July 8, 1997 - More Maintenance

970708 - Woke up @ 0230. Ate chow @ 0500. At about 0545 I was caught sleeping and put on the quarterdeck. It wasn't too bad. At 0700, I went to work. We mowed until chow time. At chow, we ate like swine! After chow we slept for about 30 min. We then mowed (I got to use the gas-powered weed-whacker). Then we came back here and sat around here for a few hours. SSgt. B____ is on duty today and tomorrow and he turned the TV on to Headline News. We went to evening chow and are now here doing nothing. I LOVE IT!!! When the chow recruits get back we'll probably get showers and go straight to bed. 52 days left. 
Each morning (and the rare afternoons that weren't too hot to work outside) during maintenance week, before we were allowed to use the lawn mowers or weed-whackers, the Cpl. made us duct-tape actual steel toes onto the outsides of our boots. His explanation for this, which seemed far-fetched at the time, became more and more plausible the more time I spent in the Marines. As he explained it, there was a recruit who didn't really want to be a recruit anymore. His solution? To stick his foot into a lawn mower. He lost a part of one toe, then went to the brig for destruction of government property. Himself. Eventually, he healed up, got out of the brig, and finished boot camp. The steel toes were an attempt to avoid any similar "solutions."

When a teenaged boy goes weeks without a TV, he will watch literally anything with rapt attention. Case in point: did you know that Headline News repeats the same program every thirty minutes, all day long? Did you know that I gladly watched the same 30-minute news reports for an entire day? Now you do.

Finally, if you're wondering what I meant in the journal about eating like swine, you'll have to check tomorrow's entry, where I actually list the courses of my lunch.  All 10 of them.

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