Stone Report: Why we do the things we do...

Last Saturday, April 3rd, I went camping with some folks here at Ft. Meade. I don’t think I’ve been camping outside of my Army experience since I originally joined the Army back in 1997. Let me take a moment to foreshadow a bit. I’ve found once an experience like this is over, I like to take an opportunity to reflect of the original reasons why I didn’t like to camp.

1. Nature – Sometimes nature decides it’s going to rain or get cold. When nature is being especially stupid, she’ll throw both at you. Granted some people from Maine doesn’t think 50 degrees is cold, but they are stupid.

2. Food – You need to have an experienced campfire/colman stove cook at the campsite. Otherwise you end up having half cooked crap or a poorly planned menu. We got lucky by having a motivated cook. The problem was that he wasn’t involved in the planning from the beginning.

3. Hard Ground – it isn’t soft.

4. Annoying Neighbors – There’s a saying that goes something like, “if you look around your neighborhood and you can’t figure out who the bad neighbor is, it’s probably you.” Yea, that was us. Some of our guys stayed up until 6am talking about everything. Not all of it was family friendly. Since my blog is quasi-family friendly, I’ll err on the side of not going into details.

5. Did I mention being wet?

We left an hour and a half late for the Flying Dog Brewery in Fredrick, MD. It was no big deal we left "late" because when we got there right as the place opened up. I took the tour and got some good pics. The guy who gave the tour was doing it for his first time that day. It honestly felt like it because he didn’t have many neat stats about the amount of beer that runs through the brewery in imperial gallons at any point in time. He just wanted to talk about beer and show off their whisky barrels in which they age beer. My funny line of the day was "Do they do this for Coors Light too?" I got a good laugh out of some people. I sampled some of the brew, but it was really about hanging out with some of the folks that were graduating the next week.

The prior service barracks at DINFOS has an interesting dynamic in place. On one hand, you have the soldiers fresh out of basic training with whom we aren’t allowed to associate, but they are in our classes. The other hand is the prior service barracks, where the soldiers changing jobs stay. Prior service seem to associate with people that arrive around the same days. Of the people I hang out with, we are in four different schools, but we got here roughly the same time. One of my friends here, Pete, seems to transcend the barrier. He's able to make friends with whomever.

Then, two of the guys that graduated, Hoffman and Bennett (pictured on the right with the gayest photo I could find of them) would welcome anybody into the fold.

After the brewery, we go look for our camping spot. We have one person waiting there because she decided to go mountain biking instead of Fredrick. We reserved a spot at the Patapsco Valley State Park . One cool thing about the place is that it’s right outside of Baltimore nestled between two pretty cool cities of Ellicott City and Catonsville. Ellicott City is an old town that was founded in 1772. It looks like it’s been around forever. It has a really cool rare book store I’m going to have to check out sometime. I digress. We get to the campsite around 6pm. We get the tents setup, buy $20 worth of wood, and start looking for food. We see that all we really have are hot dogs and smores supplies. That doesn’t really cut it for Steve. He decides we need real food. I volunteer to go with him to pick up a grill and food. Long story short, we spend over $170 on food and booze and don’t get back to the campsite until 9 (we left at 7). Steve is a pro with the grill and he made some good burgers.

The smores were really good too.

My favorite part of the night is this. I was pretty worn out for whatever reason. I think I had been up early that Saturday morning, but I don’t remember why. Whatever the reason why I was tired, I was ready to hit the sack at 10. I somehow made it to 12 before I went to bed. Trust me, the wife was impressed with me staying up even that late. Next thing I know it’s 4am, the ground is hard and I’m cold. This means I have to crawl into the sleeping bag and feel the ground even more. Now the problem is that at least six of my buddies are still awake and are talking around the campfire. All I remember from the 4am conversation is that it was colorful. Fast forward to 5:30 am. I’m still awake and they are down to three guys talking. I swear the conversation was along the lines of people’s “social responsibility” to only have the amount of children they can afford to have. I have no idea what that means, especially considering the vast majority of humans in this world can’t afford to keep up their current lifestyle AND pay for raising a child. That’s why the lives of parents change when they have children and they start making these things called “sacrifices” for their children (those last two sentences was the commentary in my head). At this point, my head was on the verge of exploding and I forgot my emergency duct tape. Once I heard one of they guys say something to the effect of “well, China has had a one child policy for years, why can’t we.” I picked up my iPod, and walked off to see if I could catch the sunrise. I’m sure our neighbors appreciated this edition of the “Tao of Soldiers.”

I’m glad I got all that bitching out of my system. It’s been in here for a week.

DINFOS UPDATE: Monday is my last training day in radio. I’ve done pretty well in this section. My instructor is tearing up my writing though. I’m not too thrilled about that. I do keep getting stronger with each radio show. I have my last edition of the Bacon and Eggs Show, Monday at 9:00 EDT. Sorry, it’s not available anywhere but in the grading room at DINFOS.