the members having no experience taking care of any kind of livestock or farm animals. Again, the biggest part of it was the coop. Below you can see the original coop the college garden club used, on the left, and then a new elaborate one which we all built one Saturday.

 

It can be any simple shelter that the chickens can fit in. The small college coop on the left above might seem like a tight fit for five full grown hens, and it was, but chickens are social animals and seem to rather like crowding into a tight space, especially to sleep. Chickens will 'roost' to sleep, which means they need some kind of horizontal bar that they can fit their feet around in their coop, which they will perch upon and zonk out for the night. Inside the coop it also helps to have a nesting space; this is where the ladies will lay their eggs. Sometimes, like during the summer if it gets too hot in their coop, the chickens will dig out a depression in the earth in some hidden nook of their choosing to use as an alternate nest. This makes an easter egg hunt out of gathering eggs!

 We checked the college chickens every day, but at home we only need to closely inspect their coop, food, and water about once ever two or three days. We supplement their diet with most of our table scraps and especially old vegetables, but otherwise they get a protein-fortified pellet feed that we can get at either the local farm supply store or at home improvement warehouse chains. The only other item we have to buy regularly is straw, to line the floor of the coop. We clean the coop out, scooping out copious amounts of poop, about once a month.

"Chicken shit" is a great fertilizer, however, it is so potent that it usually needs to be composted at least once and diluted before being spread around the garden. Otherwise, its super-high nitrogen content will 'burn up' out crops. So we pile their droppings and the used straw and then mix it with some of our regular compost when we use it to fertilize. 

That's it in a nutshell: get your chicks, raise them up in a box while you build them a coop, then refill their food and water every few days and clean their crap every few weeks...all the while enjoying rich and delicious fresh eggs..that is, when your hens aren't molting - a topic for a future post, perhaps?

The Loft, continued

Well, I am still feeling fairly uninspired with regards to what exactly to put up here. I feel like my post yesterday got away from me, becoming more of a self-indulgent pity-party than the sharing of wisdom. Of course, that was what the post was about, in a way, so perhaps that is fitting. Now, let us speak of the awesomeness of the loft. Here is the view looking into the bathroom:

 We made that cool sink cabinet from an old piece of furniture; most of the drawers still work and everything. Pretty cool! Here is the main part of the loft:

 It is pretty small, but there is a nice bedroom area, shown above, and then an office / hang out spot at the other end. I have a nice table from my apartment days that is set up in the sitting area of the loft, which is where this cool railing is:

In this picture you can see how the downstairs ceiling has been vaulted up to the loft. It is pretty nifty. There is still a lot of work to do, although it is mainly in that downstairs dining room; the loft is essentially finished, maybe like 97%. We'll be getting on that downstairs work (hopefully) in these next few days. It isn't like I have school to go to or anything! Speaking of which...I need to find some things to get into and occupy my time. Especially a job.

Also, some good inspiration and motivation. Maybe for tomorrow?

The Loft

I live in the loft now.

Wait, what loft?

The loft I made!

Okay, so I didn't make it alone. The legendary Remodel Man of song worked it righteously, him doing most of it, and the loft is in Frog's attic who conceived of the crazy scheme to build a loft. I did a nice share of the work, though, and I am living in the loft now enjoying its many qualities!

I only have before pictures for now, so here is the story of the loft:

This is the very back corner of the attic space, which has become a 1/2 bathroom. I just noticed these photos all have dates, but it is the wrong date...This work happened a month or so ago. You can see where we've framed in a wall to separate the bathroom from the main loft.




The above picture is the view from the back of the loft. The camera is facing west, the bathroom is on the right.


If you walked towards the window from the back of the loft, you would be at the top of the stairs, with the view shown in this third picture. The floor in this picture is now cut away, vaulting the downstairs ceiling up to the loft. That small triangle space, that has a bundle of insulation and a pile of scraps in the corner? That is now a cool shelf space, to display regalia, memorabilia, art, and awesomeness.



This final picture is downstairs in the dining room. Those stairs now have a fine craftsman railing, and that ceiling is long gone. The dining room is the last room in the house to finish, although it won't be nearly as much work as putting in the loft.

It has been a huge job, causing me loads of stress, and it isn't over yet. Things have calmed down, though, and I am now lord of the upper realms...or something like that. I think what I am trying to say is that the loft is freakin' awesome, and I am a nerd, and now I totally have the space and facilities to nerd out completely.

Landlocked Blues

So today I deactivated my Facebook account. Gosh, the internet sure is boring without checking updates and chatting with peoples. It is certainly for the best, though, as I wasted a lot of time mulling around and seeing what everyone was up to. I will definitely be paying more attention in class now; I had developed a pretty bad habit of bringing my laptop to class for legitimate reasons like accessing online course content but would just end up distracted instead. I got several peoples' contact information before closing the account down, though not as many as I would have liked. Still, I let everyone know and gave them a week or so to get back to me...I didn't want to make a huge fuss about it. Although, I suppose announcing it on Facebook itself and then having a post about it here constitutes a fairly decent fuss...

I still don't think anyone reads my blog, but that is fine. Unlike Facebook, I'm not making my posts here intending for them to be seen by people. This is much more focused on me, an outlet and place to put things for myself. I'll probably start posting regularly now, too!

You Know Not the Power of VacBot

Revenge of VacBot

Two Houses, Both Alike in Dignity

The time has finally come to finish out our house. Starting this week, we'll begin working with a home remodel pro to put in a loft bedroom, stairs, and the finish on our front dining room. It has been about ten years in the making, and I am so excited for it to finally be nearing completion. I will probably be moving into the upstairs loft, which will feature a 1/2 bathroom, lots of closet space, and a small living area. We are also going to 'loft out' the dining room, so it will have a really high ceiling. The stairs will simply climb up to the loft, rather than going through a hole in the ceiling up to a second floor. Pretty cool.

Also going on this weekend is a two-day birthday project at my best friends' house. I have been exceptionally lucky over the past couple of years and have made some of the best friends of my whole life. They are a married couple my age that live right in my neighborhood who, between the two of them, share almost all of my interests. It is his birthday on Saturday, and his big gift from everyone is putting in a garden plot. The plan is to build two 16' x 4' planter boxes, about 2' high, in the far corner of their large and oddly triangular backyard.

Unfortunately, we won't really be able to work on each others' projects, at least not this weekend. However we have been working together on the planning, and will certainly all share in the enjoyment of the finished product. AWESOME!

Cut off at the Apartment

So...whichever of my neighbors whom I was piggy-backing off of slapped a password on their network mid-week, hence the lack of posts since then. Soon I will get the internet I had set up at my parents' moved to the apartment. Then I won't have to rely on errant wifi signals.

So what have I been up to lately? The highlights included:

*Having my parents over for dinner; I made them the lovely mushroom-alfredo pasta that I perfected while at Better Living's.

*Wearing blazers/sports-coats with all sorts of outfits! Mixing up jeans, dress shirts, v-neck shirts, blue blazer, old pinstripe gray suit jacket, varied belts, a tie once, french cuffs a few times...

*Dropping off my Mr. Mac suit to get altered down to at least somewhat fit me, now that I am back to my Marine Corps lean-and-mean build. I also picked up some patterned, french-cuffed, no-wrinkle, and even spread-collared new shirts, as I have yet to encounter such nice shirts at Mr. Mac.

*Financing a television and getting the apartment moved along towards a a state of being fully and fashionably furnished.

A Job Well Done

So, the DEX competition over the weekend proved to be very fruitful for my fellow Westminster College students and I. There were three of us competing, and in each of our events, we took 3rd place. Hi-ho! Sounds like an auspicious start to me! Now, we just need to go wave our awards in the Dean's face and try to drum up some publicity, and I think that the Westminster College chapter of Delta Epsilon Chi may actually become a reality.

I was also pleased to see a multitude of fellow DEXers sporting French cuffs and cuff-links. While my initial reaction was sadness (I no longer hold the monopoly on elegance within DEX), ultimately I was happy to see men taking pride in their appearance, and having the guts to wear French cuffs, ties in colors besides black and gray, and even one three piece suit!


I found myself more satisfied with the weekend than I had expected, and I decided to reward myself accordingly; I purchased two essential items that no household should be without:

A Bodum double-walled French press and a bright orange Le Creuset kettle!


Of course, my thanks must go out to Better Living, for introducing me to the vastly superior coffee that a French press produces. :)