Reception: Day 15

Wow! What a week-end it was. We heard from Blake twice over the weekend.

First of all, everything is on target for him to start the basic training phase of this ordeal this Wednesday. For the past two weeks, he's been locked in the reception phase, and since he's done with his processing and all of that, he's been policing around the fort every day. He's more than ready to get the training portion started.

He called and gave us a lot of news about the fort and his barracks. Seems there are 181 others in the same phase as he is in. They share the barracks upkeep and the fire guard duty nightly. The shifts are an hour. That's one of the things he was worried about. He didn't want to get the 1:00 a.m. till 2:00 a.m. shift on Sunday morning. That one took a little thinking till I realized that that was when the time rolled back an hour. That poor guy would have two hours.

The best news from Blake came when he called Carol on Saturday. He said that a lot of the others were impressed with his Bible that Carol had bought him before he left. It's a Soldier's Bible and she had his name engraved on it. He said that he had been reading it regularly! In fact, in the church service last Sunday that he went to, he opened it up and read through most of the service. He told his mom that that's where he gets his strength. What a great thing to hear from him!

Blake also said that his day was spent memorizing things like the soldier's creed and a couple of other things they wanted him to learn. He's got it all memorized now and is ready if someone asks him to recite it.

The other big news from Blake came in his call on Saturday. He said that the Army had changed basic training to 10 weeks rather than the 9 we had expected. He's not getting out of basic now until the end of January, thanks to this delay in processing, the Christmas time off, and the additional week added on to his training. That pretty much throws that link I posted earlier right out the door, but I'm still going to use it to get a general idea of what he's doing every day. So if you're using it too, this Wednesday is Day 1 of his basic training. He's out of reception and starting the real basic.

That was a lot, but he sounds just great! He's still excited, motivated, and is keeping a positive mental attitude.