A Geek’s Think

It's been some time since my last update, in small part due to a brief foray into the world of Facebook and in larger part due to my engagement to an amazing woman by the name of Sam(antha) Wilcox. Our story is quite interesting - read it here if you like. Sam and I are to be married on 28 August 2009 in the Orlando Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We will be holding a wedding reception that evening in Jacksonville, Florida and an open house on 11 September 2009 in Mesa, Arizona. Information, times, and places can all be found at stricklandclan.com.

My life of late has been filled with the wonders of wedding preparation - wedding invitations, moving Sam from Memphis to Gainesville, Florida, choosing new car insurance (USAA), and buying my first tuxedo since my High School band tux (which I still have, by the way!). It's a busy time, and I wouldn't trade it for the world.

When I signed up for the Navy back in 2005, I had a problem.  I was out of shape. I weighted about 200 lbs and wore size 36 pants - now that's not huge for a guy who's 6'2", but it's certainly not small.  I could do maybe one push-up and couldn't run for more than a few seconds at a time.  My strong point was sit-ups - I could do a whole 30!  I worked out on my own and finally got up to the Navy's minimum standards about 8 months later, but it was a hard push.

Fast forward to now.  I weigh under 175 and wear size 32 pants - the same size I wore in high school!  My ship had its semi-annual Physical Fitness Assessment (PFA) this week, so on Wednesday I had to run 1.5 miles and do as many push-ups and sit-ups as I could in a two minute period.  I guess the Navy's doing something right, because I made a new high in my push-ups and run and almost matched my high in sit-ups.  I did my run in 11:05, which is a full 70 seconds faster than my previous PFA this spring and roughly equivalent to the speed I ran/walked a mile back in my high school days.  I was able to do 62 push-ups and 78 sit-ups.  Now that's not exceptional by Navy standards - a bit less than that, actually - but by my standards, I'm in a whole new world of in-shape-ness.  I even ran a 5K race not too long ago and finished in a decent (for me) time of about 27 minutes. 

My next goal: run a 10K next spring.  Anyone else up for the challenge?

Last night I had the pleasure of heading over to the Jacksonville downtown area and attending a wonderful concert by the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed it - I’d forgotten how much I love the symphony. It brought back memories from my own band days in high school. Yes, I was a band geek, and proud of it! It was also fun to watch a bunch of elderly blind men jumping around, singing, and having a great old time. And by elderly, Jimmy Carter, the lead vocalist, has been with the group since its early days in the 1940’s! I hope I have half their energy when I’m their age!

I arrived in town a bit early to avoid the traffic for the Rascal Flatts concert and Monster Truck Jam also going on and decided to walk around town a little. Jacksonville’s a nice little city: check out some photos I took during my wandering.

Well, I’m home at last - in more senses than one! Admittedly, I’ve been home from my Navy deployment since late December and have seen many of you since then, but that’s not the complete story. I’ve also more recently moved off the ship into my own apartment, which is a really, really nice thing. I can’t describe the joy of moving away from a ship where I lived with 70 other people in the same room and could not easily escape from work or find a place of my own. And thus I gladly say that I am writing this post from my apartment and will be sleeping on my very own and very comfortable bed.

Now on to the deployment. We left Florida’s Naval Station Mayport July 24th 2007 and returned home December 21st, having visited (at least briefly) Key West, Columbia, Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Panama (multiple times). We caught two major drug shipments, each of which was the second of its kind in naval history and whose combined value was in the hundreds of millions. I left as an Electronics Technician Third Class (paygrade E-4), and was known as ET3 Strickland. I returned ET2(SW) Strickland, meaning I both advanced one paygrade and completed a major qualification known as Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist (ESWS). I experienced extreme tiredness and seasickness; I was also able to visit some great countries, read some great books, and save a good deal of money.

It was a long deployment, and I can’t say I particularly enjoyed being away from home and out to sea for that long - but then again, I think most of the sailors on my ship would say the same thing. But we made it through and we’re home, and I’m enjoying it while it lasts. We’ll deploy again before too long, but that’s the Navy way.

Click here to see some pictures taken during the deployment, and feel free to email me if you want more information about any of them. I’d like to say I’ll eventually put descriptions with each photo, but that probably won’t happen. So enjoy the pictures and imagine some elaborate plot to go with them.

This article describes our first drug bust involving a semi-submersible craft full of cocaine.

This article in the Mayport Mirror describes our deployment and mentions our second major bust where we discovered liquid cocaine being transported by a shipping vessel.

It’s great to be home!

Well, here I am, out to sea on my first deployment. I’ll be gone for a total of six months, sailing around doing Counter-Narcotic and -Terrorism Operations, or ‘CNT Ops’ for short. Basically we patrol the ocean between the US and South America and try to stop a bit of the drug smuggling that’s going on. It promises to be an interesting trip, with several nice South American port visits planned.

We’ve already had one stop on the way down there - just a brief overnight visit to Key West, Florida. It was a nice place, with gorgeous light blue water, but a bit touristy for my taste. Case in point: I saw enough t-shirt shops along the main drag for me to declare Key West the ‘T-Shirt Capital of the World’. Plus, food prices (at least in the tourist section of town) were crazy! Most entrees cost around $15-20, even at the burger joints! Ouch!

I’ll try to get some pictures up now and then during the deployment, but that’s not going to happen very often - our Internet connection out to sea is worse than dialup. I had one day where it took me an hour just to check my bank balance.

<rant>Side note to all you web page designers out there: Not everyone has broadband! Some of us are stuck on slow connections and those sites with lots of images and fancy Javascript do nothing but annoy us and waste our time. Grrr.</rant>

Oh, well. On with the deployment. Ciao!