Safe At Home!

Early outs are definitely out of the ordinary at West Point. Unlike at other schools, where you skip class at will and go home (or wherever) whenever you feel like it, at West Point you stay till the bitter end. But M is participating in the CPRC program this holiday, which means...early out! Sorta.

He will be at home all week, plus the two weekends, but a lot of that time still belongs to West Point, and he will be busy with a lot of PR things: a tv interview, a radio interview, and high school presentations on Monday; more high school things and candidate physical fitness assessments on Tuesday; meeting with interested homeschooled students on Wednesday.

After that he is all ours, until dark and early Sunday morning, when he will get back on the plane to West Point for a speech from POTUS, West Point's traditional Xmas party, the legendary Army/Navy football game...All while wrapping up classes, finishing end-of-semester projects, and, of course *participating* in the TEE's. It's a busy life, that of a West Point cadet.

And now...Only three weeks until he's home for Christmas!

Just Another Day At West Point

West Point offers no end of opportunity, and M takes every possible advantage. He stays stretched to the limit. Until he takes on something new. Then he stretches just a l-i-t-t-l-e bit more.

Every day starts dark and early for him. Formation and duties and whatever all they have to do, then breakfast, and classes, which for him start immediately after breakfast. Tuesday offered up a few extras:

• Lunch with Walker, Texas Ranger, aka Chuck Norris. West Point habitually plays host to hosts of heavy hitters, and you just never know who is going to show up to join the cadets for a lunch of luscious lasagna. Yum! Good food and good company.
  
• An afternoon of packing with one hand while talking on the phone with the other, tracking down all manner of trivia and other obscurities in order to fill in the blanks on 82 pages of questions in the quest for a Top Secret Clearance which he will need for his internship next summer.
  
• And then a sprint to catch the bus with the rest of the debate team headed for the airport to get on a flight to Merrie Olde Englande.

My last word from M, right after "Boarding, boarding, boarding," was a txt msg saying, "The guy sitting next to me is a Russian. Cooooollll!" M's language is Russian, so, knowing M, I'm sure he spent the next couple of hours practicing on his captive audience. I was rather hoping he would get some sleep, but sleep is the one opportunity of which the cadets are chronically deprived. Well...there will be sleeping enough in the grave...

One thing about West Point: It never lets schooling interfere with education.