May 18th, 2010 is the new date set for my ship out to Basic Combat Training. My contract has been renegotiated and I will be moving on to my chosen career path. Words cannot describe the overwhelming sense of relief that washed over me when I left MEPS yesterday. Honestly, I wouldn't be happy with my life in the military if I were a cook. Not that it isn't an important career – however, cooking and computing are two vastly different skill sets. In one, I have nearly 30 years of practical experience … in the other I have practically no good experiences. No, cooking is not a demeaning job … but I was a cook once at McDonald's and found myself disgusted with life … the only good that came of it was that the pay was tremendously superior to my weekly allowance.

So now that I am going down this path, I will be changing my major in UAT to Network Security. Of course, after I finish this current course – C/C++ Programming I. This class is just so much fun – the geek in my has been writhing in so much ecstasy that it has been extremely difficult to conceal my dorkgasms. We're already into our third week and while I'm lagging a little behind on the reading, I'm enjoying every moment of this class … more so than the entire year, last year. Coding seems to complete my soul in such a way that DJing has definitely taken a back seat … yes, really.

I also ran across some of my mother's writings today. There are so many similarities in the manner through which we see the world – it's uncanny. I miss my mom … I really miss being able to talk to her about life in general and it breaks my heart to know that my daughter will never know the greatness of the character whom her name is derived from. I didn't get depressed … but I did feel the empty pang in my heart for awhile …

My daughter is walking now … has been for over a week. It's crazy how these skills just seem to sprout overnight. She still isn't talking but she does understand distinctions in verbal intonation as well as reacting to a few simple commands (Hello, Goodbye, Arms Up, Arms Down, Where's Dada?, Go to Mama, Get your wahwah) … I really hope that I'll get to hear her make some simple Neanderthal sentences before I leave for Basic, but that may be expecting a bit much. We all want our children to be intellectually superior than every other child … I want mine to make me feel stupid with her powers of reasoning and recall like a couple of my friends do … though, I suppose, I should be careful for what I wish for.

So with the change in dates on my boot camp ship out, I've also decided to reboot my physical training regimen.  I'm still going to Tae Bo on Wednesdays and Fridays, however, I've decided to start over on my Pre-BCT Walk to Run PT schedule. I've swapped to Training Schedule #2 which, surprisingly, is very similar to the regimen that I'm on now BUT it reboots the running portion. The reason why I rebooted, really, is so that I can actually do the regimen as intended instead of my modified version which only had me going around the nearly mile block once … I need to go around at least twice which would condition me to run over a mile and closer to that two miles.  The block is about 0.7 miles which means twice around is only 1.4 miles … which means, really, I should be making three laps for the 2.1 miles.  If I can shoot for 17 minutes 30 seconds, I'll be good to go.  So to track my progress I'll be writing a daily entry.

Thursday last week I was able to pull out 30 sit-ups and 20 push-ups. Unfortunately, the next Curtis decided to do an abdominal workout … Yikes, that was painful. Yesterday I did 20 push-ups and 25 sit-ups.  Today I did 10 push-ups, 10 sit-ups, and 5 chin-ups.  Tomorrow I'll need to start doing my sprints and then later I have Tae Bo.  So I'll need to do my sprints soon after waking up so that I can be some what capable of keeping up with Curtis' class … things have been getting crazy over there.