Military Life: Part 2 Uniforms

One night while Amy was here, she walked into my room and saw me with an ironing board, my uniform, a ruler, and a book. She laughed at me and asked me what I was doing. I guess I didn't realize how funny this looked and said "I'm getting my uniform ready for work tomorrow." The ruler and book was to make sure I had my ranks, ribbons, and pins on correctly. Instead of wearing scrubs to work, I rotate between my khaki uniforms and the new blue cami's. Being a nurse in the military is much different from the civilian sector and we have a lot more responsibilities. Making sure our uniforms are squared away is just one part of it.

This week, we had a command wide uniform inspection for our new cami's. It was pretty crazy walking out and seeing a huge sea of people in blue cami's. Sometimes when you work in a hospital, the military aspect gets pushed aside and you focus only on your job. Uniform inspections always give you a nice smack in the face to remind you that you are a military member and you're held at a higher standard, especially as a Naval Officer. We lined up at 0700 outside in ranks. I've been sick for a couple weeks now and haven't been feeling too good. Standing at attention outside in cold weather was not fun. Times like these make me really happy though, since I'm in San Diego and 40 degrees is considered freezing instead of being back home in MD where it's in the 20-30's. It's always intimidating when the Captain steps in front of you and looks you up and down to see if there's anything wrong with your uniform they can pick out. Luckily there were so many of us, they didn't go into too much detail and got thru all of us pretty quickly. I spent an hour the night before ironing and cutting off loose threads on my uniform. All that for a 30 second up and down look from the Captain. Good times. NOT! I wish I had gotten a picture... hopefully they will post some up and I can post them here later.

**EDIT**
As promised, here are pics!