In which Chlorosilane looks at Veterans Green Jobs

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

FINALLY, someone had a good idea about green industry that wasn’t just a bunch of blowing smoke with fancy buzzwords or an attempt to gain stimulus funding and/or sell their book!

Solving the problem of veteran homelessness and the energy crisis in one swell foop is made of nothing but win. Chlorosilane is pleased. She only looks pissed off because she was drawn that way. ;-7

I’ve been looking at the Veterans Green Jobs program, which is loosely affiliated with Obama’s Americorps endeavor. I applied to the program and receive email about opportunities for training as they occur. The next iteration appears to be oriented mostly toward forestry careers. It’s taking place in Colorado and runs from June 1st until August 14th.

The video (linked from Change.org) has it’s cheesy moments as it is interspersed with old newsreel footage, but in general is good and useful information.

Applicants will apparently be expected to be able to deal with living under “in the field” conditions for most of these programs. While I am no stranger to this, a back injury prevents me from being able to do heavy lifting, extended walking or standing. However, it’s not like I don’t have anything to offer once the program moves closer to my area and/or expands into training that will accomodate my existing skill set and abilities.

Those abilities, with all due modesty, are not small. I am a National Merit Finalist scholarship winner whose SAT scores consistently fell within the top 2% of the national average of my peers. My score on the electrical component of the ASVAB was 98. It can be said that tech is in my blood – my father was an electrical engineer whose first project at Sperry coming out of NYU in 1959 was to join the design team for the E2-C AWACS radar; my grandfather was a mechanic who would take Model Ts apart down to the last screw and then put them back together for fun. I have 20 years of IT experience supporting mission critical systems (leaving out the numerous “friendly fire” incidents of recent years which were designed to drive myself and others like me out of IT so that room could be made for the greedy assholes who either support or prefer to remain ignorant about 9/11 coverups, right wing propaganda, left wing complicity, warrantless wiretapping, mortgage fraud, and stock market shenanigans).

Right now I have two self-driven projects going on. I’m building a home security system from scratch, and I’m teaching myself about solar electric systems. In addition to that, I am holding a voucher to update my Solaris certification to 10 (right now they’re current for Solaris 8) some time before next March. Other projects on the horizon are to learn how to do cordwood masonry (I think the houses are gorgeous) and how to keep bees.

Also, I can kill you with my brain.

OK, but enough about me. ;-7 The real deal is, I love the idea of this program. I love where it’s going. I love where I can possibly go with it. Yay. Whee. Rejoicing. The Obamas get a bottle of mead next time I am in DC. I will find out tomorrow how it did in the AHA Nationals.