We finished the inspection today. They ran our shop "Off-Track", for some stuff that we don't agree with. Some paperwork was not routed to us properly, because the Lieutenant that does the Technical Directives Program never wrote up the right paperwork. We're off-track because we failed to make a Lt. do his job. Here's a hint, oh Navy Chief doing our inspection- this is the Corps. I'm a corporal. I DO NOT tell a lieutenant what to do. I can ask him nicely, and we in fact had a documented paper trail of emails asking him nicely to run the paperwork. In the Navy, chiefs have infamous power onboard ship, such that junior officers are terrified of them. In the Corps, things are different. We take the command structure much more seriously.

But it's over and done, at least the inspection is. Tonight the inspectors are writing up their reports, and tomorrow I and all the other Program Managers and Program Monitors and the CO and other involved officers will have a meeting with the inspectors where the formally present their results. The word is that will be nine Off-Tracks and seven Needs More Attention, which is a grim showing for the squadron. Which is good for us, because we won't stand out so much as being a problem.

And anyway, we get on the boat very soon, and the inspectors can't stop that. The first people start getting onboard Monday, and the rest of us will be embarking the last week of the month. It's our last float for this endless painfull MEU cycle. If the CO wants to know why his squadron showed it's ass during this inspection, I got three words: "Two year MEU."

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The reason I stayed late last night was to fix the couple of discrepencies that had been found in the first day's inspection of my program. Today we finished the inspection, with no further hits. All the stuff from yesterday was already corrected.

And they gave us an "Off-Track", which is the worst rating, meaning "Fail!"

I have learned an important lesson from this. Honesty is a sucker's game. I filled out people's paperwork correctly, and thus showed that we had been making mistakes in the past. It would have been trivial to make a couple of "minor edits", concealing our past misbehavior. In which case we'd have received an "On-Track" rating and a pat on the back for being such good people.

Pencil-whips and lies, that's what the Navy rewards. So next time that's what they'll get.

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I just spent the last fourteen and a half hours at work, and when I got home to the barracks, I found out that the Sergeant Major is pissed off that I missed the field day formation. Maybe if she had announced the formation ahead of time, I would have been there. Probably not though, I was busy.

Stupid inspection. My program is about half way through it's time under the microscope, and we've "identified issues" that I'll be oblidged to correct, even though all the ones we've "identified" are, in my humble opinion, useless wastes of times. But it's the Navy that's inspecting us. And the general Marine opinion of the Navy is that they've got nothing but time to waste. (Navy aviation units have about 20% more maintainers per flight hour than Maines, despite the Navy also having much newer aircraft.)

What, me bitter? Now if you'll excuse me, I need to field day my room. Again. It's a good thing I don't have any important work I should be doing. Oh, wait...

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The big inspection started today. The one we had three weeks ago was just a warm up to prepare us for this week. We're being inspected by the staff of the Commander, Naval Air Forces; it's the highest level inspection that squadrons are subject to.

So all week we'll have very senior navy enlisted poking into our business. These guys are looking for any deviations. We don't like them. The way I think of it, I'm a good Catholic, and they're the Inquisition. They'll take any excuse to burn someone, regardless of the justice. Dropping that simile, I think of my job as providing safe gear and aircraft for flight, while their job is ensuring that every ambiguous clause in an obscure order that you've never heard of is being observed to the letter.

My program gets inspected in about a half hour. I think it's good, but there might be something wrong that I'm not even aware of.

And as a bad sign, the first inspectors already rolled through the shop this morning. They were doing the battery safety program. So after we were grilled about storage of our AAs for NVGs and strobe lights, and lithium cells for radios, they asked us where we removed and stored the batteries from the shop computers, which are laptops in docking statements. We looked at them with blank incredulity. We now have a discrepancy we have to document our correcting, specifically: all lithium batteries must be removed for their host device, and stored individually in a locked storage area, when the host device for the battery is not in use. So we're supposed to disassemble our computers every night to fulfill the requirements of a battery safety order that was written when the closest thing to a laptop computer was a Kaypro II.

I'd be willing to correct myself for legitimate safety issues, but that kind of transparent bull crap really sucks out any belief I may have had that these guys are here to help their fellow servicemen.

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I found the sticker from the last time my car had an oil change. It was changed at 50,000 km, with a recommended next change of 55,000 km.

The current odometer reading is 86,000 km. Let's see, that's 31,000 km since the last change, which works out to be 19,000 miles.

19,000 miles of urban driving, without an oil change. And it still runs quite well!

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Well, went to my followup today. I'm not out of the woods yet, because the cardiologist wanted more blood tests done, so I got stuck again. The results should be in this afternoon. Also, I had to pee in a jar, which is a depressingly frequent task in today's drug-free Marine Corps. At least this time there wasn't anyone watching me.

Pending further test results, I'm told that the old ticker's probably going to be OK, although we did have a talk about my diet. My cholesterol measured at 216, which is in the "borderline risk" category, and is also much higher than I've ever had it before- usually, my cholesterol levels are in the 170-180 range.

While talking diet, the doc pointed out that even though I've been working crazy hours recently, living on microwaved foodstuffs is probably not a good thing. But that when I start eating properly again, my cholesterol should drop right back down to where it should be.

I blame my still-decently fast metabolism, which when combined with 320 minutes of high-intensity excercise a week, means I eat what I want and don't gain weight. But without so much as a kitchenette, I don't cook myself the healthy foods I used to enjoy.

The joy of being in the military is that civilian doctors can only try to persuade their patients to take better care of themselves; this doctor gave me a direct order to take an apple or banana to work with me every day and eat it as my midafternoon snack. "Aye, sir."

The doc was also disappointed that I left Texas so young; he'd grown up in Dallas and having seen my place of birth in my medical records, wanted to talk about the old neighborhood. Sorry, doc, although I can go on about upstate NY at length, I know more about Okinawa than I do Texas.

As to my thumb, it was only strained. The swelling was down on Monday morning, so I didn't bother going to sick call; today, it's almost as strong as it ever was.

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