A little bit about me

    I have always been a shy and very self-conscious person. I'm also overly sensitive and I get embarrassed pretty easily. For whatever reason, I cared what people thought about me. I would wear a pair of shoes that killed my feet because they looked good before I'd wear a comfortable pair that looked stupid...

    Eyeglasses, on me anyway, are in the same category as stupid looking shoes. 

    I got my first pair of glasses when I was in about the 4th grade. My father was in the Marine Corps so I changed schools a lot. At the beginning of my 5th grade year my family moved to Camp Pendleton in California. Since it was a new school, and none of the kids had ever seen me before, I decided to wear my glasses thinking if the other kids were to see me the first time with glasses on, I wouldn't look so funny. But by lunch time those kids made so much fun of me that I took them off and never wore them in public again. Since most of the teachers wrote lessons and homework on the blackboard, and because I wouldn't were my glasses outside of my house, I had trouble keeping up my grades. 

    The last full year I completed was my freshman year in high school. After that I went back and forth between Boron High School in Boron, California, and Mojave High School, 30 miles away, in Mojave, California. I would've graduated in 1980, instead I got my GED in 1979.

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The Military

    In September of that same year, I took a vacation with Uncle Sam, via; "The United States Army".  My first stop was Fort Gordon, Georgia, for basic training. The accommodations weren't as plush as the recruiter led me to believe and the staff could have used some lessons in public relations. But the activities far exceeded any expectations I may have had.

 Basic wasn't that bad. I was kind of G.I. Jane-ish, so to speak.  I qualified expert with the M-16 and the grenade, and was pretty gun-ho, for the most part anyway.  I must admit though, if there was a way to make things easier, or a shortcut I could take, I took it. 

  All through basic training you are never alone. The entire company, three platoons of guys and one platoon of women, would be right there with you. That was until we started school. Then we were free to spend our off-duty time doing whatever, wherever, we saw fit as long as we were back in time for roll call at morning formation.
   And so, being a little 17 year old party animal wanna-be, I'd go out partying all night and get back in the morning just in time to answer "here" when my name was called. And so, as I often did the last couple of years in high school, I'd fall asleep during class.

  A part of the enlistment process is a series of tests you're given to determine what career field you'd be best suited for. Of all these tests I scored highest in mechanics and electronics. Being the17 year old idiot I was, I didn't think they knew what they were talking about. So instead of choosing something related to one of those fields, I chose to be a telecommunications systems operator... in short... a secretary.