When we had my promotion reception at the Navy Art Gallery on Washington Navy Yard, the staff (Gale, Pam, and Karen) were kind enough to let us have a glimpse in the back.
Holy cow that place is ginormous!
The gallery part in the front that is open to the public is literally the tip of the iceberg and only a very minuscule selection of their overall inventory. They said they try to rotate out the artwork on display about every 6 months.
Back behind the polished and well-presented little gallery up front, there is a vast archive of rows upon rows of shelves with incredible artwork and even a shelf full of ship bells.
Up Periscope Thomas Hart Benton Oil on canvas, 1944
All Hands Below Georges Schreiber Watercolor, 1943
Periodically when I have happened upon prints of such artwork at various submarine commands, I've wondered where I could go to purchase one of the prints to hang on my own wall. Well, the staff at the Navy Art Gallery pointed me in the direction of Joseph Rudinec's website. From his website, you can order a photographic reproduction of almost any artwork in the Navy Art Gallery, and I think the prices are pretty reasonable for what you get.
Thomas Hart Benton's "Up Periscope" shown above is going on my birthday wishlist this year (not so subtle hint, hint, wink, nudge).
Oh, FYI, the Naval History & Heritage Command has a Facebook page. They have asked their fans who write blogs to put in a plug for them, so this is my plug. I like keeping up to date on activities at the museum and I look forward to the upcoming bicentenial activities for the War of 1812.
Also note that the Naval History & Heritage Command is NOT just for folks in the DC area. If you check out their web page, you will see they have listings of special events and activities going on at Navy museums across the country like Family Fun Fridays at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum and Wild, Wacky, Sometimes Wet Wednesdays at the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, WA. Check it out!
I've been a big fan of the Broadside cartoons in Navy Times for a long time. Whenever I pick up a copy of Navy Times, the first thing I do is flip to the back and read the Broadside cartoon. I actually got to meet the artist, Jeff Bacon, while I was in Monterey back in 1999-2001.
Anyway, I discovered Jeff has started a Broadside Blog. He puts up new cartoons and has caption contests, but he has some other more thought provoking good content like this one about Success in Iraq and this one with the Hero of the Week. Check it out.
Friday for Family Movie Night, we broke our habit of getting our pizza from Boston's North End Pizza across the street and drove over to Pearl Ridge Mall to get pizza from CPK instead. We had a Santa Fe Chicken pizza that was really good.
Our movie selection for the evening was The Princess Bride. We had been talking about watching it for a couple of days, and I was pretty excited. Before we watched the movie, I kept saying things to ES like, "My name is Inego Montoya. You keeled my fadder. Prepare to die." and "Incontheivable!" ES thought I was crazy, looked at me like I had three heads and said, "What?!?!" The boys really enjoyed the movie, and now ES has been going around saying, "You keeled my fadder. Prepare to die." and "Incontheivable!"
I think given how well ES took to this movie and memorizing one-liner sound-bites from the movie, I may have to break out Monty Python and the Holy Grail next. Man, if I get ES quoting Monty Python, LW will go absolutely NUTS. :-)
Lazy Saturday
Saturday for me was one of those lazy days you need once in a while to just sit around and do nothing. In the morning, we happened upon Mr. Bean's Holiday on TV and got sucked into it. The boys and I really enjoyed it. None of us had watched any of Mr. Bean's stuff before. There wasn't a lot of dialog - just a lot of slapstick, physical type of comedy.
Then we watched the new episode of Battle 360 on the DVR. In case you haven't seen Battle 360 yet, here's a segment on YouTube:
LW was actually much more productive with her day, to include sneaking a car load of stuff off to Good Will (she has to do it in stealth mode so the boys won't throw a fit over the toys she takes).
Both our neighbors' husbands across the street were out of town and didn't feel like cooking, so we invited them to join us for dinner on the lanai. LW made up some awesome mini-cheesesteak sandwiches for dinner, some sort of frozen margarita concoction to drink, plus some downright sinful pots-de-creme from this PW recipe.
Mmmmm... Pots de creme (We forgot the whipped cream though)
Sunday
My favorite song on the radio right now is Song of Hope by Robbie Seay Band (click the song title to give it a listen). I'm sad though, because it has been elevated it to that ultimately popular status where they play it like once an hour and I know I'm going to be sick of hearing it by the end of the day. As much as I love KLOVE, I wish they wouldn't do that (play good songs so repetitively that they run them into the ground and make you sick of them).
When we went to church, they started off with one of those songs that in all reality is a pretty good song, but the radio stations have overplayed it so much that it's just like scraping finger nails across a chalk board to me (Heaven by Salvador). Luckily, they made up for it though and played one of my favorite and NOT overplayed songs after the sermon - I Can Only Imagine by MercyMe.
El Mariachi Mexican restaurant
For lunch, we made our third attempt to find the Mexican restaurant in Kaneohe that one of my JO's recommended (oops, sorry, I mean DO's - we're not supposed to call them JO's anymore). The first two times, we tried to find it just by using the address in the GPS receiver and had no luck. Today we actually called the place and asked for directions. The lady on the phone explained to us that they were tucked back behind the Aloha Gas Station on Kam Highway, across the street from the bank. If you happen to go looking for this place, that's an important point to remember because there are two Aloha Gas Stations right across the street from each other, so you need to go behind the one ACROSS the street from the bank.
El Mariachi Mexican restaurant is a very nondescript little hole in the wall. The fact that all the tables were full in a place so hard to find is a pretty good sign their food is good though, eh?
Atmosphere: Once you get inside, you'll find about 8 tables crammed into a small place with some Mexican music playing softly in the background. Most hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurants share the same decor - paintings of Mexican countryside scenery, a Mexican flag, etc. This place had some of those typical wall-hangings you would expect, but added a coat of textured red paint and some faux-brick wainscoting for a nicer appearance. Plus, it was cleaner than your average hole-in-the-wall type of place.
Food: Although they didn't have my favorite mole poblano on the menu, they did have a good variety of other Mexican dishes that I love like carnitas, chili verde, and carne asada. LW had the carne asada burrito - I tried a bite and it was excellent. I had the carnitas and it was also superb. The meat was tender, flaking apart, and flavorful. The guacamole was the smooth consistency of the processed stuff you get at other Tex-Mex chain restaurants (i.e. not made from fresh avocados), but it was alright. The drinks are served from a fountain (as opposed to selling you cans of soda). While it wasn't the BEST Mexican food I've had on the island, it was certainly a very tasty meal that I enjoyed very much.
Service: When we got there, all the tables were full, but we only had to wait like 5 minutes for someone to finish and leave for them to clear off the table for us to sit. Have you ever played that addicting game Diner Dash on the internet? I felt like I was in a real live version of that game. There was one waitress serving all 8 tables, but I thought she did an excellent job. Given how small the place is, she was never far away from any of us and easy to get her attention. She was working her butt off, but she did a great job.
Lego Sculptures at the Mall
After lunch, LW went to get a pedicure with the neighbor ladies from across the street. I had wanted to take the boys for a hike, but it was drizzling rain off and on with some heavy black clouds looming overhead. I didn't want to get a mile out and have the heavens open up, dumping buckets on us and turning the trail to mud (not like that's ever happened to us before).
The boys check-out the hanging-man. That gray tower he's hanging from is all made out of legos, too.
ES and J check out the Parthenon.
Man! How do I sign up for THAT job?!?! I wish someone would pay ME to sit around and make sculptures out of legos all day. I couldn't do what he does with the curves of human forms, but I could totally do the parthenon and the other balanced shapes. Maybe when the Navy is done with me we can retire to Legoland!
This afternoon, I tried to be at least a little bit productive. When we moved the furniture around last week (when we thought we were staying in Hawaii for shore duty), I took down all the pictures hanging on my "me wall" because we wanted to put the entertainment center along that wall. Now that we're NOT staying in Hawaii and we have company coming at the end of this week, LW made up a new honey-do list for me, and the first item was to rehang the pictures. Normally, I wouldn't mind so much, but the aluminum frames in these houses make hanging pictures a pain in the arse. At least I got that item crossed off the honey-do list.
I started to write about wine-tasting tonight, but I'm going to save that for another post. This one has gone on long enough. If you've actually made it this far and read all of my rambling above, then please leave a comment - I'd love to know WHY??? :-)
"A significant number of Hawai'i's drivers should not be on the road, according to a recent online test. That's because nearly 22 percent of Hawai'i's drivers would not pass the written test required for getting a license if they took the test today, the annual survey indicated."
No! Say it isn't so! I'm SHOCKED. Sorry, just a little bit of sarcasm there. Frankly, I'm surprised it was ONLY 22 percent.
2. Lego Art. We might have to go to the mall this weekend...
"New York artist Nathan Sawaya, with one of his latest LEGO projects at Pearlridge Center yesterday. Sawaya's creations are on view daily at the mall through July 20. You can also build your own LEGO creations from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday."
Crash Hot Potatoes
For dinner tonight, LW made some of these Crash Hot Potatoes, and they were REALLY good.
Thinking Positive
Although we're disappointed about not going back to the mainland for shore duty, we're trying to look on the bright side and focus on the positive aspects. So continuing my previous list of benefits of staying in hawaii, here are a couple more we came up with:
- I complained before about buying that silly dinner dress white jacket for the sub ball and that I'd only wear it once because we never wear them on the mainland. Well... Now I get to wear it a few more times! :-)
- We're going to have a lifetime supply of cleaning agents, candles, and liquor when all the other officers from our boat move and give us their stuff they aren't allowed to pack up in their household good shipments.
Oh, as promised, I did go back and add the group photo from our command picnic to my last post.
I thought these two pieces of artwork ES brought home from school were pretty cool.
First, are you familiar with the "if you give a mouse a cookie" series? They're really cute children's stories. So following along the same pattern, I give you "if you give a pig a flagpole."
I'm not exactly sure what the picture is supposed to be besides two pigs of some sort of military variety. The story under the picture it what I thought was really funny. In case you can't read it in the image, it says: "If you give a pig a flagpole he'll want to join the military so they can use it and do colors."
Next up is the Broken Computer book. ES did this with a little ink stamp of a computer, so you're supposed to read the stamp as if it were the word "computer."
Here's the cover page: Here's the inside: I wonder if any Bust By or Geek Sqod executives read my blog?
From September 2007 to September 2008, this blog started out as a journal of my family's adventures around Hawaii. Then from 2008 to 2011, we lived in the Northern Virginia (NoVA) suburbs of Washington, DC. From the spring of 2011 to 2013, we called the Pacific Northwest "home." In June 2013, we moved back to the DC suburbs again. I like finding cool things for us to do that get us out of the house, so I will continue to blog about our adventures around the DC area, as well as periodic musings about whatever else strikes me as funny or odd. Note: These are my frank and honest opinions. Nobody is paying me to write anything in my blog.
Gouge Index (a.k.a. Links to Common Topics in My Blog)
My name is Kevin. I'm 40-something. I have a lovely wife (LW) and two great little boys, Eldest Son = ES and Younger Brother = YB (in older posts, I previously referred to him as Youngest Son or YS). I'm a submarine officer, and I've been in the Navy for 21+ years.
I started this blog to document our family adventures around Hawaii for family and friends. After that we moved to DC and then to Bremerton, WA. We have since moved back to the DC suburbs and I continue blogging about my random observations of life.
If you would like to contact me, you may email me at blunozblog at hotmail dot com.
Geocaching!
My wife refers to me as a "crack addict" when it comes to geocaching. Geocaching is like a scavenger hunt with a GPS receiver. People hide stuff in the woods and post the GPS coordinates on the geocaching website, and techno-gadget geeks like me go hiking in the woods looking for them. My wife calls it "Geek-meets-Nature."
It's the only magazine I have consistently kept a subscription to and read every month. Although I don't agree with the magazine's recurring theme of agnosticism / anti-religion, I skip those articles and soak up all the cool electronic gadgets and technology articles.
Outside Magazine is another new favorite of mine. One thing I really like about Outside Magazine is the photography. The pictures are absolutely amazing, but there's more to it than just the picture. Outside Magazine includes a short description of who the photographer was and how he/she got into position to capture the shot at just the right moment.
What I'm listening to...
KLOVE - contemporary Christian music
or First Wave - 80's alternative music on Sirius channel 22.
Where'd I get the name "blunoz" from?
On my first deployment as a junior officer on USS PROVIDENCE (SSN 719), I had the awesome experience of going north of the Arctic Circle. The Navy has many customs and traditions, and when you cross a significant invisible line in the ocean like the Arctic Circle or the Equator, you have to go through an initiation ceremony. When I returned from that first deployment, I got a new license plate on my car, but had to fit it into 6-letters, so I condensed blue nose into "blunoz."
Up Periscope
All Hands Below
Oh, FYI, the Naval History & Heritage Command has a Facebook page. They have asked their fans who write blogs to put in a plug for them, so this is my plug. I like keeping up to date on activities at the museum and I look forward to the upcoming bicentenial activities for the War of 1812.
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