AubanBird
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hello folks, how have you all been?
the last few years have been pretty hectic for me. lots of stuff going on. so... where to begin...
the last time i was here, i had just purchased a home in a town near fort bragg, north carolina. two barns, three acres, a large pond, etc. pretty much everything i would want in a home. and, my wife and i had just invested thirty thousand dollars in a Snapon franchis(my re-up bonus, after taxes). lol, it literally got spent the day i got it.
not that i got to spend much time at home... from december 2014 to march last year, i spent about a total of four months home. the rest of the time was spent either in training or on deployments. since then i have deployed to Afghanistan and Africa. i am currently on another deployment, but would rather not state where. i did manage to spend about five more months home last year, transitioning to a new unit that had a need for people experienced at what i do.
anyway, as i said, a lot has happened. for starters, my parents went bankrupt. my father owned a Matco tools franchise in florida. long story short, he ran it into the ground. i didnt really understand how bad they had mismanaged their business and finances until they came up to live with us. i gave my father a job, with the agreement that if he didnt find his own employment somewhere else after a year, i would have to let him go. he didnt do very well and i ended up letting him go after a year. my parents didnt fall apart though, they moved to georgia, my dad got a good job working for harbor freight, and they now own a nice(and old) house outright. and they got their tax debt paid off. you know, all the things they could have done much easier had they been working on it while they lived with us, but oh well. they are doing well now, at least. and mortgage free!
another thing that happened was that i took on my niece. my parents were raising her, but my mother and my niece did not get along very well at all. as it was, if they lived under the same roof much longer, i was pretty sure either my niece or mother would have ended up in jail or worse. so, i took over guardianship until she turned 18. i then managed to convince my sister to get to rehab and get herself clean, then move away from florida. this is the same sister and niece that i found during my deployment to iraq in 2011, right after my saw gunners room mate died. she got cleaned and, after talking it over with akina (my wife), we decided to bring her up to our house to give her one year to get a job and save up money for college or getting on her own feet.
let me tell you something... its hard enough trying to manage things when you are trying to raise a teenager who was raised by a meth addict for most of her life. its harder still when her mother, for whom she still holds a lot of animosity for, is living with her. it gets even more stressful when you are trying to respond to the inevitable drama that ensues while you are thousands of miles away engaged in intensive training or deployed to remote locations. akina is a saint!
well, a year passed and my sister had not saved anything. i originally wanted her to save up money and finish her medical degree. i was willing to provide her with a phone, internet, place to live, and a vehicle to drive, etc. all she had to do was get that degree, which she would have been able to do pretty easily had she wanted it. oh well. you can lead a horse to water...
anyway, she is now living on her own, paying all her own bills, and now has her own vehicle. she and my niece moved out into their own place a few months ago. my sisters relationship with her daughter is a lot better than it was before, my sister has stayed clean, and my niece has graduated high school. so, i guess my efforts weren't a failure. i wanted more for them, but they didn't do too bad. everyone has to grow up in their own time, and im sure they will figure it out. so long as my sister stays clean.
along with all of this, my sisters husband got in trouble with the law, again. after talking with him, i decided to sponsor him to get him out of florida as well. he has never lived anywhere but polk county, florida. until i brought my sister up, neither had she. since my sister has managed to stay clean for the longest time in the last 15 years, her husband is hopeful that he can too. i investigated the events that led to his most recent arrest, and i am convinced that he was trying to stay straight, but was around the wrong people at the time. he doesn't know that i see it this way, but then again, he doesn't know how much i know about the circumstances of his latest arrest. the justice system in florida is wonky. he pled guilty to something i know he didn't do, so thats on him i guess.
he is set to be free by Halloween this year, and will be moving up to be with my sister when he gets out. i will use some of my contacts to get him a starter job up here. the contacts already know of his background. in the mean time, i have been sponsoring him so that he can get some good old fashioned vocational school education while he is in prison. when he gets out, im going to sit him down and work with him to plan a way to pay back his 50 thousand dollars worth of child support.
while i believe that everyone is responsible for their own actions, i kinda feel for the guy. his mother died in a car accident when he was 14, and his father drank himself to death when he was 16. i have seen school records of his indicating that he was extremely good at baseball. he was set for a free ride through college if he could just stay out of trouble and keep his grades up. when his father died, he kinda just fell apart. he had no other family. i look forward to seeing what he does with his life when he gets away from everything he has ever known.
on top of this, we had a friend from new york come down and live with us last year. same kinda deal, we gave her a place to start fresh. she arrived march 1st, had all kinds of psychological issues. she was pretty much crippled with anxiety. well, she is doing a lot better now, and is most likely going back up to new york on march 1st of this year. she still has a long way to go before she feels the way she wants to feel about herself, but the difference is that now she believes she actually can. she has gotten pretty good at selling stuff online, has lost a fair amount of weight, and had a pretty nasty case of psorisis go into complete remission, which has never happened for her before. and all done completely without medications! that alone has done wonders for her self esteem.
early last year, after running all of this for two years, akina had pretty much had it with the snapon franchise. so, she sold it back to snapon. im glad she did. it was too much work for not enough gain. i was originally hoping to have that as a backup so that i could get out, but... i had no idea how much the skills i would come to acquire would be worth as a civilian. if i got out of the army tomorrow, i would be making about six times what i make right now. there are not a lot of people who have my qualifications in the world, and demand is only going up. so im not very concerned about that anymore.
that said, akina is getting ready to use her GI bill to go to college for electronics engineering. basically, she wants to help me build things related to my job, which i think is awesome. in my field, the best way for me to improve is to to learn to make my own equipment. technology is always changing at such a rapid pace...
on a personal note, last year was kinda tough for me. i got back from Africa early last year, and i have to admit, that deployment messed with my head a bit. Afghanistan and Iraq were nasty, but i wasn't quite prepared for Africa. im glad i had that pond... i spent most of my post deployment leave with my hands in the mud there, digging up worms, isolating algae to use in aquariums, and looking for new critters to make live fish food cultures. thank god for hobbies!
the lead up to this deployment was kinda rough too. back in October, i buried a few buddies of mine who got ambushed in Africa.
As it is, i am in a pretty good position to advance my career if i want to. not sure if i want to do that quite yet. taking a promotion would likely mean that i cannot do field work anymore. despite the nasty moments, i do love my job.
oh, and before i forget, i have been pretty much avoiding GMO foods like the black plague for a year now. i noticed something in Africa... since i was living off the local economy, eating mostly local poultry and veggies, i started to feel much healthier. i started getting curious about it and noticed something... nothing i ate came in contact with roundup. to test the idea out, i tried eating a few different pastas from the US. without fail, unless it was labeled organic, it destroyed my stomach and left me feeling like absolute crap. it even made me anxious for the next few days and made it hard to sleep. im thinking that it is all the glyphosate that gets sprayed on crops in the US in the form of Roundup. even wheat that is non GMO gets sprayed with roundup right before harvest, as a drying agent. after talking with some Africans and some Europeans, it seems that a lot of people who suffer from autoimmune issues have their symptoms clear up when they leave the US.
who knows, maybe its the food?
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