The Secret Weapon Underneath A Naval Officer's Uniform

 

I love this picture of John. This was taken Sunday after church. The Annapolis ward is very small. If I was to say I have a lot of confidence in this ward taking care of John I would be lying. Bob went with John to Elder's quorum and they took turns reading the lesson. The bishop's wife gave a really long drawn out analogy of a drowning child during her talk for sacrament meeting. She tried to tie it into missionary work. I had to go out and take a walk because I could not take it. I know I am sensitive about this subject, but come on! How could that analogy possibly be inspired? We went to a plebe parent information meeting during the Sunday school hour. This was actually informative and we got to meet the other plebes and their parents. We talked about missions and how midshipmen do this. They actually go to school for two years then go on the mission. They serve for about 20 months which is a little shorter than the average mission. They said that one of the main reasons they go after two years is because plebes typically get really low grades and it is hard to get readmitted with a low grade average. This excuse for low grades just did not sit well with me. First of all, freshman low grades are not unique to the Academy. Next, Muirs do not blow off freshman year. I understand that he needs to go for two years before he goes on his mission, but do not give the him this excuse for poor performance. Okay, enough complaining.

One thing I like about the ward is that they assign a sponsor family to the mids. They are the home away from home and a place for normal in a difficult world. John's sponsor family is the Lund family. I will do a separate blog on this wonderful family later. They invited us to a barbeque on Sunday and it was really nice meeting them. I appreciate their willingness to help out my son.

 

Here is a closer picture taken at the same time.

 

After church John changed into his PE clothes so that he could be a little more comfortable. He has to wear something called shirt stays as part of his uniform. The stays are made out of elastic and connect to the shirt tails, The elastic shirt stays go down and around his feet. The purpose is to keep the shirt tucked in and the creases sharp. The cost is that they pull out his leg hairs one at a time by the root. He got out a razor on Saturday and shaved certain parts of his legs to decrease his discomfort.

 

This is a picture of John's summer Company. They had a formal parade on Saturday morning. Can you find him in here? I think I agree with Joey who said that he can't tell the difference between any of them because they are all tall, skinny, nearly bald, and dressed in white. Where's Waldo?

On Friday and Saturday John was so happy to be with us and we had a great time. We went out to eat and watched The Dark Knight. We ate at Pot Bellies, Panda Express, Burger King, and a local Mexican restaurant. I will have to say that John probably won't be getting descent Tex-Mex until he comes home for Christmas. We ordered Chile Rellenos. They were the size of small jalapenos. We had to ask for tortillas with the meal and the waitress could not understand why we would want tortillas with our meal. We got charged 25 cents each for them which was not bad but we thought it was weird that you would get charged for tortillas.

On Sunday there was a definite shift in John's mood. He was just down. After talking to him I realized that he had used the thought of Plebe Parent Weekend to get himself through the last 6 weeks. Now what? He can choose to look forward to Christmas but I had a better idea. He is going to be starting real college in the next few weeks. The classes will be challenging and he has to keep his head in the game. I gave him my typical freshman pep talk about how he can be at the top of the class, how he needs to go into every class and size up his competition. I also sarcastically reminded him about how much fun he had his senior year of high school. He really is ready for this challenge. Incidentally, the upper classmen were playing Christmas music out of their windows when the Plebes came back. Gotta love those guys! They understand just what these kids are going through and they know how to twist the knife. I thought it was kind of funny but I don't think John appreciated the humor.

John always tells me that at the end of a long, boring story you say, "Then I found $20." It always perks things up. Well, yesterday on the flight home we had a stop in Memphis. An announcement came that they were overbooked and would anyone be willing to take a later flight and get $300 in flight credit. I yanked Joey up and we got $300 each and a food court credit to eat breakfast and lunch while waiting 4 1/2 hours for the next flight. As our luck would have it, The next flight was overbooked as well so we volunteered again for the same deal. That was $1200 for about 6 hours of our time at the airport. I bought a used copy of the BBC version of the Chronicles of Narnia and kept Joey busy the whole day. I could have done that the rest of the day and the next day too, but the next flight actually took us to Dallas. What a good way to end the trip. Then I found $1200.