Posts

Showing posts from June, 2018

5 Things on a Friday: A Scorcher Coming Monday

Image
The Class of 2022 starts on Monday.  Feel old yet? I’m just gonna drop this here. In case somebody’s maybe planning to stand outside in uniform all day on Monday. For some reason... #RDay “Drink water New Cadets!” pic.twitter.com/HzJK7uyMue — Danno E. Cabeza (@Dan_T_Head) June 28, 2018

#SBRLLR: Beat Navy (Part 2)

Image
I showed up on the pool deck later that afternoon for the first Captain’s Practice, one of the early unofficial workouts organized by the our team captains  before  the start of the NCAA’s official swimming season.  This felt very much like coming home.  A tall man with short-cropped red hair introduced himself as “Rocket.”  He was our captain and one of just two firsties on the Army Swim Team that year.  He was also a sprinter, hence his nickname.  Beside him stood Rob and Flip, both cows, whom I knew from my recruiting visit and from the handful of “mass athletics” swimming sessions the team had held during Beast Barracks.  Beyond them stood the rest of the team, a handful of their cow classmates and a very small number of yearlings.   I stood with my own classmates while Rob and Flip introduced us to the team, and that’s when I met “Toad,” Army’s incumbent butterflyer.

Swimming: 5000 yard key workout

Image
The Swim Across the Sound is coming up, and with that in mind, I scheduled a key workout this morning.  Actually, I meant to do today's main set on Thursday, but I only got about halfway through it before getting thrown out of the pool.  Alas, one of the little kids pooped, necessitating an evacuation. So it had to be today.  I put in a solid 5000 yards, the most I've swum in several years.

#SBRLLR: Beat Navy (Part 1)

Image
"From the Far East I send you one single thought, one sole idea — written in red on every beachhead from Australia to Tokyo — There is no substitute for victory!" ― General Douglas MacArthur We marched back from Lake Frederick after a relatively relaxed week in tents.  Our class motto, “With Honor We Strive,” led the way, emblazoned in gold letters across a black background.  To my amazement, the entire West Point community came out to give our class a legitimate hero’s welcome.  I didn’t know what to think.  After six weeks of Beast Barracks, the mass cheering of all those folks lining the streets evoked within me some rather serious cognitive dissonance.  Similarly, my classmates and I were eager for the end of Beast Barracks but also nervous for what lay ahead.

#SBRLLR: Drinking Beer & Looking at Old Pictures

Image
Spoiler Alert: When your folks die, you're gonna have to go thru a million old pictures.  Sally asked me to go through some old picture albums today since she's been cleaning up our garage, and I found one from one of my ancestors dated 1923 to 1924.  It details his literal trip around the world .  He's got pictures from Japan, China, Egypt, and every point in between. Dude was, like, a member of the landed gentry from the farmlands of Middle Tennessee.  An honest-to-God Southern Gentleman.  It's crazy.  At times, I badly want to go back in time and lecture my one-time family members about the values of financial responsibility.  I've had to start rebuilding the family wealth almost from scratch, and that's fine in the sense that I had a few advantages when I started, but it's also maddening, all things considered.  But what can you do? I'll share the pics from that trip some other time.  Documenting it will be much more work than I want to put in to

5 Things on a Friday: Building on Momentum

Image
Before we get started this week, I’ve got a couple of announcements: First, my  Swim Across the Sound  team still needs your support .  We’re about halfway to our fundraising goal, and I  know  that a lot of people have been on this site lately checking out the happenings.  Most of you fins folks can  easily  afford to support  Team RBG .  Please do that.  It’s for a good cause. Yes, this is me swimming. My second announcement is about  #SBRLLR .  This week’s post did gangbuster numbers, which is awesome.  Thank you for that.   If you’re wondering what to read next, well… I personally think the whole thing is worth reading, especially if you care about context.  However, most folks have liked  Chapter 2 .  If you  also  like Chapter 2, then I hate to say it, but you ought to just bite the bullet and read the whole damn story.   It’s free, you cheap bastards. Finally, if you liked #SBRLLR, and you’ve been thinking about doing something similar, please reach out.   As I sa

#SBRLLR: Beast (Part 2)

Image
My roommate John turned out to be a prior-service soldier who’d just finished a year at the Academy’s Prep School, getting his grades up so that he would be able to compete with a bunch of high school heroes once the Academic Year started.  If R-Day or Beast Barracks ever fazed John, I never saw any sign of it.  I don’t know if they put me with John because his last name was near mine alphabetically, or if somebody somewhere thought that maybe I would need a little extra help with some of West Point’s overarching military bullshit.  John was a huge help, and I was extremely grateful for it.  However, we came from radically different pre-Academy backgrounds, and so we didn’t hit it off immediately—not in a deeply personal way at any rate.  We got along well enough, but I think my shell-shocked military stupidity and ongoing emotional numbness must surely have tried John’s patience.  He was a few years older, and he’d already been through Basic Training and had served in the Regular Arm

Entry-Level Thoughts on Writing a Memoir

Image
As  my memoir  slowly enters its West Point years, its readership has increased dramatically, especially among my Academy classmates.  That’s a good thing.  I wrote the book for a lot of reasons, but one of the more outward-thinking ones was as a way to discuss the idea of writing about experiences with some of my friends.  As our current class president said a few years ago, “Classes get remembered when they tell their stories.”  Our class has done a few things.  We therefore have to find ways to tell the story.

Sunday Musings: Monkey See, Monkey Do

A few random musing from the last few days. How Good Is the Trump Economy, Really?  (NY Times: The Upshot) So what is the most honest way of talking about the Trump economy? It goes like this: The president inherited an economy that had come a long way toward healing. During his administration, the economy has continued growing at about the same rate it did before he took office, pushing incomes, employment and output to yet higher levels.

Swim Across the Sound 2018

Image
I out this out on FB and Twitter on Tuesday, but let me say it again here: we're still looking for some support for Team RBG in this year's Swim Across the Sound .  A lot of folks have "liked" and "retweeted" the links for our quest, and that's great, but as of this writing, we're still quite a ways short of our total fundraising goal. Link: Team RBG and the Swim Across the Sound

Thoughts on Solo & the Star Wars Universe

Image
We saw  Solo: A Star Wars Story  over the weekend.  Everybody liked it okay.  I don’t think it was anyone’s idea of a great movie, and even my kids saw some of those closing double-crosses coming, but it was still entertaining, and that’s fine.

#SBRLLR: Beast (Part 1)

Image
"If the fresh skin of an animal, cleaned and divested of all hair, fat, and other extraneous matter, be immersed in a dilute solution of tannic acid, a chemical combination ensues; the gelatinous tissue of the skin is converted into a non-putrescible substance, impervious to and insoluble in water; this, sir, is leather." ―  Plebe Knowledge, “The Definition of Leather” 22   I met my friends Amber and Rose outside the auditorium on Reception Day.  The three of us had met during our recruiting trip back in March, and Amber and I had hit it off particularly well.  We were three swimmers with no idea what lay ahead of us, save that all three had gotten a pair of black leather low-quarter shoes and started breaking them in per West Point’s instructions to cadet candidates.  I’d tried to talk to my dad a little about what it was going to be like to join the military, but he had brushed off most of my questions, save to push me to keep running and doing pushups by way of being

5 Things on a Friday: Praying for a New Plane

Image
I’m back.  I’ve been busier of late, so I don’t know that 5 Things ' return is necessarily going to be a regular occurrence, but there’s so much going on that I thought maybe we ought to talk about at least some of it. Let’s get it on!