Watch your speed!

For those who live in Hawaii, I just got this in my email. I don't know how to check if it's true, but figured it wouldn't hurt to pass it along:

On 4/ 1/08, the city and county of Honolulu will launch a 30-day speeding ticket frenzy. The city estimates that 9 million dollars will be generated in speeding tickets. 1 million will go to pay police overtime. There will be 50 police on duty at all times patrolling the 9 main thoroughfares.

They are the following:

H-3 both directions

H-2 both directions

H-1 both directions

Pali Hwy

Likelike Hwy

Nimitz Hwy

Kalanianaole Hwy

Kam Hwy

Farrington Hwy

Now 5 mph above the limit can justify a ticket and every officer is supposed to pull a car over and write a ticket every 10 minutes. They have issued 30 brand new unmarked cruisers and they are bringing all their part timers on full time.

Race to the North Pole!

First, lest we forget, yesterday was the 45th anniversary of the tragic loss of USS THRESHER (SSN-593). The Sub Report had a link to this article. I was surprised by the detailed description and the computer-graphic animation of what happened to the THRESHER that were on the wikipedia page. In the wake of the loss of the THRESHER, the submarine force implemented a robust Quality Assurance (QA) program, in addition to some important design and procedural modifications. The submarine QA program is what ensures that we have the same number of surfaces as we have dives.

To the officers, crew and families of THRESHER and all the other submariners on eternal patrol, God bless you and may you rest in peace.

On a happier note, I received a really nice email from the Executive Director of the Dolphin Scholarship Foundation about my previous blog post.

In honor of the U.S. Submarine Force's birthday TODAY, April 11th, the DSF has kicked-off a virtual submarine Race to the North Pole. It starts TODAY and lasts through August 3rd. You can make donations in any amount under the name of any submarine. Right now, the website shows USS NAUTILUS is in the lead, with SILVERSIDES, GROTON, and BLACKFIN following behind. If any of you aren't sure which boat to vote for, just click on the Mighty MSP in the pull-down menu.

Aside: If I thought there were more people interested in naming another ship USS OREGON besides just me, I would propose a campaign for us to have the USS OREGON win the race to the North Pole as a gesture to the Navy leadership that the TIME HAS COME FOR OREGON! I have a feeling nobody shares my enthusiasm on that topic though.

Anyway, back to the Race to the North Pole topic...


For anyone who hasn't been under the polar ice cap before, it's a tight squeeze getting through the Bering Strait. The emblem for the Arctic Submarine Lab is a SCALE drawing of the clearances a 688-Class submarine has squeaking through the strait.


When I went through the Bering Strait, the closest we got was an ice keel passing 17 feet over the top of the sail, with 20 feet of clearance between the keel and the muddy bottom. Yes, there are deeper ice keels, like the one pictured on the right side of the ASL logo above, but you have to drive around those like a slalom. Keep in mind, a 6,900 ton nuclear submarine doesn't exactly turn on a dime. As an Officer of the Deck driving through there, you stare intently at the sonar display, because as soon as you detect an ice keel out in front of you, you've gotta put the rudder over and get the ship started turning to keep from hitting it.

Oh, check out the Arctic Submarine Lab website for some cool photos and videos of submarines breaking through ice and stuff.

Anyway, back to the DSF news:

Our Board of Directors has recently voted to increase the annual amount of the scholarship, to $3400! Tomorrow we will select 44 new Dolphin Scholars, and their potential scholarship over 4 years will be worth $13,000. The Board's goal is to eventually award scholarships of $4,000 each. Don't forget DSF when your sons are seniors in high school!

WRT the DSF Cartoon Calendars: Apparently I was wrong about the calendars. They aren't a big money-maker for the DSF, but they continue to do them as a matter of tradition. I've always been a big fan of the calendars and hope they will continue to keep the tradition going.

Observations on Pee and Poop

Yes, I am a father, so naturally, I have an observation or two to share about the bodily functions of small children.

Okay, so HOW LONG is it going to take for my boys to learn to WATCH where they're AIMING when they PEE??? I know it frustrates LW to no end to find pee all over around the general vicinity of the toilet that somehow "missed" and she ends up being the one to clean it all up.

One time, we were sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner and YB got up to go to the bathroom. He didn't bother shutting the door behind him. From where I was sitting at the kitchen table, I could see into the bathroom and see his little bare bum while he was doing his business.

Then ES said something at the table that got YB's attention. I watched in horror as YB turned his head around toward us and said, "What?" to ES. Meanwhile, his torso and waist followed him around as if his body wanted to naturally untwist itself and follow where the head was pointed, and so I watched as the solid stream of pee continued to swing around in an arc away from the toilet and across the bathroom floor. Realizing the pee would continue to follow whatever he was looking at, I said, "LOOK AT THE TOILET! LOOK AT THE TOILET! LOOK AT THE TOILET!" Startled and wondering what horrible sea monster was coming up out of the toilet to make me say such a thing, he swung his head back around to see what was so important in the toilet. Sure enough, as he turned his head, his torso and waist followed his head back around and the stream of pee went back into the toilet again.

We had a similar incident tonight before the boys got in the bathtub. It was YB not watching where he was aiming again because ES had distracted him again. Not that ES is all that innocent, mind you. I've seen him do the same thing more than once, and I keep telling both of them WATCH WHERE YOU AIM.

Maybe we should make them wear blinders when they go pee so it'll keep them focused on the task at hand.

Then there's #2...

Thank goodness ES graduated to wiping his own butt a while ago. YB hasn't reached that milestone yet. Recently we went to the foreign residence of tasty flatbreads for dinner with our neighbors across the street. Of course, right as the food is coming, YB says, "I have to go poop!" So off to the men's room we go.

As I was standing there in the stall waiting for YB to finish his business, something occurred to me. As much as I won't miss wiping his butt, and as disgusting as it sounds, I'm actually going to miss hearing YB's play-by-play commentary when he poops. It's just so funny to hear him describe the number, length, shape, width, color, size, density, stench, mass, texture, aroma, and specific gravity of his poop and what it looks similar to (sort of like trying to pick out clouds in the sky that look like familiar objects). Quick rewind for background: YB had a speech impediment and went to a speech therapist up until we left VA to come here to Hawaii. So back to the story at hand, the humor of his poop description is further enhanced by his innocent little voice and mispronunciation of words.

Oh, another thing I won't miss is coming back to the table after everyone else has already finished their dinner and mine has been sitting there getting cold the whole time we've been in the men's room. Ahhh, the joys of parenthood. :-)

San Diego Favorites

Some of our neighbors are leaving on a PCS transfer to San Diego and asked me for a list of my favorites in San Diego. Here's the list off the top of my head. I'll come back and add to it later on if anything else comes to mind. Here we go...

Restaurants: These are my favorite actual sit down and be served by a waiter or waitress restaurants. Just below this, I'll list a couple of my favorite fast food places.

Crown Bistro: THE BEST breakfast in San Diego County. If you take ANY of my recommendations, take THIS ONE and go have an extraordinary breakfast. It's on Coronado. Take I-5 to Rt. 75 over the Coronado Bay Bridge. After the bridge, follow the street through a couple of twists and turns. When you get to the traffic light at Orange, turn left. Orange is the main drag through Coronado, and the Crown Bistro is about two blocks up on the right hand side. EVERYTHING is good there, but my favorite is the Bananas Foster French Toast.

Miguel's: Great Mexican. There are a couple of locations - one on Point Loma near the sub base, one way out in East Lake (Chula Vista). The one in East Lake is nice because they serve this awesome rotisserie corn on the cob. We most frequently went to the one on Point Loma due to its proximity to the sub base. To get to the Point Loma restaurant, take I-5 to the Rosecrans (Rt. 209) exit. Follow Rosecrans down into Point Loma. Turn left at the traffic light at Shelter Island Drive (there's a Wells Fargo Bank on your left and Blockbuster video on your right). Miguel's is right behind the Wells Fargo. Note: While on Rosecrans, you will pass both a Rubio's and an In-and-Out.

Parallel 33: Serves a sampling of foods from everywhere on 33 degrees north latitude around the globe. A little on the pricey side, but excellent food and service. It's on Washington. Take I-5 to Washington Street exit (you'll be able to see the airport runway). Turn away from the airport (east) off the exit ramp and it's about 1 mile up on the right hand side.

Onami: All you can eat sushi, Chinese, Japanese food buffet in Mission Valley. Go for lunch. It's like $23 for dinner and like $13 for lunch, but it's the same buffet either way. They have lots of things to choose from besides sushi (including a dessert buffet, too), but the sushi is really good. Directions are a little complicated, but I can write them out for you if you have an interest in going here.

Red Sails Inn: Seafood. Great food and service - above and beyond what you would expect given their equally great prices. Both indoor our large outdoor patio seating area. Use same directions as Miguel's, but continue on Shelter Island Drive a couple of blocks and it's on the left hand side.

Peohe's: Very nice seafood restaurant with a fabulous view of downtown San Diego. Pricey. It's on par with Roy's. Take I-5 to Rt. 75 over the Coronado Bay Bridge. After going over the bridge, follow the road through a couple of twists and turns then turn RIGHT at the traffic light onto Orange. Follow Orange all the way to the end. Turn RIGHT at the traffic light. You'll see signs for Peohe's about a block or two down on the left hand side after the Burger King.

Tom Ham's Lighthouse: Nice seafood restaurant, not too pricey, great view of San Diego. It's at the north end of Harbor Island across from the airport. Follow signs like you were going to the airport, then turn left at the traffic light onto Harbor Island instead of turning right into the airport. On Harbor Island, turn right and drive all the way to the north end of the island.

D'lish. In the Terra Nova shopping center in Chula Vista (just off I-805 at the East H Street exit). I love their salads and their sandwiches, and their prices are pretty reasonable.

Fast food: The term "fast food" has such a negative stigmatism with it. Here, I am just trying to distinguish between the restaurants where you get waited on (listed above), and the restaurants where you order your food at a counter and sit down with your food in hand.

Rubios. Two words: FISH TACOS. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it. These are the best, true Baja-style fish tacos. But wait! That's not all! They have a lot of other good stuff like carne asada steak burritos, etc. Our boys loved it, too. We used to go there frequently after church on Sundays.

In-n-Out. The menu is REALLY simple. Burgers. Fries. Milk shakes. They make the fries right there in front of you. Watch them pull out a whole potato and put it through the french fry press. The hard-core In-n-Out afficionados use the secret code words like "animal style" that aren't listed on the menu.

Attractions:

Zoo and Sea World: Buy the annual passes for the Zoo and Sea World. It's really nice to be able to just go for like 2 hours in an afternoon to see ONE exhibit and then leave. Note that Sea World is an Anheiser-Busch park, so military and their families can get in once per year for free.

Lego Land. The first time we went there, ES was too short to go on most of the rides and I felt like we got totally ripped off. We subsequently went back a few times after that and the ES loved it.

Mount Soledad. Don't get the wrong idea here. Just because it's called "Mount" Soledad doesn't mean you have to drive for hours on end up winding mountain roads. This is a very large hill wedged in between Pacific Beach (south side), I-5 (east side), La Jolla (north side), and the Pacific Ocean (west side). On a clear day, go up and check out the view from the top where the big white cross is. There's a photo of the view on the wikipedia article here.

Mount Soledad has been a source of controversy in San Diego because of the large white cross on top of the hill. There have been many efforts to take it down. I think the resolution they came to was that they sold the land to the veterans memorial association so it's no longer public land. The veteran's memorial association website has more pictures and driving directions.

Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park. Both our boys love this place.

Flying Leatherneck Museum at MCAS Mirimar. If you drive along Mirimar Road along the northern perimeter of the base, you'll see a spot where there are like two dozen airplanes and helicopters set up on static display. That's part of the USMC Aviation Museum on the base.

Military Shopping: If you need anything from the NEX or commissary, the NAS North Island NEX is the newest, largest, and nicest - comparable to the NEX shopping complexes at Norfolk or Pearl Harbor. PLUS, there's a RUBIO'S in their food court!! (Keep in mind, it's been a few years since we left San Diego, so things could have changed since we left).

Best Wine Cellar: MCRD (Marine Corps Recruit Depot) next door to the airport has an awesome package store called The Cellar with some VERY nice, high quality wines for VERY good prices. Try something from Stag's Leap vineyards (it's my personal favorite).

Best Place to Watch Ships Departing or Returning from Sea or Deployment: Cabrillo National Monument at the end of Point Loma. You can see both out to sea as ships approach, and you can see into the harbor.

ES by the Point Loma Lighthouse at Cabrillo, watching Daddy return from deployment in December 2003.

Picture my mom took from Cabrillo when the Mighty MSP pulled into San Diego for a port visit in July 2007.

Books

Surely, you're all dying to know what we've been reading lately. Here's a quick run down.

A few weeks ago, we went through Borders and picked up a few new books to read. Well... new to ES, but good old stories to LW and me.

First up was Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. ES really liked this one a lot. He did a super job reading it, too. I just held the book open for him and he read it all. Amazon says the reading level for the book is 9-12, so I thought that was pretty good for my almost 7-year old. He looks forward to reading more stories about Pee-tah and Fudge, so I think we'll be picking up Super Fudge, Double Fudge, and Fudge-a-Mania.

Next we gave Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events a try. Someone had told me that they loved reading this series with their kids. I really enjoyed the movie, too, but wasn't sure how ES would go for it. I thought we'd try the book. We read the first chapter together one night, but it didn't really catch his interest, and he wanted to try a different book the next night.

I'm really excited about the third book we've started reading. When I was around ES's age, my Grandpa Ernie started reading books to me on an audio tape and sending the tapes to me in the mail. One of my favorites was The Hobbit. I must have listened to Grandpa's tape reading the story to me a hundred times or more. Because of the fond memories I have of Grandpa reading to me, it's one of those things that I have looked forward to doing with my sons for quite a while. I was a little worried it would be too deep or over his head.

I'm happy to report that he REALLY likes it! We wants to read it every night. The biggest problem is that we start reading it and then end up reading for like 45 minutes instead of the usual 15 minutes with his other books. I need to start setting a timer to limit how long we spend reading so that ES gets to bed on time.

It's most definitely above his reading level, so I have been reading it to him with him sitting on my lap following along. I definitely think it is going to help his vocabulary grow, because he doesn't hesitate to ask me, "What does _________ mean?" when we encounter a new word.

Aside: For the previous books, I included links to the edition we picked up at Borders. There are just way too many different printed versions of this one for me to include a link here. I would spent all day just searching the internet for THE edition we bought.


As for my own personal reading, I have been reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. It's really good! My commodore came back from the submarine major commanders' conference with this book recommendation from Admiral Donnelly.

It's quite similar to Levitt & Dubner's Freakonomics in it's expose of bizarre and seemingly irrational choices that people make. In fact, both books cite some of the same studies, like the Israeli day care center that started charging a fee for parents that picked their kids up late. It backfired on them and people were more frequently late to pick up their kids, because now they were just paying for the time instead of feeling guilty about their kids being watched for extra time without paying for it.

There's one big difference between the two books that sets Predictably Irrational apart as my favorite of the two. Freakonomics read like a sensationalist tabloid of bizarre true life stories. In Predictably Irrational, Ariely illustrates the phenomena with similar sensationalist-style stories, but then he takes it a step farther. He describes the probable root cause behind the behavior and illustrates the potential weaknesses in our own "logic." Then, he takes that a step further and offers some practical strategies that the reader can use to try not to make the same "irrational" decisions. In other words, I felt like Freakonomics was just sort of an interesting description of some weird behavior, while Predictably Irrational offers practical applications of knowing about these weaknesses in human nature.

Reading Predictably Irrational reminded me a lot of one of my favorite classes in college, Social Psychology. The thing I enjoyed most about that class was what it taught me about marketing and salesmanship. Not because I was a salesman, mind you, but so that as a consumer I was aware of the tricks that high-pressure salesmen use.

Weekend Recap

An Unusual Experience at the Barber Shop

On Saturday, we had lunch at the NEX, then LW went to the Commissary while I took the boys to get haircuts. In case you haven't been there before, the NEX barber shop in Pearl Harbor is HUGE. There are probably twelve barber chairs in there, usually with about 9 or so barbers working during the day. The waiting room has enough seats for about 20 people to wait, and they're normally full in the middle of the day.

The parking lot was PACKED, so we were expecting the worst (both in the commissary and the barber shop). I opened the door to the barber shop and did a double-take. Not only was the waiting area half empty, but the people that were sitting in the seats were all wearing barber coats! They didn't have any customers! The waiting area had transformed from an area for customers to wait for barbers into an area for barbers to wait for customers. Very bizarre.

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Worst Restaurant Experience on Oahu (so far)

After church on Sunday, we decided to forego our favorite Zia's and try one of a handful of places in Kailua that an acquaintance had recommended. First we tried going to Moke's, but there was a line of people waiting out on the curb. We were starving, so we skipped Moke's.

Instead, we tried going to the Mexican place next door to Boots & Kimo's. I think it was called Cisco's Cantina. We walked in, and it smelled pretty darn good in there. There were about twelve tables in the place, and only three of them were occupied.

Hindsight: I guess maybe that should have set off alarm bells in my head since Boots & Kimo's next door had the usual line of people waiting outside - why weren't people lining up to take the empty spots in THIS restaurant???

There were no employees anywhere in sight. We noticed that there were menus out on each of the tables, so after a minute or so of standing there we just decided to grab a table. Eventually a waiter came out of the kitchen and delivered something to one of the other tables. He made eye-contact with me and said, "I'll be right with you." Okay, cool.

Over the course of the next 20 minutes, it became apparent to me that he was the ONLY employee working in the front half of this restaurant. Heck, for all I know, he was the ONLY employee working there PERIOD. He could have been doing the cooking in the back for all I know. In that time, he visited our table once to take our drink orders and LW asked him if they had a kids menu. He said yes and that he'd "be right back."

Yyyyyeah, not so much.

After several minutes of watching him visit each of the other tables, he did bring back our soft drinks with some chips and salsa, but that was the last we saw of him for about another ten minutes. Maybe he was cooking in the back, who knows. We were starving, and LW had a hair appointment for 3 p.m. that she was NEVER going to make at the rate he was going.

We had consumed ALL of our soft drinks and very nearly ALL of the chips and salsa and he still had not come back with the kids menu much less taken our food orders. LW and I decided we had waited long enough and it was time to abort. We left a few dollars of cash on the table to cover the soft drinks, packed up the kids' coloring books and stuff and left.

We went back to Zia's. Their special today was a papaya seafood salad with shrimp and fresh ahi, and it was delicious. The speed of their service wasn't super fast, but I have no doubt we got out of there a heckuva lot quicker than we would have over at the Mexican place. As it was, we barely made it home in time for LW to hop in the car and leave for her hair appointment.

Anyway, the whole point of this was that I couldn't remember the last time (if ever) I went to a restaurant and actually got up and left like that because nobody was serving us.

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Family Movie Nights

One day on vacation, the boys caught a few minutes of Around the World in 80 Days on TV and wanted to watch the rest of it. I picked it up at Blockbuster and we watched it for Family Movie Night on Friday. Little did I realize, this would be the boys' first Jackie Chan flick.



My first Jackie Chan flick was Rumble in the Bronx with Jud in NY. I had never heard of Jackie Chan before Jud took me to see that movie, and WOW what a lot of choreographed action!
Around the World in 80 Days was a pretty good movie. ES and I enjoyed it at least. YB wasn't able to follow the storyline so well and he ended up playing Webkinz on my computer while we watched the movie.

Saturday night we had another Family Movie Night and watched Back to the Future. ES really liked it a lot. I wasn't sure YB would understand it or like it, but he did sit through the whole movie.





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Hooray for Recycling!

We just got a notice that they are going to begin curb-side recycling pick-up in our housing area on April 22nd. Finally!!! Almost in time for Earth Day, eh? I'm so glad I won't have to feel guilty about tossing recyclables in the trash anymore.


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Blast from the Past

I meant to include this in my post about scuba diving on Thursday. My guys got a good laugh out of seeing the photo on my scuba certification card.


Just now, as I was adding the photo to my blog, YB saw it and asked "Who's that?" I told him it was Daddy. He smiled. I asked him, "Doesn't it look like Daddy?" He smiled and vigorously shook his head NO. NO?!?! Common, I don't think I look THAT different, do I??? Okay, so that was almost 19 years ago...

Things we missed on vacation...

Things we missed while we were on vacation... (in no particular order of importance).

- KLOVE. Riding in the car yesterday, it was so refreshing to have KLOVE on the radio again. One of the first songs I heard in the car on the way to go scuba diving was Mercy Me "Here with Me." KLOVE was on a roll yesterday and just kept playing one song after another that made me want to turn the volume up on my radio.

- Spicy toothpaste. Normally, at home, YB uses a training toothpaste and ES uses regular toothpaste. While we were on vacation, we just used ES's tube of regular toothpaste. YB called it the "spicy toothpaste" and took a big slurp of water after each brush past his teeth. Wednesday night getting the boys ready for bed, YB was SO excited to have HIS toothpaste back and not use the "spicy toothpaste" anymore.

- Traffic on H-1 and Kam Highway. Oh wait... no, I didn't miss that. In fact, I totally forgot about it and didn't take it into consideration at all when buying our plane tickets home. In other words, I didn't think about the fact that if our plane landed at 4:30, then it was going to take us like an hour to drive home in the rush hour traffic.

- The Neighborhood Kids. Man... when we drove down our street, it was like a ghost town. I half expected to see a tumble-weed go barreling across our driveway as we pulled up to our house. Human reflexes could not push the buttons on a stopwatch fast enough to measure the time in between me putting the car in park and the doors flying open and the boys' feet hitting the ground. They ran across the street and started ringing the doorbells. It was as if there had been some sort of large-scale game of hide-n-go-seek, and they just announced "olly-olly-oxen-free" on a bull-horn. The kids came out of the woodwork. Within moments our front yards were total chaos with screaming playing children running in and out of our house and the house across the street.

Aside: I've reached a new phase in life. I have un-learned the conditioned response of going to the door when the doorbell rings. I was telling LW the other day that I think it would be interesting to hook up a monitoring device that would measure how often and how many times per day our doorbell rings. I doubt it's anything less than a dozen times a day, and it's never for me or LW. LW chastises me for not even getting out of my chair when the doorbell rings. I just figure why bother? We live in Navy housing with a gate guard controlling access (well... as long as you smile and wave and look like you belong , you're good to go, right?). On those rare occasions it's not for the boys, then they tell us. Then I'll get off my butt and go to the door.

Anyway, returning to my original line of thought...

- DVR. If we ever go on a trip longer than a few days, we definitely need to bring DVD's of the boys' favorite shows off the DVR. They're so used to just picking up the remote control and turning on their favorite shows whenever they want. Every time we walked into our hotel room on vacation, they would turn the TV on and say, "I want to watch ________" and we would have to explain to them that ________ wasn't ON at that particular day and time. They just didn't get that. "Why noooooot? Just use the remote!"

- Now LW and I are catching up on our favorite shows that recorded while we were gone. LW was just watching Dancing with the Stars and I had a total flashback...

Teleportation Song: Kylie Minogue "Can't Get You Out of My Head." Suddenly, I'm back on deployment in Westpac, in a dance club in Brisbane, Australia. Most of the wardroom and chiefs' quarters are there and wearing our summer whites because we were invited out to this welcome to Australia social function. Some gorgeous blond Australian girl got the Eng and I to make fools of ourselves dancing up on one of those raised platforms in the middle of the dance floor. (We were just a novelty to draw attention to her - her boyfriend stayed close by watching us like hawks). I think the rest of the town heard all the U.S. Navy guys were going to THIS dance club and decided to join us. It was PACKED. I don't think any of us could have bought a drink that night. It was like we were celebrities!

- Crocs. Another one bites the dust... We were in one of the souvenir shops in Maui and saw these cute little decorative pins that are designed to poke into the holes of Crocs. The boys thought they were really cool and wanted to get some. Keep in mind at this point only YB had Crocs. So after we got back home, LW now had to take ES to get his very own pair of Crocs so that he could attach his new decorative pins to them. Take a wild guess what color Crocs ES picked out. Those of you who know him know that his favorite colors are yellow and orange.

Here he is in his new outfit (he wasn't cooperating with my requests for him to get dressed until I asked if he wanted to wear his new shirt from Maui).

ES in his new Maui T-shirt and Crocs.

This is the gecko pin ES chose for his Crocs.
(He picked out a yellow gecko of course...)

p.s. I went back and added a few photos to my last post from one of the other guys that went scuba diving with us yesterday.