I don't have time to really write, but here's a few pictures of where I'm at right now. In the first one, you can sort of see the two carriers tied up to the pier across the bay. CV 59 and CV 60, both are decomissioned and are being prepped to be sunk as artificial reefs somewhere off the coast. The next two pictures are of King Hall, the barracks that I live in. Sorry about the poor quality of the three of them... all I had with me was my phone to take pictures with.
Things are going pretty well. I'm two weeks into NSI right now, and so far it hasn't been too bad. It's definitely a lot of academic work... 18 credit hours that are normally taught over the course of three years at a NROTC program, crammed into 8 weeks. We've only had one week of actual classes so far, and our midterms are scheduled to start on the 10th... so it's pretty intensive. During the week I don't have time for anything but school, eating, PT, and sleeping. I get up at 4:00 every morning, so I try to get to bed as early as possible, but usually it's not until well after 9:00, and sometimes past 10:00. The classes I'm taking are Naval Engineering, Weapons, Navigation, Naval Operations/Seamanship, Seapower, and Intro to Naval Sciences. They're all fairly interesting, and I have somewhat of an advantage over some of the others here in that the Engineering class is basically the stuff I've been teaching to others over the last two years at NPTU. We PT three mornings a week before class, and our class officer, LT Brewer is really 'enthusiastic' about his PT sessions. I was more sore than I've ever been for the first week, and that was with me being in pretty good shape to begin with. I'm doing a lot better now, though, and I feel great.
So, all in all, it's been good so far, except for the major fact that all the demands on my time leave me with hardly any time at all to talk with Naomi. It's been a tough transition from talking for over an hour each and every night to the fifteen or twenty minutes a night that we get now. God had been faithful, though, and is teaching us both a lot through this time apart. But if you think about it, we'd both appreciate prayer for the next seven weeks... :) The other thing I'm praying for for myself right now is for opportunities to be able to be a servant to the people in my class and division here. I feel like a lot of times I don't really know how to share my faith in Christ with others, and He's been showing me over the last couple of weeks that a good place to start is by being humble and willing to be a servant to others... So I keep looking for opportunities in day-to-day life to do that here.
Well, this ended up being a decent length post, after all. But despite my best intentions of getting lots of sleep in over this weekend, it's now Sunday night and I haven't really done that yet. So I'm going to go and see if I can get to bed relatively early tonight and start the week off right.
