Congrats Junior Officers of the Year!

Congratulations to the Submarine Junior Officers of the Year!

I'm proud to say one of my JO's was selected as the Junior Officer of the Year for Submarine Squadron 3.

At the end of the year, each submarine nominates a JO to be the JO of the year to their squadron staff. The squadron commodores review the nomination packages and select one JO to represent their squadron. There are about five submarines per squadron and about ten JOs per submarine, so being chosen as a squadron JO of the Year is saying you're the best out of 50 JOs in your squadron.

Here's the message announcing all the Submarine Junior Officers of the Year listed in order by squadron:

R 141621Z JAN 08
FM COMSUBFOR NORFOLK VA//N00//
TO ALSUBFOR
INFO COMSUBFOR NORFOLK VA//N00//
COMSUBPAC PEARL HARBOR HI//N00//
CNO WASHINGTON DC//N87//
BT
UNCLAS //N02300//
MSGID/GENADMIN/COMSUBFOR/-/JAN//
SUBJ/2007 SUBMARINE FORCE JUNIOR OFFICERS OF THE YEAR//
RMKS/1. WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE FOLLOWING WINNERS OF THE 2007 COMSUBFOR JUNIOR OFFICERS OF THE YEAR COMPETITION:
SQUADRON / WINNER / SHIP
CSG-2 / LT NICOLAS T BOGAARD / PCU NORTH CAROLINA (SSN 777)
CSG-9 / LTJG TRAVIS W WAGNER / USS EMORY S LAND (AS 39)
CSS-1 / LT MICHAEL J ELIASON / USS LOS ANGELES (SSN 688)
CSS-2 / LTJG JEREMY J PARM / USS SPRINGFIELD (SSN 761)
CSS-3 / LT DAVID B HART / USS MINNEAPOLIS ST PAUL (SSN 708)
CSS-4 / LTJG MICHAEL R MAZZONE / USS VIRGINIA (SSN 774)
CSDS-5 / LTJG JOHN R NAKEL / USS SEAWOLF (SSN 21)
CSS-6 / LTJG CORY L SCHNEBERGER / USS SCRANTON (SSN 756)
CSS-7 / LTJG NICHOLAS E SAFLUND / USS CHEYENNE (SSN 773)
CSS-8 / LTJG RYAN J HACKMAN / USS OKLAHOMA CITY (SSN 723)
CSS-11 / LTJG RUSSELL W JONES / USS TOPEKA (SSN 754)
CSDS-12 / LTJG KEVIN M MOELLER / USS ANNAPOLIS (SSN 760)
CSS-15 / LT ADAM I ZAKER / USS CITY OF CORPUS CHRISTI (SSN 705)
CSS-15 / LTJG CHARLES E BARRERAS / USS FRANK CABLE (AS 40)
CSS-16 / LTJG JEREMY C MEDLIN / USS FLORIDA (SSGN 728) BLUE
CSS-17 / LTJG JESSE D BIRBACH / USS KENTUCKY (SSBN 737) BLUE
CSS-19 / LT LUKE H SWARTZ / USS OHIO (SSGN 726) GOLD
CSS-20 / LT WILLIAM F CUNNINGHAM / USS ALASKA (SSBN 732)
2. EVENTS ARE PLANNED IN WASHINGTON DC. JOOYS WILL MEET WITH SENIOR NAVAL LEADERSHIP AND TOUR NAVY RESEARCH LAB (NRL). DETAILS TO BE PROMULGATED SEPCOR.
3. JOOYS MUST MAKE CONTACT WITH THE APPROPRIATE POC LISTED ABOVE VIA E-MAIL TO COORDINATE TRAVEL ARRANGEMENTS.
4. WELL DONE TO THOSE NOMINATED AND SELECTED! THE COMPETITION WAS EXTREMELY KEEN. PARTICIPATION IN THE JUNIOR OFFICER OF THE YEAR PROGRAM SHOULD BE A SOURCE OF GREAT PRIDE TO EACH NOMINATED OFFICER AND THEIR COMMAND.
5. VADM DONNELLY AND RADM WALSH SEND.//
BT

Weekend Recap

Friday Lost and Found. HOORAY FOR WINTER COATS!!! Dontchya love the things you find in your pockets when you put on your winter coat for the first time since the previous winter?

Friday I sat on an Admin Board over at Navy Legal.

Aside: An Admin Board is used to decide how to characterize a sailor's discharge from the Navy after he has already been found guilty at a court martial. We had to review his service record and make a determination if he should get an Honorable, General, or Other Than Honorable (OTH) discharge, and our decision has an impact on whether he gets to use his GI Bill benefits for education or other VA benefits after he is discharged. It was my first time sitting on an Admin Board, and it was a very good learning experience for me. If you're on shore duty or in the shipyard, I recommend telling your JAG you're available to sit on an Admin Board whenever he needs somebody.

Well, the JAG warned me that the courtroom we would be in was extremely cold and I would want to bring a jacket. I dug my black Ike jacket out of the closet to take with me to the board. It didn't take me long sitting in the board to get goose bumps from the cold. Even with my jacket on, I was clenching my teeth to keep from shivering, and my hands were slightly numb from the cold. I was overwhelmed with joy when I stuck my hand in the pocket and found a special pen that I've been "missing" for over a year now.

This is a geocaching pen that has a customized stamp in the back for stamping my name into geocaching logs. When I couldn't find it for quite a while, I went back to the manufacturer's website and tried to order a replacement, but they don't make them anymore. So I was VERY excited to finally find my lost geocaching stamp-pen when I put on my jacket.

TFTC = Geocaching abbreviation for
"Thanks For The Cache!"

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Saturday morning, I got up and went to the training for Cub Scout leaders. I had expected to get up, pack my lunch, make some coffee, and go before the boys woke up. Much to my surprise, both boys were already downstairs when I came down at 6:45, and I got the barage of "I want apple juice!" and "I'm hungry!" So I tried to get the boys settled so they'd leave LW alone and let her sleep a while longer, got my lunch packed, and headed out the door sans coffee. So I went through the Burger King drive through on the way and got some coffee.

Burger King was not at all helpful to me and my time constraints. I ordered a medium coffee with ONE creamer. I got to the window and paid for it. The lady tossed four creamer cups in the bottom of a bag, tossed a stir stick in the bag, then picked up my cup of coffee and put the coffee in the bag. Why on Earth would that make sense to anyone? So first, I took the cup OUT of the bag and put it in my cup holder. Then I had to pull over on the side of the road to open it up, put the creamer in, stir it up, and put the lid back on.

Aside: Unforunately for Burger King, I had high expectations from my trips through the drive through at the McDonald's on base. The first time I went through the McD's drive thru, it totally threw me for a loop. It's totally computerized and robotic and high-tech. When you pull up to the drive-through menu, you aren't talking to anyone inside THAT McD's. You're talking to some dude sitting at a computer in Texas. He enters your order (including exactly how many creamers or sugar packets you want) and it shows up on the computer screen in the menu. You pull up to the window, and you see a robotic arm pull out your cup size, hold it under the spigot to pour the coffee, pour in the creamer, and put the lid on. The only human involvement was the girl who took my money and handed me my coffee.

Anyway, so I get to the address where the Cub Scout Leader Training is going to happen... and it's a Mormon church. I didn't give it much thought until I got out of my car and started to walk into the building holding my big cup-o-joe. Some lady accosted me and said, "They won't let you bring that in here. This is a Mormon church. NO CAFFEINE ALLOWED!" Common! You gotta be kidding me! (AND, I had a Diet Coke in my lunch bag, too.)

Some of you may be surprised and / or disappointed with me for how I reacted... I hadn't yet consumed any of my precious caffeine to put me in a better mood, so I was a little flippant and like, "Yeah, whatever," to the lady on the steps and just headed on inside to training. What's next? Are they going to make us read the Book of Mormon at Cub Scout training? It's not like I was making the Mormons drink MY coffee or violate THEIR rule about consuming caffeine. If I were the Cub Scout leadership choosing the training location, I would NOT have chosen that facility if they were going to impose restrictions like that. If other factors dictated we use that facility, then at the very least I would have warned the people coming to training NOT to bring caffeinated products.

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Saturday afternoon - an aborted hike...


I tried to take the boys for a hike Saturday afternoon in the Waimano Valley. Some friends of ours told us they did the hike with their kids and they enjoyed it. It's a short (2-mile) loop, so not even half as long as the Makapuu Ridge hike last weekend, and it's a lot closer to our house.

We got a late start due to a traffic accident that caused a major traffic jam on Kam Highway. We parked and got all geared up and headed out.

This hike is covered by Ball Chapter 20. When you get to the sign in the picture above, you're supposed to take the path to the left down into the valley, and you return via the path on the right.

Well, not long after we passed this sign, we started heading down into the valley and could hear the running water of a stream below. Suddenly, the little black beasts with wings descended upon us in force. There was this black cloud of 783 DOZEN mosquitoes in the 10 cubic meters of space around each of us. (Aside: Did you know that 87% of statistics are made up on the spot?).

YS wasn't at all deterred by the bugs. He seems to have this belief that the magical word, "Shoo!" will cause ALL BUGS to cease and desist at once. He kept saying, shoo! Shoo! Shoo! But the mosquitoes weren't listening. He needs to learn to swat at them with his hand when they're guzzling down his blood. After about 10 seconds of trying to swat at the blood-suckers on ES's neck and arms, plus the ones on YS's neck and arms, AND the ones on MY neck and arms, and determined that I didn't have enough hands to cover all the square inches of exposed skin on the three of us, I said to myself, "Self, it's time to ABORT. "

RUN-A-WAAAAAAAAAY!

We were only one quarter mile from the car when we turned around to head back. This should be added to those bizarre weight loss methods shown on Loping Squid's blog, because I must have lost a pound just from the blood those stinking little blood suckers robbed me of during our treacherous quarter mile hike back to the car.

Fast Forward to Sunday morning - LW scolded me for not aborting the hike and turning back sooner because there are SO MANY little red bumps from mosquito bites ALL OVER the boys' necks, arms, and legs. That was another reason we went to the Commissary today was to look for some anti-itch lotion for bug bites.

I'd still like to try the Waimano Valley hike again, but we'll go back with some long pants and a coat of bug spray next time.

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Saturday Evening - Family Movie Night.

The boys have been asking to watch Indiana Jones ever since they started watching the ads for the Lego Indiana Jones game, and bought the Indiana Jones character to play with in Lego Star Wars. So tonight we had family movie night and watched Indiana Jones. It was rated PG, but LW and I had to invoke the parental covering of the boys' eyes during a couple of creepy parts.

All during the movie, YS kept referring to Indiana as, "Han Solo" and talking about Star Wars. When the girl in the movie put on that white dress for the German bad guy, he said, "Princess Leia!" He clearly doesn't understand the concept of actors pretending to be the characters they play in movies.

After the boys were in bed, LW and I popped in the latest Die Hard movie - Live Free or Die Hard. It was worthy of the Die Hard name. I didn't care for Die Hard 2, but the original Die Hard, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and Live Free or Die Hard were all really awesome action flicks. There were some really spectacular stunts that you know could never happen in real life, but they were fun to watch.

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Blackberry versus Palm Pilot continued...

Sunday after church, we went to Tacos Del Mar to get some lunch before going to the Commissary. They were playing some upbeat kind of pop music in the restaurant, and while YS was eating his chocolate chip cookie for dessert and had chocolate all over his face, he started doing a little chair-dance to the music in the restaurant. It was really funny to watch. As much as I love my new Blackberry, I did miss having that camera in my Palm Pilot.

In my previous post on Blackberry versus Palm Pilot, I had commented that there were a lot of little things that just made me say, "Wow! Why didn't Palm think of that?" Of course, when I was writing that blog post, I couldn't think of any concrete examples at the time. Well, one came to mind earlier today. When you're typing in an email address on the Blackberry, if you push the space bar, it enters an @ symbol, and on subsequent times when you push the space bar, it enters a period. So on the Palm, I would have typed in name, symbol button, @ sign, domain name, symbol button, "dot," com. It's a lot faster on the Blackberry where I just type name, space, domain name, space, com, and it automatically puts in the @ and the "dot" and cuts out two extra keystrokes (and eliminates hunting for which button has @ or the "dot" as the symbol associated with that button).

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

UpWords is a big hit. I've been playing it with ES every night for the past three nights. It came to mind tonight that it's not just helping ES learn spelling. It's also helping practice his math skills, too. The way the scoring system works, you get two points per letter for a word spelled all the on the board level (no stacked letters). If the word you make has any stacked letters (like someone put an S on top of the H in HAT to turn it into SAT), then you count one point for each tile - including each of the tiles in any stacks in the word.

So tonight, for example, ES made a five letter word (PIANO) and he counted out loud by two's (two, four, six, eight, ten) to add up his points. I thought that was good since it's one of the skills he's had to do in his homework recently. Then, he laid down three tiles that spelled new words in two directions at once. Like Scrabble, you count up the points for both words. He counted the points for one of the words as 5 points and the other word as 7 points. Then I asked him, okay, what's 5 + 7? He thought for a second and told me 12. So that worked on another skill he's been working on in his math homework - simple addition. So it's a pretty good game all-around for my first grader.

ES has a little trouble looking at the letter tiles in his hand and figuring out which words he could spell, so he needs help with that. I help him out by looking at his letters, then asking him leading questions, like "What type of musical instrument are you taking lessons for?" and he figured out PIANO. I still need to figure out how to incorporate the words that are specifically ON his spelling list each week. Maybe I should pull out the letters that will spell his spelling words and tell him to figure out which of his spelling words he can make.

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Girl Scout Etiquette. Okay, so it's that time of year again. We keep having girl scouts come to the door trying to sell us cookies. What's the right thing to do? Should you only buy one box from each girl scout so that you spread the wealth? Should you place your entire order all at once with the FIRST girl scout to show up at your door to reward her for her initiative? Should you place your entire order all at once with the girl scout who lives closest to you as a friendly-neighbor gesture? Should you tell them they picked a HORRIBLE time to come selling COOKIES when you JUST made a New Year's Resolution to lose all the weight you gained over the holidays??? LW placed our order with the girl who lives across the street from us (she qualified under both the second and third category above - she's both the one who lives closest to us, and she was the first girl I saw out on the street working the neighborhood when I got home on Friday). More of them just kept ringing our doorbell through the weekend, so LW made up a nice little sign to hang on the door and scare off any other girl scouts by telling them we've already been "cookied."

Friday night odds and ends

Okay, this writer's strike crap has gotta come to an end. There is absolutely NO REASON on God's green Earth that *I* should be familiar enough with my wife's soap opera (All My Children) to know the characters' names and basic storyline. I HATE that show.

You see, I've never been the one to turn on the TV or choose the show we're going to watch. I normally just sit here with my laptop and end up watching whatever LW turns on. Yes, there is some sort of bizarre local disturbance of the gravitational field in our family room and LW controls the TV remote. Most of the time, I don't mind. I mean, how else would I have discovered HIMYM or Amazing Race? (Only 2 shows left in this Amazing Race! Check it out this Sunday!) We also really like Numbers (geeky show where a mathematician helps the FBI solve crimes) and The Closer (Kyra Sedgwick's character Deputy Chief Johnson has an amazing ability to draw out confessions once she figures out whodunnit). Since the writer's strike has left us with nothing but reruns, LW has been turning on her soap opera after the boys go to bed. ENOUGH ALREADY WITH THE WRITER'S STRIKE!!!

* * * * * * * * * * * *

LW bought a new board game to play with ES today. It's called UpWords. It's similar to Scrabble, but you can stack the tiles. Say the word "THIS" was on the board, and you had an A and a T in your hand, then you could put the A and the T on top of the I and the S to turn "THIS" into "THAT." It offers a LOT more flexibility than Scrabble. ES had a hard time with Scrabble in trying to find words that fit in the two-dimensional space on the Scrabble board. We played UpWords tonight, and he did really well. Neither of us branched out much on the board. We just kept building up and up and up replacing one letter here or there to change CASH into RASH into CRASH into TRASH. It was fun.

I know you all are dying to hear the score after ES beat me at Scrabble the other day. TECHNICALLY, ES "won" the game tonight, but it was with a lot of HELP from DADDY, so I don't consider it a detriment to my ego. (...THIS time at least).

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Funny Blog. I don't remember if I put a plug in before for this blog, but if you want a good laugh, check out Boobs, Injuries, and Dr. Pepper. She is a little bit vulgar or foul-mouthed at times, but she has a great writing style and some pretty funny stories. The first post of hers that I read was Holly Jolly Christmas, and I laughed pretty good at that one.

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Wii Play! Thank you to whoever recommended Wii Play to us. I think we actually got the recommendation from a couple of Wii friends. Plus LW liked the fact that Wii Play comes with another controller. It's a collection of games similar to Wii Sports.

There's a shooting game sort of like the old Duck Hunt where it goes through rounds of balloons then targets then clay pigeons to shoot at. Then, in the last round, there are a dozen of YOU (your Mii character) running around on the bottom of the screen, and these UFO flying saucers fly down and try to abduct the Mii's with a tractor beam, and you have to shoot the UFOs and save your Mii's. It's really funny to see the Mii's running around in a panic as the UFOs are trying to abduct them.

There's a matching game where it will show a crowd of Mii's, and you have to find the two matching Mii's in the crowd before the time runs out. There's also a tank game and a fishing game that I like, too.

The only thing I DON'T like about Wii Play is that you're limited to only TWO players. When you play two players though, you can play any of the games on the disk and it keeps a tally of how many games each player has won during your session.

I knew I should have picked up that penny...

Earlier today as I was walking from the barge toward my car, I saw a penny on the ground in the street. Some remnant of my childhood in the back of my brain got excited and said, "Oooh! Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you'll HAVE GOOD LUCK!" The crotchety old fart in me said to myself, "Self, that's just a silly stupid superstition. If you pick it up, then you're just going to have a dirty and useless penny cluttering up your pocket." The old fart won, and I kept walking without picking it up.

Fast forward to tonight. ES always gives us a hard time about practicing his spelling for school, so LW and I keep trying to come up with alternatives to just sitting there writing the spelling words out. We've let him type the words on the computer. We've let him spell the words with the letter magnets on the fridge. We've let him spell the words with letter cards. Tonight, I thought I'd try playing SCRABBLE with him. I was trying to think of a way to incorporate his spelling words into the game, but ended up just teaching him how to play and playing a game, and HE BEAT ME!!!

Call it beginners luck if you will. I call it BAD LUCK on MY part. I just couldn't get a break on the letters I was drawing. First I had this...

I just couldn't spell ANYTHING with it, so I sacrificed a turn in order to trade in the X, the Z, and two U's. What did I draw to take their place you ask? This is what I ended up with next:


So while I was making measly little three-letter words by adding an "IE" or an "OU" here and there and skipping a turn to trade out tiles, ES was making words like "RODENT" and hitting the double and triple word scores. Is that one of the standard entries in a baby book? First tooth... learned to walk... first word... beat father at Scrabble?

I think it's all just because I didn't pick up that darn penny in the street this afternoon.

Oh, and another thing! Recall from previous posts my explanation that we normally ask the boys what their favorite part about the day was before we say bedtime prayers. For someone who puts up such a fuss about going to school, tonight was the second out of four nights this week that ES has said his favorite thing about today was "school." His other favorite part about today was playing Scrabble though, so that lessened the ego-body-blow of losing to a six year old.

Palm versus Blackberry

You don't have to know me for long to find out what a gadget-fiend I am. I always have to wear pants with lots of pockets to accomodate the gadgets, especially when I go out geocaching - the wallet, the palm pilot, the cell phone, the GPS receiver, the camera...

I've been through four generations of Palm Pilots now. I can still remember the first time I saw the original Palm Pilot in a magazine ad and then the first time I saw one in a store at the Crystal Mall in New London, CT. I needed to hold a cup under my chin for the drool.

That original Palm Pilot Professional carried me through my JO tour out of Groton and our time in Monterey. Then, when I went to SOAC, that was back in the days when they ISSUED all of us SOAC students a Palm Vx. I used that for most of my department head tour.

During my pre-deployment shopping spree to get everything-I-never- knew-I-needed-but-you-never-know-what-you-might-need-thousands- of-miles-from-nowhere, I decided I really wanted a Palm Pilot with a COLOR screen and some more memory. I went browsing through Best Buy, and they had JUST received and put up the display for the NEW Palm Zire 71. It had a color screen, an SD memory card slot, it could play audio music files, and it had a built in camera! SWEET! I bought it, and we headed off for WESTPAC.

WARNING: Tangent Ahead - one quick sea story to tell...

Two weeks into deployment, we had our first port call in Chin Hae, Korea. I had that awesome Palm Zire in my back pocket. (Note, for those of you non-literary types, that is called foreshadowing). It had been raining topside. I don't remember why I was topside, but I came down the ladder (this one was an actual straight-up-and-down ladder) through the Weapons Shipping Hatch (the one forward of the sail that puts you into the Command Passageway between the CO and XO's staterooms), and turned to go down the "ladder" (a steep set of stairs) from the Command Passageway to the Forward Compartment Middle Level (FCML) passageway. As I started to put my foot out to take the first step, BOTH of my feet went FLYING out in front of me. I felt like Wile E. Coyote in that moment between running off the edge of a cliff and plunging to his demise. Why is it time seems to slow down in those terrible instances? During those long moments that seemed like hours as I tumbled down the steps of the ladder into FCML, I had a conversation with myself that went something like, "Self, is this the end? I wonder if you'll break your neck and this'll be "the end." Or, if not, I wonder which bones will be broken and which hospital they will take you to? That medical clinic on the American section of the base looked pretty darn small, and your injuries are bound to be more than they can handle... I wonder what South Korean hospitals are like. I hope they're not like the karaoke bars..." and then I landed - OOF! MUCH to my surprise, it WASN'T my demise and I DIDN'T even break any bones. I was battered and bruised and really sore for a while, but the only irreparable damage was that darn Palm Pilot that was in my back pocket. It shattered the screen, KAPUT!

While thankful for my health and lack of serious injuries, I was devastated without my Palm Pilot. I quickly went to the internet cafe and wrote LW to ask her to get me a replacement Palm Pilot as fast as humanly possible. I forget the exact logistics of it, but LW and my stepmom teamed up to get me a replacement in the mail that same week.

We had subsequent port calls in Chin Hae, Okinawa, Guam, Yokosuka, Guam, Brisbane, Guam, Saipan, Guam... mmmm... I think we might have gone to Guam once or twice in the middle there, too. Each port call, I got mail and care packages from my family, and almost always about one week after they had been mailed, but no sign of the package with the replacement Palm Pilot. After about two or three months, I gave up hope and assumed some postal worker in Guam had himself a new palm pilot.

Two weeks before we returned home from deployment, we had our final port call in... can you guess? GUAM! After running some errands around the island, I came back to the boat and found a package waiting on my rack. It was my replacement Palm Pilot!!! It only took 5 MONTHS and missed all but the transit over and the transit back, but it made it.

Picture taken with my NEW replacement
Palm Pilot on the day we returned from
deployment in 2003.

Anyway, whether it was my original Palm Pilot, my Palm Vx, or my Palm Zire, I always had my Palm Pilot. If my CO wanted to know what the tides and currents would be in the channel if we delayed our underway by 4 or 6 hours, I would whip out my Palm and with a few taps tell him the answer. I used my Planetarium program to predict when we would spot the Southern Cross on our way south to Australia, and by golly I found it with the periscope that night on the midwatch. When it came time for me to transfer, my CO wanted me to include the Palm Pilot as part of the turnover process. How could my relief POSSIBLY function without the Nav's Palm Pilot???

During my last tour in DC, I discovered geocaching, and I started doing a juggling act with all my electronic gadgets. I had to carry the GPS receiver to find the geocache. I had to carry the cell phone in case of emergency. I had to carry the palm pilot for the geocache description and hints. If I wanted good pictures, I had to carry the camera, too (the Zire camera was only 0.3 megapixels). So I decided to upgrade to my fourth Palm: a Palm Treo 700p.


The Palm Treo 700p wrapped my cell phone, palm pilot, and a 1.3 megapixel camera into ONE device, and it enabled me to check my email or search the internet on the fly. I chose the 700p (Palm O/S) over the 700w (Windows Mobile) because I was so familiar with the Palm O/S, and the Windows Mobile version came with a lower-resolution screen.

So you're saying to yourself, "Self, why doesn't he get to the POINT already?"

My point in telling you all this is that I want to set the stage by explaining my long history with Palm Pilots. I have been very pleased with them overall.

Having said that, I have not been very happy with the Palm Treo. It's slow. It frequently locks-up. The BlueTooth didn't work. The email was difficult to set up and frustrating to use. The thing that really drove me nuts was whenever it lost the Verizon signal and regained the signal, then it had to stop everything and do this lengthy process of logging back onto the Verizon network, and it wouldn't let me do ANYTHING ELSE while it was doing that. So I couldn't use the Palm side of the device as a Palm Pilot and write appointments on my calendar and I couldn't use the camera side of the device to take a picture of a fleeting moment if it was in the process of logging back onto the network. Whenever I tried to make an urgent or just a QUICK phone call, I NEVER could. Inevitably, the phone would lock up then. I was convinced that if I was ever in a car accident or needed to make a life-and-death emergency phone call, the Treo would lock up and I'd have to remove the battery, put the battery back in, wait for it to start up, wait for it to log onto the network, and finally dial 911 ten minutes later.

My first Treo died on me and I had to get a replacement from Verizon under warranty, and I have had the same problems with the second Treo.
It's like in the process of cramming three gadgets into one, they gave up a lot of the functionality and robustness of those individual components, so all three suffer.

Enter the BlackBerry.

Well, I continued using the Palm Treo anyway, until we entered the shipyard and I couldn't take it to work with me because it has a camera in it and cameras aren't allowed in the shipyard.

Aside: One of the paradoxes of the submarine force is that everyone on the submarine has a siprnet computer right at their desk (secure classified military internet). The detailers at Navy Personnel Command (NPC) in Millington, Tennessee, don't have access to siprnet. The detailers have to use the regular unclassified internet (a.k.a. "niprnet"). On the boats, we have limited access to internet email. We can send and receive emails, but no forwards and no file attachments. The "Sailor Mail" we use for unclas email is sort of like a webmail program on the siprnet. It takes a few days for the emails to go through, and sometimes they get lost in the cyberspace shuffle and never show up. It's neither reliable nor fast to communicate via Sailor Mail.

Between the need for email access (without a built-in camera) and the desire for a local Hawaii cell phone number, I picked up a BlackBerry 8830.


Being such a long-time user of Palm Pilots, it took me a while to get used to the user interface and nuances of how the BlackBerry works. Setting up the email was not-at-all intuitive nor explained adequately in any of the documentation that came with it.

However, I have quickly grown to REALLY like this BlackBerry A LOT. It has MUCH better functionality and ease of use than the Palm Treo had. The device is about the same size, but they keys feel bigger and it's easier for me to type messages using the keypad on the BlackBerry. It hasn't locked up on me at all yet. Once I got the email set up, it has worked like a champ and is much easier to use than the Treo. The BlueTooth works GREAT in my car. It doesn't prevent me from using the date-book or the task list when it's lost or regaining the network. There are a lot of little things that just make me say to myself, "Self, why didn't the Treo designers think of that? (or just copy it?)"

I was worried that going from the Palm Treo with the touch screen to the BlackBerry with NO touch screen that I would lose functionality and it would be difficult to move from one display to the next without being able to just point-and-tap. The little roller-ball in the middle of the BlackBerry keyboard is AWESOME. It's VERY easy to switch from one application to another, to make new entries, or to switch between the day, week, or month view. I'm curious to see how long the little roller-ball thing will last before it needs to be replaced, but for now, I REALLY like it. How did I ever survive without a BlackBerry before this??? Why did I put up with that darn pain in the butt Treo for so long???

In summary: TWO BIG THUMBS UP FOR BLACK BERRY!

RANT: Driving in Hawaii is Driving Me Nuts

My good friend EP told me that it's a major milestone when you can complain about living in paradise.

One of my favorite quotes from Hey Shipwreck is, "When I get out of here I'm going to a training command, because it must be really nice to do absolutely NOTHING." I'm now going to modify that to, "When I get out of here I'm going to work for Hawaii Driver's Ed, because it must be really nice to do absolutely NOTHING."

WHY don't they understand the concept of NOT BLOCKING THE INTERSECTION here??? To make matters worse, the traffic lights are HORRIBLY timed, or just simply NOT timed AT ALL. People here MAKE the traffic worse than it has to be, because they keep blocking the intersections. If there ISN'T ROOM on the other side of the intersection for you, I DON'T CARE if your light is GREEN, then DON'T pull out into the intersection and block it!!! Am I being totally unreasonable in this expectation?

Of course, on those occasions when I get up to the intersection and realize there's no room on the other side, I stop to keep the intersection clear, and the people behind me get all pissed off and honk at me for not going.

Then there's the whole shaka thing that drives me nuts, too. It doesn't matter how egregious someone has been in cutting you off or making a right turn from the left lane right in front of you, they think that if they give you the "hang loose" hand sign, then that makes it all okay. "Aloha spirit" - thbbbbbbt! :-P

WARNING: Tangent Ahead

This all got me to thinking. I grew up as a Navy brat. Yes, yes, I know that the traditional or technically correct terms are "Army Brat" and "Navy Junior," but I also know I'm not the only one who thinks "Navy Junior" sounds really stupid and always preferred the term "Navy Brat."

There is such a large concentration of Navy bases and commands in San Diego that you really can homestead there. My mom loved San Diego and never wanted to leave, so my dad did a lot of cross-pier transfers from one ship to the next. We spent almost my entire time growing up in San Diego, except for four years up in Long Beach (a whole 2 hours north of San Diego).

It was always heart-braking to have childhood friends move away when they got orders to their next duty station. I remember asking my mom why they had to go off to far away places like Norfolk, and then why didn't they come back to San Diego after a while. My mom explained to me that there was a difference between "east coast" people and "west coast" people and that some families just preferred to live on the east coast. As I grew older, I learned the stereotype that west coast Navy people were much more laid back and easy going, and east coast Navy people were much more formal and even "stuffy" or "uptight." I always thought of myself as a west coast type of guy.

Well, when it came time for me to head off on my own Navy career, I knew I would be moving every couple of years, and I wanted to see what life was like in other parts of the country. The Navy sent me to Orlando for Nuclear Power School and then to Charleston for Prototype. I volunteered for a boat out of Groton for my JO tour, and the detailer was only oh-so-happy to oblige (I guess nobody else ASKED to go to Groton).

It turns out, I really loved living in New England. I love Mystic, CT. I love Boston. I love going up to Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. I loved the changing seasons, especially the fall foliage and the snow in the winter. [Aside: I sun burn easily, and I kind of have an aversion to the sun in general. LW makes fun of me because I spend like an half-an-hour lathering up with sun-block lotion before we go out to the pool or the beach.] Then we got to go to Virginia, and we absolutely loved living there. My wife actually prefers VA over CT because the winters aren't as harsh and she doesn't have to shovel as much snow (because there is some strange universal law that it has to snow when I'm out to sea, so she's the one who has to shovel it all).

Now, as I find myself living in "paradise," complaining about the "aloha spirit," and wishing we were back in Virginia, I ask myself, "Self, have you become one of those stuffy formal "east coast" people?"

One thing's for sure though. My body has adjusted to the climate here. I normally have the thermostat in my car set at like 77 degrees. While my family was here visiting from Oregon, each time I got in the car after one of them had taken the car somewhere, I found myself shivering from the cold and looked down at the thermostat to see they had set it at like 65 degrees.

Oh, and when we picked up Nate to take him to dinner two nights ago, he did a double-take and commented on how tan we all are.

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Shifting topics... I don't know if anyone noticed that I didn't report my WW results last week. You could easily have predicted my bathroom scale results based on the lack of exercise reported on my PT log and all the good food we ate over the holidays with family members visiting. I gained back 2.6 pounds over the holidays, but it could have been much worse. At least I'm still at an overall loss since I started WW, and now that I'm going back to work, I will get back into our Command PT routine and be able to plan what I eat and not graze so much on holiday goodies laying around the kitchen.

Week 6 Summary
Result this week: 2.6 pound gain (over two weeks)
Cumulative Result: 2.6 pound loss
Average Per Week: 0.4 pound loss per week

LW has made some really good dinners for us lately that were both healthy and delicious. One of my new favorites that she's made a few times is Baked Shrimp in Lemony Garlic Sauce. First ES decided he liked it on a previous run (he gave it the high praise of declaring it, "NUM NUM!"). Then, this time, YS shocked us by not only TRYING it (this was a monumental achievement just getting him to TRY something different), but also LIKING it and EATING MORE! It turns out this one is actually a WW recipe, and it's only 4 points per serving.

Another new one LW made that was a big hit was spaghetti with ground chicken meatballs from a Rachel Ray recipe. One would THINK given YS's addiction to chicken nuggets that it would have been relatively easy to make the "jump" to chicken meatballs. OMG the fuss he made! He refused to try it and pulled the "I don't like it" routine, to which we gave the standard, "You aren't allowed to say you don't like it until you've at least tried it" response. YS wanted a dinner roll, so LW resorted to Uncle Dave's tactic of putting the chicken meatball inside the bread like a sandwich. Will wonders never cease? He tried it and he LIKED IT. After that, he actually sat there and ate the rest of his meatballs without the bread.

School Vacations Should Be Outlawed

Back to School Today.

OMG what a royal pain in the arse it was getting ES to go back to school today. He refused to get out of bed. He refused to get dressed. He refused to tell LW what he wanted to lunch. He ate his breakfast with the speed of a desert tortoise trying to devour a rubber ducky. He refused to do anything LW or I told him in order to get ready to leave for school. I dropped him off at school on my way to work, and it's a miracle we were just barely on time.

Then, tonight, we had another episode with trying to get him to do his homework. I mean, it's FIRST GRADE. His homework is three simple worksheets that I KNOW he's perfectly capable of doing. He could have finished it in 15 minutes EASILY, but instead he wastes an hour and a half with high drama - pretending he wasn't done with dinner (because when he asked to be excused, we told him yes and to go do his homework), dragging his feet, claiming he can't find a pencil (there's a box of them on his homework table), making long dramatic sighs and holding his head in his hands, whimpering and crying. He NEVER would have finished if I hadn't stood there behind him directing him to do each task. With the commotion he was making, LW jokingly asked from the other room, "Is Daddy pulling out your finger nails in there?"

YS was also a challenge to deal with today. At one point tonight, he was wearing this headband with three colored feathers sticking out the back like a Native American warrior, and it reminded me of one of my favorite stories my Grandpa Ernie used to read to me when I was a kid. It was a short story called The Ransom of Red Chief by O Henry, and it was about a couple of not-so-smart criminals who kidnapped a holy-terror of a boy who pretended to be an Indian savage named Red Chief. Much to my surprise, I found the entire story available at this website.

Aside: Although I'm complaining about what a pain the boys were today, I have to offer two disclaimers. First, LW is the one who bears the brunt of the boys, and I applaud her for her patience and ability to deal with the frustration our boys can produce at times. I don't have as much patience as she does, and I tend to snap a little easier or a little sooner than she would. Second, we have to count our blessings. Our boys can be frustrating at times, but overall they're very good boys and we're very truly blessed to have them both.

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Small World.

I just about fell off my chair when I got an email from one of my Nav-ET's from my previous boat yesterday. He's stationed in the DC area now and living VERY close to where we used to live in Ashburn, VA. He recently discovered geocaching, and as he was finding some of the geocaches around Ashburn he kept noticing this name "blunoz" and thought that sounded kind of like a Navy-related user name. He looked up this "blunoz" guy on the geocaching website and was blown away to find out it was his old Navigator. Turns out there are two other guys from my usetafish that are also living out in Ashburn and working in DC now. Small world. What are the odds of reconnecting with an old shipmate like that???

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Unexpected Visitors.

Yesterday (Sunday), I went with ES and his Cub Scout Pack on a tour of USS RUSSELL, an ARLEIGH BURKE Class DDG. I was really impressed. They really put on the full-court press for our tour. They had static displays set up all over the ship with crew members standing by to show us guns and torpedoes and fire-fighting gear and fire hoses. The tour concluded on the bow of the ship with chocolate chip cookies and fruit punch. It was great!

Daddy and ES on tour of USS RUSSEL

As we were standing on the flight deck with a crew member showing off his Visiting Boarding Search and Seizure (VBSS) gear (black vest, black helmet, black goggles, black knee pads, black rifle, black pistol...), I looked across the water at the sub base side of the harbor and did a double-take. I said to myself, "Self, that is most definitely NOT a 688 Class submarine parked over there!" I was pretty sure I read the name on the brow banner correctly, but confirmed it with another bubblehead in our tour group.

It turns out, a long time friend of mine is on that boat. Nate and I were classmates and became friends in Nuclear Power School in Orlando and then roommates in Prototype in Charleston. He's the guy I previously mentioned I had gone to the Army-Navy Football Game with in '95. Later, we were both Navigators at the same time in San Diego. Then, we both went through the Submarine Command Course together.

So after leaving the RUSSELL, ES and I headed over to the other side of the harbor to welcome our unexpected visitors and invite Nate to dinner. We took Nate down to Ryan's in the Ward Center for an excellent dinner (see my previous post for more info about Ryan's). This time I had the corn chowder and the fish tacos. They were both really good. I think the corn chowder was a little bit of a rip off though - 5 bucks for a very shallow bowl that didn't hold much. Although the fish tacos were not at all like Rubios (THE best place for fish tacos in SoCal), but they were still really really good.

After dinner, Nate came over for a while for us to play some Halo 3 on the XBox and reminisce about old times.

The boys were both really excited and looking forward to going for a tour of Nate's boat today. After I picked ES up from school this afternoon, we headed over to get the tour. In spite of his excitement beforehand, YS complained almost the ENTIRE tour, "I'm thirsty," or, "I'm want to go home." He was a real joy (tack this comment onto the first section above). Anyway, it was good to see Nate, and good to see what life is like on a floating hotel.