Tree to the Knee

As promised, I started writing this immediately after my previous post. It took me a minute to remember what I was supposed to write about.

Almost exactly one month ago (did you see what I did there?) I had a go at the demo for the tryouts for the Estonian SpecOps group. It was supposed to be 30 hours of gruelling, almost action packed, unadulterated fun. And pain, sweat and a touch of lack-of-sleep. Simply put, fun for the whole family. Oh, and it took place over the weekend, meaning I couldn't go home. She LOVED that part (not).
Here's what was planned, pretty much in the same order we did them:
- Half an hour of morning exercise. A tenth if us almost died here.
- SpecOps general physical test, which entailed push-ups, pull-ups, leg-ups, sit-ups, push-ups on parallel bars, climbing up a rope, bell-bar reps with a large percentage of one's body weight, and a 10km run to finish. We all almost died.
- Three hours' orienteering. We all got lost and I took a tree to my knee, or something. I was out for the count after this one.
- 300 word essay writing. Or was it 200?
- A quick intro to SpecOps.
- A boat rally. Where they (see what I did here?) took an inflated boat and..... ran up and down and everywhere else, making sure the boat didn't touch the ground or vegetation.
- Crawling for two hours.
- Counting. To 500. With push-ups every time someone gets confused. Did I mention the time? Around 3 a.m.
- Song memorization. With something unpleasant with every failed attempt.
- Sliding down a rope. And trying in vain not to slam into the brick walls all around.... at least not TOO hard....
- And a nice long trek to finish.

'Nuff said.

Off to the Sanatorium

Heya, It's been a while (understatement, yes, I know). There's been stuff happening and I haven't had the time nor the energy to write a blog post.
However: I am off to some sanatorium soon, thanks to what I might call a testosterone overdose. I'll write a post on that when I'm done with this one.

I thought that this would be a perfect time to rant about our medical care. Our med centre, also called our Laatsaret (Laats for short), is where we go whenever our bodies complain against the strain we put on them. One would think that Laats is good at what they do, bearing in mind that they are part of a military institution. One would think that these people can handle any medical issue with efficiency and aplomb. Hell, one would even think that they performed miracles. One would think wrong.

Here's how Laats works: you talk to your higher-ups, telling them you need to head over to Laats. The higher-ups book a time. If youcre lucky, the booked time will actually suit you, instead of, oh, I don't know... errr.... demand you find some way to get from the middle of some random forrest a couple of tens of kilometers away to Laats, or interrupt an important part of training just to let the ladies at Laats throw a peak at whatever's bothering you. That aside.... You get to Laats, after booking and rebooking and hitching a ride from the middle of nowhere to get there. Let's say, for the arguments' sake, that your knee is fuukèd (took an arr... ahem, BULLET, no I wasn't about to say arrow[who would say that in this age?], to the knee or something). You wait in line for half an hour or longer (because the fact that YOU booked a time doesn't mean the others did, neither does the fact that YOU showed up on time mean the others did either), depending on the luck of your draw. You finally walk into the nurse's or doctor's office (also depends on your luck and how convincing you or your higher-ups are) and have a seat. They type at their keyboard for a minute or five, after which they ask what brought you there. "My knee has been giving me hell for the past two weeks, see..." They have a look at your [insert offending body part here], ask questions and irrespective of your answer, they prescribe some painkillers and excuse you from physical exertions for a week, telling you to come back a week later, when they will do the same thing again. On the n-th iteration, they might consider taking you to some diagnostics or MRT scan and if they're lazy, they'll just send you off to a sanatorium.

So the wonderdrug we use around here is the awesome Walkitoff inhalator. Given time it fixes everything. Add a touch of Negotiatewithhigherup and you're fit as a fiddle! Yay!