Violated

This post was a runner-up for Post of the Week.
Thanks, Hilary!

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So there I was...

Minding my own business... Actually, to be totally honest, I was minding everybody else's business because I was reading Facebook, but I digress.

Then the phone rang.

I instantly recognized the area code and prefix as being from my alma matter, USD. We know from our caller ID that they've tried calling several times lately, and I figured I better answer the phone or they'll just keep calling. I fully expected it to be a fund-raising phone call, so I hid my wallet, put up my mental defenses, and practiced saying, "no, no thanks, not today, no, and what-part-of-no-did-you-not-understand." Then I answered the phone.


Man, the business school at USD must be doing really well... especially with that telemarketing class they're offering.

They got some young junior with a very friendly, soft, and sweet voice to call me up and flirt with me for a while. She asked why I chose to go to USD and what I liked most about going to USD. She talked about her favorite parts about going to USD. She told me about going to the Navy Birthday Ball with one of the NROTC midshipmen. She asked me about life in the Navy and what my favorite port calls have been. We talked for several minutes without even a mention of money.

I chastised myself, "Self, you were totally wrong to assume that just because USD was calling it was because they wanted money. You should be ashamed of yourself! They have clearly started a NEW program to help re-establish connections with alumni. Granted, the underlying motive in refostering the relationship and making me reminisce about my time at USD is so that they can get me to donate later, but in the meantime, it's nice to talk to a USD student and remember what life was like in college."

Just about then I let my guard down. I was enjoying talking about life at USD. The sweet young lady on the other end of the phone line must have sensed the change in my tone of voice. I shifted from my guarded no-you-can't-have-my-money tone of voice to my wasn't-being-a-college-student-awesome nostalgic voice, and she knew she had me.

Then WHAMMO! She sensed the opportunity, so she went for the jugular.

"So can USD count on your donation of $600 to support the founders' scholarship fund?"

I started coughing like I had just inhaled a tarantula. My mind quickly jolted back from nostalgia-land to the here-and-now of the present, and I quickly felt for my wallet to make sure it was still secure.

I'm sorry, what??? Did you seriously just dead-pan ask me for

SIX
HUNDRED
DOLLARS?!?!

[Sniff, sniff] Here I thought you weren't like all the other sweet-talking college students that call us from USD. I thought you were different. I thought we shared something special...

No, I didn't really say that. I said something more like: Ahhh, no, sorry, we just bought our plane tickets to fly home for Christmas today and I'm out of spare cash (which is true).

"Oh, okay, well how about $250 then?"

Um, no thanks.

"We can defer the payments or set up a payment plan for you."

Gee, thanks... but no thanks.

She pressed on a couple more rounds, and I finally gave in and pledged to give them SOME money (but not much).

I feel like I was just robbed by a girl scout.

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.

Carne Asada Burritos

Our neighbor across the street gave us some intel on a taco shop down Kam Highway that she said was really good. Since she's a fellow San Diego native, I took that as a high-compliment for a taco shop and went to check it out for lunch.

I walked in the door to Diego's Taco Shop, and...
[Cue sound effect: Angels singing Hallelujah Chorus.]

I felt like I had been instantly teleported thousands of miles across the ocean to San Diego.

Anyone who has lived in Southern California and developed and appreciation for the hole-in-the-wall taco shops you find on every street corner. Around San Diego, they come in every variety of _____-berto's. There's Roberto's, Adalberto's, Umberto's, Yourberto's, Myberto's, Wouldn'tchyaliketobeaberto's-too... It's hard to tell one from another.

Without even tasting the food, I felt right at home in Diego's, because the decor precisely matched the standard San Diego taco shop. The strip-mall store-front... The painted cinder-block walls... The pressed-wood, formica veneer, curved bench seating... The white plastic menu board with the individual black plastic letters pushed into the slots... The little clear-plastic cups with lids that contained the toxic-waste-sludge-style hot sauce in both the green and the red varieties... Things like "carne asada" and "horchata" on the menu... One person at a simple cash register taking orders and writing them on a slip of paper at the counter, then handing them through the window to the short-order cook at the grill in the back... Your order handed to you in a brown paper bag with your food and some paper napkins inside.

I had a carne asada burrito, and [cue sound effect again: Angels singing Hallelujah chorus] it... was... awesome! Their version is slightly different than in San Diego, but I just asked them to hold the sour cream and add the guacamole and it was perfect.

Flashback to when I first left San Diego and moved to the east coast, I went through some serious withdrawal symptoms (even more so than for the Henry Weinhard's). I seriously craved carne asada burritos and could find none. One of my parental units forwarded me a newspaper article a long time ago that said some types of chilis used in cooking Mexican food really ARE addicting, so it was understandable that I was having such cravings.

My mom gave me a real treat just before I left on my first deployment. She packed up a Roberto's carne asada burrito in a box with some dry ice and shipped it to me overnight.

As a department head on a boat out of San Diego, we had a standing order from the Captain: If anybody went off base for lunch to Santana's or Adalberto's (the two closest taco shops on Rosecrans) , they weren't allowed to return to the ship unless they brought the Captain a carne asada burrito. While we were on deployment, if you looked at our JMCIS / GCCS-M screen (geographic display of where you are in the world), we always had a waypoint saved for Santana's that kept us up to date on how many miles we were from home. During our transit home from deployment, we had a posted countdown of miles-to-go to carne asada burritos.

Anyway, done with the flashback and returning to the present.

For anyone else from socal living in or just visiting Oahu, if you want your carne asada burrito fix, go to Diego's!


Update 8/21/2008: While I do love carne asada burritos, at some point I decided to branch out and try something new. The rolled tacos at Diego's are also really good, and my new favorite is the carnitas burrito with guacamole.

Sailor Mail Sea Stories

My previous post about colors brought to mind a couple of quick sea stories.

Sea Story #1: Lilac.

During my previous sea tour, the Eng's wife and my wife were known for going nuts with their paint brushes around our houses. Every time we'd go out to sea for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, the Eng and I would come home to find our LWs had painted one or more rooms of our house a different color than it was when we left. [Aside: In our case, this was the first house we had owned, so LW was really excited about getting to paint the walls instead of living with the plain white walls in previous rentals and military housing.]

One day, we went to PD (periscope depth) to clear the broadcast and download our email traffic. Eng was sitting in his stateroom and I was sitting next door in my stateroom. As the email started to flow into the LAN, I suddenly heard a panicked yell from the Eng's stateroom, "WHAT COLOR IS LILAC?!?!?"

Eng had received an email from his wife informing him she had painted their master bedroom "lilac." We took a poll around the wardroom table at dinner that night, and nobody had any clue what color "lilac" was.

Sea Story #2: Our New House.

Before I tell this story, I have to explain the Sailor Mail system for any of you that aren't submariners and haven't used the system before. Sailor Mail is a system that enables us to send and receive unclassified internet email via our classified LAN on the submarine and our routine satellite communications circuits back to the shore. The limitations are:

1) It's slow. There can be a time lag of a couple of days between it going through filters that search for bad news or classified information, and then it depends on how often and how long the submarine is going to PD to download the email traffic.
2) You can't send file attachments or forwards. The Sailor Mail system automatically strips any inbound emails of any attachments or text marked with the carrot symbols to say it's forwarded text.
3) Lastly, we have no ability to browse the internet or use any internet links that someone emails to us.

Okay, so, rewind to the end of my last sea tour. I was going to spend the last three months of my tour out at sea before transferring to DC, so we decided to sell our house while it was a strong seller's market and send LW and the boys off to DC to find us a place to live.

Aside: Back then in San Diego, houses went on the market and got multiple offers within the first week. We put our house on the market and got two offers in the first week. We were in the process of counter-offers on those two when a third buyer came into the fray. Their realtor told them that we were already in counter offers with two other buyers, so if they wanted the house, they better bid fast and bid BIG. So the third prospective buyers rounded UP from our asking price, and we said $OLD! Now, our neighbors back there tell us our former house is on the market again, but listed for over $100k less than what we sold it for. Cha-ching! We made out like bandits when we sold that house, but it turned out to be a good thing. We took a loss on selling our house in VA, but we're still in the black from selling our San Diego house.

Anyway, getting back to the story. LW and the boys are off in the DC area house hunting, and I'm out at sea. We go to PD and get a download of email. I get this email from LW that's addressed to a bunch of our family and friends, and says, "Check out this house that I just put an offer on!" with a link to the Realtor.com MLS listing. Um... Sweetie... I can't use the link... How about telling me something about the house? That was all I got that PD trip. So I strolled into lunch in the wardroom and had a conversation something like this:

Me: "[LW] put an offer on a house!"
Wardroom: "Oh yeah? Where is it?"
Me: "I don't know."
Wardroom: "How big is it?"
Me: "I don't know.
Wardroom: "How many bedrooms does it have?"
Me: "I don't know."
Wardroom: "How many bathrooms does it have?"
Me: "I don't know."

Before I continue the story, let me just stop and ask the question: If you wanted to know what a house was like, what information would you want? In systems engineering terms, what are your evaluation criteria? I think the discussion with the wardroom above reveals what a man would want to know - location, square footage, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, asking price... These are simple terms that enable you to compare from one house to another house.

I figured it was just a case where she sent out the link to everyone for the MLS listing and that email made it through on the last Sailor Mail download, and there was probably another email still waiting in the buffer that was addressed specifically to ME with details about the house.

Fast forward to our next PD trip. I open up my computer and I'm VERY excited to see another email from LW. LW wrote to me that she really loves this house and that it just "felt right" to her, and she really liked that it had a jacuzzi tub in the master bedroom, a partially finished basement, and a swing set in the back yard for the boys. Okay, okay, this is good, right? So I walk into the wardroom for lunch and have a conversation that went something like this:

Me: "I got another email from [LW] about the house she put an offer on!"
Wardroom: "Oh yeah? Where is it?"
Me: "I don't know."
Wardroom: "How big is it?"
Me: "I don't know.
Wardroom: "How many bedrooms does it have?"
Me: "I don't know."
Wardroom: "How many bathrooms does it have?"
Me: "I don't know."
Wardroom: "What DO you know?"
Me: "It's got a jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom, a partially finished basement, and a swing set in the back yard for the boys."

Ahhh, the challenges of time-delayed communications with your spouse. :-) Luckily, we pulled into port soon after that, and I was able to get on my webmail and see all the pictures LW took of our house and read the MLS listing.

San Diego Fires - Updated 24 Oct

Update 24 Oct: OMG... Seeing this AP photo from Rancho Bernardo, I felt like someone just socked me in the gut. Those used to be peoples' houses. This area is just north of Mirimar in San Diego County.

It breaks my heart to think what those families must be going through. I mean, as an adult and as a Christian (and sitting here in the comfort of my la-z-boy recliner), I can (theoretically or philosophically) put the material loss aside and be thankful for my health, but how do you ever explain that to your kids?

I remember shortly after my family moved to Northern Virginia, there was a tornado warning and my wife and kids had to hide in the basement for an evening. Even though nothing happened, my ES was terrified at the mention of the word "tornado" or of strong winds howling around the outside of our house. Can you imagine how much worse it would be if something HAD happened to our house then? The kids who lost their homes in the fires will be traumatized for some time to come.

To everyone in San Diego County, you continue to be in my thoughts and prayers.

Looking at the maps of the fire boundaries and the evacuation areas, the northern fire is very close to the homes of some close friends of mine. Chris & Cath, Dave & Kate, Dave & Eva - I hope you have safely evacuated from your homes, and I pray you're safe and sound. The southern fire is approaching my mom and grandpa's place, but it's still a safe enough distance away that they're not in the evacuation area (yet).

Update 23 Oct 2007 at 1747 Hawaii time: My mom sent me this website for a really good map of the fire boundaries and evacuation areas.