Okay, okay, I'm SORRY I didn't write a blog post last night! Sheesh! I didn't think anybody would mind if I skipped a day, but I guess not. :-) (I got a couple of emails and a voice mail message about the fact that I didn't post anything last night).
I didn't have much to write about yesterday, so I figured I could wait until today when I would have more to say. Yesterday consisted of us driving from Bakersfield, CA, to Oceanside, CA. I expected it to be a long, agonizing day. We've NEVER before had a GOOD drive through LA. There's ALWAYS traffic.
By some strange miracle, we FLEW through LA yesterday. I used this website to check the traffic and see what the best path through LA would be. I kept the cruise control on almost the entire way. I only had to tap on the brakes twice for some congestion. We had to make a trip to Target to restock LW's supply of books because she reads them faster than a fish drinks water, so we didn't leave Bakersfield until almost 11 a.m.. We got off the freeway in Oceanside at 3:30 p.m.! (And that INCLUDED our stop for lunch!)
Speaking of our stop for lunch, we put another check-in-the-block for our SoCal favorites yesterday as we headed down the Grapevine into LA.
We arrived in Oceanside with enough time to go to the ITT at Camp Pendleton to buy our Legoland tickets, get checked into our hotel and rest for a bit, and then head down to meet my Mom and Grandpa at P.F. Chang's for dinner.
Oh, and then when we got back to the hotel and got the boys to bed, LW discovered the season finale of The Closer was on TV, and we didn't have a DVR to push "pause" so we watched it together and went to sleep.
Statistic for Yesterday:
66.3 AVERAGE number of miles per hour from the time we left Bakersfield until we arrived in Oceanside (based on my GPS).
That was it for yesterday.
Now on to document today's adventures... (Going to start a new blog post just to break things up and keep the posts from getting too long).
We've been watching the Olympics every night for the past week. Well, almost anyway.
Some of my favorite parts of the Olympics:
- Watching Michael Phelps win the Gold in swimming the 100m butterfly by 0.01 seconds. If you missed it, or even if you didn't miss it, you should check out this photo sequence on the SI website. Absolutely amazing!
- Watching Shawn Johnson win the Gold on the gymnastics balance beam. No offense to Nastia, but Nastia just never looks like she's having fun. Shawn on the other hand with her big, white, toothy grin is fun to watch because you can tell she's actually enjoying it.
- Watching Jonathan Horton win the Silver on the gymnastics high-bar. That was absolutely stellar and worthy of a Gold medal.
I recently saw an ad on TV from AIG that said laughter can add 8 years to your life. Well, the most recent episode of Monk just added about 16 years to my life. LW and I normally watch Monk together off the DVR, but with the Olympics on we totally forgot and didn't even notice the DVR had recorded a new episode of Monk. It wasn't until my mom emailed and asked if I had seen the episode about Monk getting stuck on board a Navy submarine at sea that we hit pause on the Olympics and switched over to watch Monk.
Aside: In case you've never seen the show before, it's about a police detective named Monk who has obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Naturally, he is extremely uncomfortable with even setting foot on a submarine much less getting stuck on one for five days at sea.
The ENTIRE episode is TOTALLY preposterous. They clearly did not consult ANYBODY who has EVER set FOOT on a submarine before they filmed it. It was SO bad it was absolutely comical.
I mean, yeah, the officers wear summer whites on board the submarine all the time, right? We always submerge right next to the pier without so much as a moment's notice. It doesn't take any time to prepare the ship to get underway and we certainly don't make sure we have an accurate count of who is on board before the crane takes the brow off. Oh wait, we just submerge by the pier, we don't actually have a crane take the brow off - we just let that fall in the water behind us, right? Why yes, the COB is qualified OOD, and he can just relieve the Captain of the Conn anytime he feels like it.
I'm barely scratching the surface of their technical errors here, but the thing that really made me lose it was when they're sitting in the crew's mess eating a meal. The boat suddenly starts to violently shake as if they were in a California earthquake. Monk was wigging out about it, but all the crew members just sat and quietly ate their meals. One of the sailors turned to Monk and said, "Don't worry, it's just a little underwater turbulence."
Maybe you have to see it and hear it on the TV to really get the humor from it, but I erupted in a fit of laughter. I had tears streaming down my face and my abs seriously hurt from laughing so hard. LW thought I was going to pass out from hyperventilation. I just couldn't control myself for several minutes after that.
For you guys at prototype and sub school reading my blog, I know you've probably heard stories about the salty experienced guys on the boat playing jokes on the new guys, but rest assured there are NO doors that go into the ballast tanks. I don't want to spoil any more of it if you want to actually watch it and have a good laugh yourself.
If you missed it, you will be able to watch it on the USA website here. It's episode #705, and as I write this they have up to episode #704 posted to the website.
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??? :-)
I picked up ES from school yesterday afternoon. In the car on the way home, he told me he didn't have to take a lunch to school on Tuesday. In my typical silly-daddy mode, I tried guessing why ES didn't have to take a lunch to school. After guessing he was going to starve and not eat anything, I took a guess that they would be feeding him fish heads at school. "Fish heads?!?!" he said giggling. Then I started singing the chorus of the fish heads song.
I only sang the chorus once and then stopped and waited for a response from the back seat. ...Silence... Snicker... Giggle... Hee-hee-hee... Haw-haw-haw... He laughed the entire way home. He kept trying to sing the fish heads song himself, but he could only get one and a half words into it (fish he...) before he would spontaneously combust in fits of little boy giggling laughter. You'd think that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard in his life.
Wii Fit Update
LW is kicking my butt. She holds the #1 spot in most of the exercises on the Wii Fit. She likes to gloat a little bit, too. I was doing the pushups exercise and I thought I did really well. It gives you a score based on your balance, and I got a really good score. I was SURE I was going to get the #1 spot. After it shows you your score, then it goes to a screen at the bottom of the rankings and scrolls up the rankings so the last thing you see is who's in the #1 slot. I watched it scroll up... and LW was in the #1 spot. I heard a snicker from the direction of LW's chair behind me.
Right across the street from the Pacific Aviation Museum and the old air traffic control tower (you know - the one where Ben Affleck valiantly charges up it and tries to single-handedly stop the attacking Japanese planes with a shotgun).
My Eng and ex-Nav recommended this place, so we went to check it out. When we first drove up, I was like, "Ugh... THIS is a RESTAURANT?"
Looks can be deceiving. This place is pretty old, dilapidated and not fancy, but it's clean and the food and service are excellent. There are a variety of things on the dry-erase board hand-written menu, but there's a heavy Mexican food influence. I had the New Mexico Pork Burrito and it was AWESOME. Bread from Commissary
I don't remember if I wrote about this before, but this organic garlic bread they have for sale at the commissary is REALLY good!
John Adams
LW recorded the John Adams miniseries on our DVR a while back, but we didn't get around to watching the first episode until last night. (Primarily because we missed the first episode and we had to wait a while for the DVR to catch it on a rerun). It was REALLY good. Paul Giamatti (John Adams) and Laura Linney (Abigail Adams) are excellent actors and passionately brought the story to life. Aside: I also highly recommend David McCullough's book John Adams (nonfiction) and Jeff Shaara's pair of novels about the Revolution, Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause. The books and the miniseries go very well together. Everybody's Moving
I'm having flashbacks to Monterey. As a student at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, one has a tendency to forget that you're in the military. You wear civilian clothes to school so as not to let rank interfere with the free exchange of ideas in the classroom. Once a quarter though, you would get a reminder as all the moving trucks descended upon the military housing with big wood crates to take household goods overseas to the graduating students' next duty stations.
Anyway, it's not hard to remember you're in the military here, but usually the moving trucks are a little more evenly spread out across time. Lately they've been really busy on our street. There are four houses already in the progress of moving. Come September when we leave, I think our street will be a completely different neighborhood.
It must be genetic
Friday morning I went to the end of year "graduation" ceremony at YB's preschool. It amazed me to sit and watch as his entire class of cute little pre-schoolers sang a song about "ohana" and "family" and did all the clapping and hand gestures to go along with it... and YB stood there like a stone statue not singing or doing any of the hand movements.
We're making progress though. When LW and I went to the Christmas pageant at his preschool, he didn't even stand up there with the rest of his class. He got down off the steps and hid in the first pew of the church. Periodically he would peek his little head up above the edge of the pew and look at us, then lower his head and hide again. So at least this time he didn't hide, right?
I just don't understand why ALL the OTHER kids will stand up there and do the song and dance, but OUR kids won't. ES was the same way in pre-school. He refused to participate in any of the performances, but the result was he stuck out like a sore thumb because he was the ONLY kid NOT participating. I remember one performance where he wouldn't even stand up with the rest of his classmates until I gave him my cover to wear.
ES's Preschool Thanksgiving Show Sterling, VA 2005
Note that all the other kids in ES's class above wore their cute little pilgrim and native american hats, but ES is wearing my khaki combination cover because that's the only way we could get him to go up there with the rest of the kids.
For any of you who would like to watch YB's statuesque performance yesterday, I uploaded it to YouTube. Sorry it gets a little shaky in the middle because LW didn't have a very good angle and passed the camera off to me, so it wobbles around a little bit while I get settled in a new angle. YB is the one in the red polo shirt in the middle of the shot NOT DOING ANYTHING.
On the Sunday before Memorial Day here in Oahu, the Aloha Council of the Boy Scouts hosts a "Good Turn" (good deed) at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific known as "The Punchbowl." Hundreds of scouts gathered at the cemetery today for a memorial ceremony and then to place flags and leis at the headstones of the graves. The VA website here has a list of the noteworthy people burried in the Punchbowl cemetery, such as Colonel Onizuka, the pilot of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
It was pretty crowded at the cemetery today. We had to park about a mile down the hill and walk up into the Punchbowl. The Punchbowl is a crater like Diamond Head. To get into it, you go up a road that curves up the outside of the crater and has some really pretty views of Diamond Head and Waikiki.
The Three Musketeers J, E, and ES in their spiffy new yellow neckerchiefs This is the road that spirals around the outer edge of the crater into the cemetery.
Gee, ES, that's an awfully nice Wolf tie-clasp. Why, thank you, E, I like yours, too.
ES and Daddy at the top of the Punchbowl.
ES checks out the map of the Battle of Midway
We had stopped here to visit Punchbowl once before a long time ago, but we didn't come up the steps to the top of the memorial. There's a really nice exhibit at the top of the steps with color maps depicting each of the battles of the war in the Pacific. If you are a history buff at all, I highly recommend paying a visit here. Also, the view from the top is pretty nice.
ES reads the headstone after placing the lei around the flag.
There were many of these "Unknown" headstones dated December 7, 1941. Some at least had the ship name where their body was found.
Medal of Honor
The graves with the blue flags and the gold lettering on the headstone are recipients of the Medal of Honor. We took a moment to talk with the boys about the significance of the nation's highest honor for bravery.
Mission Complete
ES took this photo of the flags
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Battle 360! E's dad recommended we check out this show called Battle 360 on the History Channel. It sounded pretty cool, so LW set the DVR up to record it for us. Today we watched the episode about the Battle of Midway. It was really cool. ES was absolutely mesmerized by it. They basically tell the story of the battle with computer graphics showing what the ships' positions were and what the fighting was like, interspersed with actual photos and interviews with veterans from the battle. The show really helps viewers to understand the overall sequence of events and strategic impact of the battle, but it's pretty G-rated - not a lot of blood and gore to worry about the boys watching it.
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.
First, I'm going to change abbreviations. I know I confuse myself sometimes between ES and YS with the two S's in there. I've decided I'm going to change YS to YB for either Younger Brother or Youngest Boy. I think it will help differentiate between the two.
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It's NEVER his fault.
It boggles my mind that when LW or I will tell YB to do something that he's supposed to do, we'll tell him a dozen times and he won't do it. We both feel like broken records. And yet, when he gets into trouble for doing something he's not supposed to do, it's never his fault. He has adopted the but-he-told-me-to-do-it defense. [Aside: My fifth CO would have called this the I'm-a-victim-it's-not-my-fault defense when JOs or Chiefs would try something similar.] Usually he blames it on ES. As in: YB, don't jump off the bed! "But ES told me to do it." Tonight, he blamed it on the neighbor's boy. YB, don't eat cookies right now, it's 5 minutes until dinner time. "But J gave it to me." [Aside: LW and I have a hard enough time getting YB to eat his dinner WITHOUT him eating a cookie 5 minutes before dinner.] I cringe because I sound like the stereotypical parent with the counter-argument, "If ES told you to jump off of a cliff, would you do it? No? Okay then!"
I wonder how many times we'll have to go through this pattern of he-told-me-to-do-it and the canned counter argument before he understands he needs to take responsibility for his own actions and not just blindly do something because someone else told him to do it. I mean, jeez, if a stranger drives up in a van and tells him to come help him look for his lost puppy, is he going to do it "because he told me to"???
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Future Chess-Master(s)?
Tonight the boys' bath took less time than I anticipated, so we had some time after getting their pajamas on before they had to go to bed. I asked if they wanted to play a game and listed off a bunch of games we could play like connect four or blockus or UpWords, but the boys chose chess.
It's been about a week since we last played. I was impressed that both ES and YB were able to set up their sides of the chess board on their own without any help. YB doesn't know how all the pieces move yet and just moves the pieces that I tell him to, but I was pleased that he knew which pieces started out where.
ES really impressed me with his analytical skills in playing chess tonight. He now understands that when I move a piece, there is a reason for it (I'm really not just moving the pieces around at random!), and he searches for that reason and then analyzes what to do to prevent me from achieving my objective.
I still won, but he made it a challenge. It took considerable effort to work through this substantial fortress he made with his queen and two rooks, but I managed to get check-mate because he left his king back behind a row of three pawns (after castling previously in the game), so when my queen got to the back row he couldn't do anything to either move his king out of the way or put anything in my way to block or take the queen. However (comma) I remember the first (and last) time my Grandpa won because I had done that, and he taught me the importance of leaving an escape route for the king. I suspect I won't be able to catch ES with the same trick again.
This photo is from just over a year ago back in Virginia, but it went with the topic. I love this picture - me in my pokey hair, the boys in their jammies, me with my coffee and YB with his apple juice, playin' a little chess in the mornin'.
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Movie Reviews
The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. I took the boys to the Sharkey Theater to see this new Veggie Tales movie this afternoon. It was pretty good. The boys and I enjoyed it. It was not based on a Bible story like most of Veggie Tales' previous movies. The plot outline was similar to 3 Amigos (which I'm sure someone smarter than me will tell me that plot was copied from something else by Shakespeare or some other classic). They added a whole bunch of one-liners from other movies, like, "Say hello to my little friend!" ala Al Pacino. It kept me involved because I was trying to remember what other movies each of those lines came from. I also really enjoyed the spoof on the B-52's Rock Lobster at the end.
BTW - I need to go back and add Sharkey Theater to my list of Hawaii favorites. It's the base theater on the sub base. Active duty get in for FREE. I paid $1.50 for the boys to get in, and spent $6 on two popcorns, two bottles of water, and one medium soda. Can't beat those prices at any other big screen movie theater!
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New Video from Paula Abdul
I haven't been a big Paula Abdul fan in the past. LW and I watched two episodes of American Idol on the DVR to get caught up, and saw this debut of Paula Abdul's new album. I don't know what it is about it - it's just mesmerizing. LW just said, "Paula Abdul is hot isn't she?" I guess I can't disagree with that. It took me until the second time I watched it to realize that Randy (one of the other American Idol judges) was playing the guitar in the video.
[Don't forget to scroll down and stop my blog music before you click play on the video.]
A smattering of odds and ends to tell you about tonight.
Snow... er... Carpet Angels
After seeing the patterns that the vacuum cleaner leaves on the carpet, YS decided to improvise a Hawaiian version of snow angels. He calls them [YS]-Angels. It's funny watching him waving his arms and legs back and forth on the carpet. I wish it actually left an observable impression like snow angels do that I could photograph.
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Latest Technology in Making Pillow Forts
The Lucky Wifey wrote a post about building forts as kids. I know, I know, I had fun building forts when I was a kid, too. As a parent though, it's frustrating to not be able to find a place to sit in the family room with all the dining room chairs, sofa cushions, blankets, and miscellaneous other stuff all piled in heaps to make forts.
This morning, I woke up and came downstairs to find a new variation on the pillow fort...
That's LW's laptop and my laptop side by side making one wall of the boys' new "video game fort."
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Chuck Rationing
With the writers' strike putting a big damper on our favorite TV shows, LW and I were really excited to get a double-dose of new Chuck episodes this week. We decided given the overall lack of new episodes to watch though that we should ration ourselves and not watch both episodes in one night. LW checked and double checked to make DARN sure the DVR was going to record both episodes though.
During the first episode, I saw an ad for the Chuck spy games on the NBC website. The games are okay, nothing to rave about. The Nerd Herd car is pretty hard to drive, but maybe that was the point of the game. I think the "I Spy" game was the hardest (find the four things that are different between two VERY similar looking pictures of Buy More store shelves).
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Another Bullet for the "Con" List for Staying in Hawaii
Bugler, sound taps please. (If you live here in Hawaii, you may want to get a tissue box before you read any further). I sincerely regret to inform you that the ONLY Einstein Brothers Bagel Bakery here on Oahu has closed. That said, there aren't ANY places around here to get a good bagel.
Friends of ours who were stationed here previously tell us there used to be Dunkin Donuts here, but they closed before we even arrived on the island last summer. When I got up Friday morning, I was starving, but I refrained from eating so I could go to PT. I got to the gym and was running on the treadmill when they showed a Dunkin Donuts commercial on the TV that seemed to last forever. [Cue stomach noises: gurgle, gurgle, gurgle.]
That's one of the disadvantages of getting satellite TV here in Hawaii... You have to endure the homesickness induced by commercials for Target, Dunkin Donuts, Olive Garden, etc...
On a positive note though, LW did find Dunkin Donuts coffee at the store this week!
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4-Year Old Birthday Party
Today we had YS's birthday party. It was controlled chaos as you would expect. I thought it was pretty funny that YS announced to LW and I a day or two ago that he wanted ONLY BOYS at his birthday party. LW was like, but YOU invited J, can she come? Oh, yeah, J! And you asked C to come, do you still want her to come? Oh, yeah, C! The list went on and on... Off the top of my head, I think there were 7 girls and 3 boys on the guest list. YS and ES evened out the boy-girl ratio to 7:5, but the boys were still outnumbered. I just found it odd that he came up with this "only boys" proclamation when so many of the kids he enjoys playing with are girls.
LW got the "cake" from the Commissary, and it was REALLY GOOD! I say "cake" because it was really a whole bunch of cupcakes, but they were all frosted over the top to make it look like a regular cake (see picture below). It turned out to be quite messy as LW and I were pulling the wrappers off the cupcakes before putting them on plates, and the abundance of frosting was getting all over our hands. Even so, it was delicious!
You probably can't tell from the picture, but it was a Backyardigans cake. One of the other dads and I were commenting on how frustrating it can be to have the Backyardigans theme song stuck in your head all day at work.
YS quote of the day: "I'm four, so I can jump high now."
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Bedtime Stories
Every Friday, ES goes to the library at school and gets to check out two books. He ALWAYS picks out at least one military book. I've been surprised by the wide selection of kids' military books they have. They've got first-grade level books on just about every type of military aircraft or vehicle you can imagine.
One of ES's current library books is on the Army Rangers. I've been very impressed with what a good job ES is doing in reading. He blew me away tonight when he read the sentence, "Usually this means solving difficult problems in stressful situations, such as simulated combat conditions." No help from me, he just read it. His spelling word lists for school are like "was", "does", "goes", "their." It's a lot easier recognizing words and reading them or sounding them out than it is to recall their correct spelling form memory I guess.
We got to a hard word that ES didn't know: reconnaissance. He asked what that was. I explained to him it's just like a reconnaissance satellite takes pictures of where the bad guys are (he's familiar with this concept from my last shore duty job at the NRO). Rangers go out on reconnaissance missions, not to fight, but just to take pictures or observe where the bad guys are and report back to the generals so the generals can decide where to send the Army. This lead into a discussion about how the Rangers have to be stealthy and quiet so they can sneak behind enemy lines, close to the bad guys to see what the bad guys are doing. ES giggled and said, "So the Rangers aren't allowed to laugh." I asked why not, and he said they would want to laugh because they were able to sneak up on the bad guys without the bad guys knowing the Rangers were there watching them, but they can't laugh because then the bad guys would hear them and know they were there. Ya know what, son? You're absolutely RIGHT, they CAN'T LAUGH. I suppressed a laugh myself and continued reading the story.
Playing Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, I found a lot of great gouge on the internet with lots of pretty color pictures and videos. Now, playing Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, it's thrown in a few new things here and there, and the internet knowledgebase just isn't as robust as it was for LSW II.
I went on a quest looking for information about the blue cannisters.
You see, for each level of LSW, you have to play the level once through in "Story" mode using the characters that are given to you. After you've played the level once in "Story" mode, then it unlocks the ability to play that level in "Free Play" mode. In "Free Play" mode, you get to choose any character you've unlocked on other levels or purchased in the Mos Eisley Cantina with the points you've earned playing so far. Different characters have different special capabilities that enable you to reach or access different hidden parts of the map.
As you play the game in either "Story" or "Free Play" mode, there are ten white cannisters hidden throughout each level. When you find all ten white cannisters, it gives you like a 50,000 point bonus and a vehicle you can use in some race later on.
So far, everything I wrote above was the same from LSW II to LSW CS. Now in LSW CS though, after the "Story" and "Free Play" it has added the "Challenge." The "Challenge" mode is ALL about finding ten BLUE cannisters hidden throughout the map. You have a 10 minute time limit to find them all. There are no studs (coins) to be found anywhere in "Challenge" mode, but all the same bad guys are there to thwart you that were there in the Story and Free Play. It's pretty... well... challenging.
In my search for hints on the internet, I found lots of discussion forums, and I clicked here and clicked there and through some untraceable series of links, I ended up at THIS site. I don't know why it didn't pop up as the FIRST result on the list when I googled it. It SHOULD have.
Now, this guide is technically written for the Wii version of LSW CS, but it's all good gouge for playing on the XBox, too. It's not pretty and doesn't have any color pictures or other frills, but it is very well organized and logically laid out.
For the sake of anyone who hasn't played Lego Star Wars before, I wanted to share this "hint" from that website, because I thought it was a surprisingly simple synopsis of the game:
Shoot. Freakin'. Everything. If it's made out of LEGO bricks and not obviously part of the background, gun it down, or saber it down, or whatever you have to do, because a lot of stuff to move ahead in the game requires you to go on a destruction frenzy.
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PT Update: I got my trophy back! On my Polar F11 heart rate monitor (HRM) watch, it keeps track of my workouts. I set up a plan for how many and what type of workouts I'm going to do each week. If you reach at least 75% of your goal each week, then it displays a little trophy icon for the rest of the week. I had lost the trophy over the holidays from holiday laziness. Thanks to getting back into my regular weekly routine last week, my watch gave me my trophy back on Monday. Unfortunately, a shipyard fire drill prevented me from joining my crew with the PT Nazi over at Bloch Arena this morning. I'm really disappointed I missed it. I hear he had the guys running quarter mile sprints out on the bike path.
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Proud of my Tiger Scout: Last night at our Cub Scout Pack meeting, ES earned his first awards as a Tiger Scout. He earned his Bobcat Badge, six beads toward his Tiger Badge (there are 15 total to earn the badge), the Geography belt loop, and the Swimming belt loop. I know during the week or so before the pack meeting as I was quizzing him on the Cub Scout Promise, the Law of the Pack, the Cub Scout Motto, etc (all things you need to know for the Bobcat badge), he got a little frustrated or annoyed with me. I think when he got the awards last night though, it really gave him an ego boost and made the effort worth it. Now he's excited and wants to start earning more belt loops.
It was interesting to see the difference in awards last night though. Most of the other boys in his den got the basketball, soccer, baseball, and other sports belt loops. Not only did ES not get any of the sports belt loops that the rest of his den got, he was the only one to get the geography belt loop. I think that's more of a reflection on his non-athletic nerd of a dad though.
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CBS Rant: LW and I were REALLY excited to watch the season finale of The Amazing Race on Sunday. We plopped down in our chairs and clicked on the DVR, and... found... nothing... Our DVR did NOT record the finale of the Amazing Race.
So you say to yourself, "Self, WHY on EARTH would the DVR NOT record the finale when it has recorded EVERY Amazing Race episode before this?!?!?" Well, I'll tell you. Some IDIOT at CBS decided to change the official NAME of the show in the electronic listings that go into TV Guide and Dish Network and everywhere else. Our DVR was set to record every episode of "Amazing Race 12," and that worked for the entire season, because that's what it showed up as in the Dish Network guide. For some reason, they changed the name to "Amazing Race: The Season Finale" or something like that. So NOBODY's DVR recorded it if they had it set up as an automatic "record-all-episodes" function. Turns out the same thing happened to my Mom, too. She isn't using Dish Network, so it's not a problem unique to Dish.
I read the recap of the final leg of the race, and it sounded pretty intense. It's a real bummer to have missed it. Why do they offer to let you watch full episodes of all their other shows on their website, but not Amazing Race? To CBS, I say, "Thbbbbbbt!" >:-P
As I came down the stairs from putting the boys to bed tonight, I saw LW had the TV on pause (DVR). She was grinning at me with one of those Cheshire cat grins and told me she had a "surprise" for me. For a moment, I got really excited thinking there was a new episode of HIMYM or Heroes. Then she hit the play button, and that oh-so-familiar and oh-so-awful theme song started for American Idol. The first few weeks of this show each season are just agonizing to watch, and even worse to listen to. It boggles my mind that there are so many people out there who THINK they are good enough singers to go on NATIONAL TV and make total and complete FOOLS of themselves. I would NEVER turn this show on if I had custody of the remote control. Tonight, however, I have actually been pretty amused and entertained by how incredibly BAD the singers are in Philadelphia.
On a similar topic, how does one explain intellectual property rights to a 6 year old? Last night after the boys got out of their bath and we were going to get their pajamas on, ES informed me he "made up" a "new song." I said, "Oh yeah?" He proceeded to sing, "Who let the dogs out - woof! woof woof!" I tried to explain to him that someone else already wrote that song and he must have heard it somewhere else, but he insisted his song was somehow different.
I may have mentioned before that ES has broken the Mommy & Daddy Code. Even as he learned to spell and could pick up on the shorter words, we used to still be able to spell more complicated words or spell them really quickly so it'd be too fast for him to think about it. It just isn't working anymore. He now prides himself on blurting out whatever one of us has just spelled to the other. We've tried asking him not to do that so it remains a secret to YS, but he doesn't think that's any fun.
LW tested out a new code on me on Sunday. After church, when we were trying to decide what to have for lunch, she informed me there was a new foreign residence of tasty flatbreads near our house. It took me a few seconds of churning that through my noggin to realize what she was talking about. I wonder how long this code will last. I'm not that clever, so I'm not sure I could come up with things like that on the fly. Maybe we need to start working on our pig latin.
We didn't end up going to the new foreign residence of tasty flatbreads until tonight for dinner. O...M...G... We got there at 5:30, and we didn't get our food until 6:15! The place wasn't even half full and there were plenty of waiters and waitresses, it was just OUR waitress. We had been sitting at our table for about ten minutes and NOBODY had welcomed us much less taken our drink orders. I had to stop one of the other waitresses to ask her where ours was, and she went to get our waitress. Our waitress came and asked if she could take our drink orders or if we were ready to order, and LW was like, "Uh, YEAH we're ready to ORDER." So we placed both our drink and our food orders, and then... [cue crickets chirping sound effect]. Normally (as in at other locations of this chain), they're very good about bringing your drinks lickety-split. About 6 o'clock, I noticed that the family from the next table over had all left and the father was still sitting there, looking very annoyed. It dawned on me later that he had the same waitress and was waiting for a check. At 6:05, I started suggesting to LW that we just up and leave and go to Baskin Robins two doors down. I mean, hey, if it's okay to have pancakes for dinner, then what's wrong with ice cream for dinner, right? At 6:07, I stopped a guy who had good command presence and asked if he was the manager. He said he was, and I expressed to him my dissatisfaction with the service. He was very nice and very apologetic and said he would handle the situation right away. Our drinks came out about 60 seconds before our food did.
I'm not ruling out going back to this restaurant yet though. It appeared to be just our waitress. We saw coffee and food flying past us in the arms of the other waitresses serving customers who arrived after we did and departed before we did. The food was fine. The waitress appeared to keep a level head and not get a bad attitude about us complaining to the manager, so that was good. She did seem to put forth a little bit more effort to check on us after that, but by then (after we had our food) there wasn't much she could do.
Shifting topics, I was rather surprised when I came home from work today to find YS wearing crocs. No one in my family has had crocs before now, so I figured he was wearing one of the neighbor kids' crocs for some reason. I asked whose shoes he was wearing, and he grinned and said, "MINE!" He proceeded to show off his new bright red Lightning McQueen (of Cars fame) crocs for me.
I was really surprised by this. I could have sworn not long ago we were walking through the Ala Moana Mall, passing by a large display of crocs, and LW commented on how they just didn't appeal to her. When I asked her about it tonight, she said it was the Lightning McQueen that got her, and YS LOVES his new shoes.
Lastly, I've been getting back into the culture of fitness and on track with eating right and PT. I had good results on the scale this week. However, I'm not looking forward to our first session with the PT Nazi tomorrow morning after four weeks of slacking off.
Week 7 Summary Result this week: 2.2 pound loss Cumulative Result: 4.8 pound loss Average Per Week: 0.7 pound loss per week
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!!!
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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.
It's nice being back in a regular routine at home (as opposed to being on deployment or our hectic preparations for interfleet transfer or driving the boat halfway around the world, etc). I'm catching up on some old shows and picking up a new one - Chuck.
I thought it was pretty funny when I Googled "Chuck" the top two links that came up were to this new TV show on NBC. Chuck is a regular geek who works at "Buy More" for the "Nerd Herd." I missed the beginning, but somehow he is in an accident that results in the contents of some super-secret national intelligence computer being downloaded to his brain. Now the NSA has put an agent in as a "coworker" of his, and the CIA has put in an smokin-hot blond agent at the nearby Weinerlicious as protection for him. There's all sorts of spy-story action, intrigue, explosions, gun-fights, etc, but all with a geeky sort of slap-stick to it. It's like a geek version of Alias. (I was never a fan of Alias, although LW was an Alias addict). Chuck is actually a pretty darn funny show - check it out!
My other addiction right now is Heroes. Thanks to Bubblehead raving about it, and reading a WIRED magazine article about it while we were on deployment, I decided to pick it up season one on DVD. I've been watching about one episode per night, and LW is being so kind as to set up the DVR to record the new season when it starts.
We've also got the DVR recording our other favorite show, How I Met Your Mother. I'm dying to watch season two on DVD. In case you haven't seen it before, HIMYM is narrated by the main character, Ted, telling his kids about his love-life and how he met their mother. Sounds odd, I know. It's actually really funny. LW sent HIMYM Season One with me on deployment, and we watched it in the wardroom in the evenings after dinner. I got the whole wardroom hooked on it. It became required viewing for newly reporting officers (including the PCO) so that they would understand our vocabulary - for example: "suit up!", "high five!", and "legendary!" Or, when someone is consciously deciding to procrastinate a project, "Let Future-XO and Future-CO worry about that." Then later, when the previous procrastination came back to bite us, "Darn it Past-XO and Past-CO!" Anyway, I was out at sea while season two was on, and it just came out on DVD. I've got it in my hands now, but I'm being good and waiting until we go out to sea this week so we can watch it together in the wardroom (LW already watched season two while we were out at sea). After we get through season two though, I'm not waiting around on the rest of the wardroom to watch season three on the DVR.
Aside for HIMYM fans (skip ahead if you've never watched before): Incidentally, if you are already a HIMYM fan, the DVD has some really cool special features on it. For example, there's one video-collage of Barney's many variations of the "high-five" in rapid succession. High Five! Phone Five! Low Five! Little Five! I was surprised how many there were. There is, likewise, another video collage of all of Barney's different "Suit Up!" moments. In the interviews with the cast, they said that the "legendary" thing was totally unintentional. It looks like they have some similar things on the CBS website for season two, but I'm not going to watch those until I finish watching season two.
Oh, here's a great little 2 minute sample of HIMYM (and some of our wardroom vocabulary):
You gotta love YouTube!
Speaking of DVRs... What on earth did we do before the days of DVRs??? The first time I really realized the impact in had on our lives was when LW flew up to meet me for a port call in Bangor, WA a couple of years ago. My eldest son's favorite cartoon back then was called Max and Ruby (about two rabbits). It came on at like 6 o'clock in the morning, but it didn't matter because the DVR was set to record it, and our eldest could watch it whenever he woke up and whenever else he wanted to during the day. Well... fast forward to us sitting in the Navy Lodge in Bangor. Eldest says, "I want to watch Max and Ruby." LW and I tried to explain to him that it just wasn't on at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. This was just a totally unfathomable concept to the poor boy. "Just push the buttons!" he would say, holding the remote control out for us to do the magic that made Max and Ruby appear on his demand. We quickly learned that when going on trips, we have to bring DVDs of the kids' favorite shows with us.
I must admit, it's rather nice not having to watch commercials anymore... most of the time anyway. There are those annoying times, like tonight, when you catch-up with a live show and can't fast forward anymore, then you have to sit and wait. LW and I have been known to hit the pause button and go do stuff around the house and come back a few minutes later to resume watching time-late so we can fast-forward through the commercials.
We're finding that we miss our Dish Network. LW wasn't sure if it would work in Hawaii, or if Navy Housing would allow us to put up a satellite dish, and thought the local digital cable would be fine. I do NOT criticize her at all for her decision to sign up for the local digital cable while I was gone. Unfortunatly, the cable service here is totally LAME. The DVR is very non-user friendly. It won't auto-tune to the shows you tell it you want to watch, it only flashes a reminder to tell you something is on. When you hit the channel guide, it just shows ALL the channels that exist, regardless whether you subscribe to them or not, and it won't let you set up a short-list of your favorite channels to quickly browse. So I'll skim down the channel list and say, "Oh, I wanna watch that!" and click the button, and an error message will pop up that we don't subscribe to that channel. Gee, thanks. Plus, we have separate DVRs in each room and have to set up each one individually if we want to be able to watch a show in any given room.
So I'm going through the process of getting Navy Housing to approve putting in the Dish Network satellite dish so we can get back to having a favorites-list and a dual-tuner / dual-recorder DVR that'll feed both the family room and the MBR TV. I think the housing office's rules on applying for installation of a dish violates the FCC rules and constitute an "unreasonable delay," but I'm going to try and get it approved peacefully / without raising a ruckus.
It actually comes out to be about the same price per month as the digital cable here, but with so much better functionality. There are some sunk costs in terms of the installation fee for the digital cable, but there was no way for us to know in advance how bad the cable service was here.
I wonder how many states are changing their official "state flower" to the satellite dish? I know I heard the joke in California when we lived there. Then I heard the same joke in Virginia when we lived there. Now we're about to help the "flower" infest Hawaii.
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."
Mmmm, FISH TACO!!!
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