A Look Back...

Now that Juri and I are getting back into the blogging scene with our "Rated E" blog, I decided to look at my other blogs to see the work that I have done. Having read through the posts here concerning our Chiefs Initiation brought back a lot of memories: some bad, a lot of good.

Overall, I learned a lot from the experience and have grown up considerably since then. I have been through another Initiation from "the other side" and learned and grown even more. I took what I learned most from my own experiences with Initiation and applied them when I was teaching the FY10 Selectees during their physical training sessions. I am a big fan of group physical training, because everyone is able to push each other to do their full effort. I went into the FY10 Initiation Season looking to show them lessons in teamwork and motivation. I hope that they were able to pick that up.

This is the last post for this blog. I made some great friends through Initiation, and I still keep in touch with the majority of them. Thanks again to everyone who supported us and to all of my brothers and sister who went through this crazy and amazing process with me.

The End of the Beginning

The final weekend of the induction season is upon us. Thanks to the two people who used this site to donate, and thanks to all of the others who have donated money and time to help us during this entire induction season. We spend this weekend preparing for our final test: Rites of Passage. This is a secret ritual that will test our abilities as teammates and as individuals. Once we make it through the night, we will all be pinned as Chiefs, wearing our new khaki uniforms proudly. Of course, the challenge doesn't end there. Induction season only serves to prepare us for what lies ahead in our new positions of authority. I know we are ready to face the challenge head on.

A Weekend of Car Washes

It has been a good weekend of fund raising. While the totals from pizza sales this weekend haven't been tallied yet, we do have a count of the money earned at our latest car washes. We acquired a new car wash location in Santee, which has proven to be extremely profitable. After only three hours of work, we accumulated $669!! Pretty sweet! We had two car washes today: one in Imperial Beach and another at the Elks Lodge again. Tentative total from the Imperial Beach car wash is $850. We had a lot of people at this car wash and they worked for five hours total. The Elks Lodge car wash was much more impressive however, earning us $966! We only had nine people at that car wash and we worked for nine hours! Thanks to all of the hard work of the Nimitz Chief Selectees, we earned a grand total of $2485 in car wash fund raising money. A big thanks goes out to Chief Barriga for getting us the Elks Lodge location and help during the car wash.

CPO Pride Day

Today was the fifth annual CPO Pride Day (or CPO Day) in sunny San Diego. Today was very hot, but all of us had a good time. All of the Chief Selects from various commands around the San Diego area congregated at the USS Midway museum early this morning. We kicked it off with a cadence competition, where the commands marched around the Midway's parking lot and performed cadences and drill formations and the like. Our performance was exceptional and we were highly praised by Chiefs from the Nimitz and other commands too. Unfortunately, we didn't win the competition. There was one other command who's performance was pretty amazing. After the competition, we traveled to Balboa Park to speak with the Pacific Fleet Master Chief and eat lunch. We then participated in a community relations project, helping the park ranger remove some brush and branches from a hillside in the park. We also helped remove trees that the ranger cut down.
Overall, today was a success as a team building and morale boosting exercise. We will post pictures from the event soon.

USS Boxer Visit

Since the USS Nimitz is in the middle of a shipyard period, the Chief's Mess has been moved to a barge, along with many offices and berthings from the ship. Unfortunately, the barge's Chief's Mess is really small, so we don't get to experience the full effect of all 32 Selectees entertaining the Chief's in the Chief's Mess. In order to get that experience, we were taken to the USS Boxer to entertain their Chiefs. The Selectees on the USS Boxer are currently not allowed into their Chief's Mess because they aren't doing so well. So, we were given an opportunity to help the Selectees with their team work, singing, and fund raising skills. After we finished entertaining the Boxer Chiefs, some of us took a tour of their ship with their Selectees and discussed what we have been doing to earn money and make it through our long days. Hopefully the Boxer Chief Selects are able to get back into the swing of things and we'll see an improvement from them come CPO Pride Day.

Update for the Weekend of 8/22-8/24

We were successful with several fundraisers this weekend. Pizza sales occurred everyday for the duty sections on the ship. Pizza continues to be a huge money maker! Our car wash in El Cajon wasn't as busy as the first car wash in Imperial Beach, but we (and our family members) were out on the street selling it. That effort certainly helped to bring in the cars! We raked in $1700 from the car wash, pizza sales, and a small yard sale.

Our total raised after our weekend sales reached $17,170. Remember to click the button on the side help us reach our $32,000 goal by September 14th!

Second Car Wash

Today we conducted our second car wash in the El Cajon area at the Elks Lodge. It may not have been as busy as the first car wash, but we did manage to keep a steady stream of cars coming in. We'll post the results of this latest fund raising effort as soon as we count up the wads of cash!

There will be another car wash at the same location next Saturday from 8am to 5pm. So, if you missed it this weekend, please try to come on out next weekend. The Elks Lodge is located on 1400 E. Washington, El Cajon, CA.