Food storage = a good thing

[thermocouple]

As most of you know I went through Army basic training last year, followed by advanced individual (job) training. I was gone for 6 months, leaving my wife and 5 kids at home. One of the biggest challenges in doing this was the pay cut that we endured during this time, believe me it was significant. Prior to my departure we had a very healthy food storage, and it was leaned on heavily through my absense, as well as after I got back, while we tried to financially recover from the experience. We now have work to do, to replenish what we have used, but had we not been prepared in that way it would have been a much rougher experience. We would certainly have needed to lean on the bishop much more, and with so much uneployment in our ward there are families who are in serious need of any help they can get, so we wanted to avoid asking the bishop for anything if we could manage it. Food storage helped us through one of the very tough times in our life.

[Buffie]

So glad you're home safely, and thanks for giving us all such a good example of why we need to be prepared. It's just plain common sense, but nowadays that seems to be in short supply.

[DMGNUT]

Dude...
Did I miss something? You joined up?
What's your MOS? Where will you be stationed?
Etc, etc, etc???

[thermocouple]

National Guard, so I will be keeping my regular job and staying in Utah. I enlisted last year, almost exactly a year ago. Went through BCT at Fort Sill, then AIT at Aberdeen Proving Ground in MD. MOS is 44E, machinist. I wanted new skills, and with my engineering background it seemed like a natural fit to learn the job that I so often ask machinists to do with my engineering designs and drawings. They have since combined the machinist MOS with the welder MOS, into one MOS that's simply "Metal Worker", so I am being cross trained with welding too, which I am pretty stoked about.

Im in school right now to finish a business degree I started a few years ago, and once that's done I might possibly think about OCS.

[DMGNUT]

Cool beans man. Especially the machinist/welder part. That's a valuable skill.
And Thank You, for jumping on board to serve our country. Maybe this is in bad form, but I hope you don't get shipped out to any far-away lands.

[thermocouple]

I hope you don't get shipped out to any far-away lands.
Very likely to happen sometime in the next few years, but we knew that when we were making the decision.