So I made it here but my bags didn't...

It's ok though, I had packed enough of the essentials that I at least had set of T-shirt and skivies among other things.

My bags arived the following afternoon, and man was I glad to have some uniforms to jump into. Nobody said anything, cause they all understand how it is, but it was just odd to be the only one in civies while the entire rest of the base was walking around in uniform.

On the one hand, I could get away with a lot more, because nobody was really sure what my rank was, and I think some of them thought I was an officer. On the other hand, there's something to be said for the annonymity of a uniform. When you look just like everyone else people tend to give you the once over then forget about you. When you're the odd duck out, everyone wants to know your business.

Anyway, things are going well.

I've caught colds bigger than this 'lil guy, but that doesn't mean he didn't put up a fight...

I've been to Valleyfair more times than I can remember, and each time I've watched people on the ripcord just wishing I was frivilous enough to spend the extra cashola to ride it. So this time I came prepared with an extra bit of what makes the world go around for just such a purpose. Oddly enough, my brother Matt must have had the same idea because he was more than happy to pony up for it as well and our fearless-type sister in law was right behind him.

Also, I was lucky enough to be the one who got to pull the ripcord and am also the fool yahooing like Goofy off the end of a skijump.

It's been so long since I told ghost stories that I forgot 90% of the ones I knew. The other 10% wasn't really cohesive enough to share. Towards that end, and so I'll be prepared next time, anybody got any good ghost stories?

I celebrated my independance today by jumping over the side of a cliff.



My friends Taylor and Amber were camping up near Tettegouche along the North Shore of lake Superior, and invited me to stop on up for an early morning climb.
"Trust us." they kept saying as I was about to go over.
"Trust the equipment" I kept saying as I leaned out and repelled down...

You see, I've never been rock climbing before but this month has been full of new things and so when the opportunity came along I went for it. The hard thing about this climb was that we had to repell down then climb back up, instead of starting at the bottom. The way it was explained to me there's no room for changing your mind with this type of setup, once you're over the ledge you have to climb back up.

So, I was over the edge and repelled down to the point where there's no more line left and I'm at this itsy bitsy four inch ledge. Once I changed where my line is clipped from the front of the harness to the back, I began the journey of a thousand handholds by taking my first grip.

Taylor and Amber were great sports about it. It took me longer to make one run than it had taken both of them together, and that's including the ten minute cookie and water break between climbs. At any rate, I'm hooked and plan to spend a bit more time at some climbing walls in order to learn my head from my butt and get a little better at the safety aspect of it.

Here are a few pics of other stuff I saw while in the park.

He didn't have them for long, but somewhere between the morning shave and his better half finding out, my kid brother had chops...

I went to a Twins Game today!
Surprisingly to me, they smoked Milwaukee 8-0. I know I've been gone a while, but I don't remember them being this good.

In other news, I spent Thursday and Friday with friends in Alexandria and Brainerd, and hope to maybe go rock climbing over the fourth!!!

Anyway, it's time to run.
bye

In keeping with my previous theme...

You really can't tell it here, but that's a camel that I have my hand on. The guy who took my picture didn't know how to use the camera so instead of a nice shot with me and some chili eating fleabag, it looks like I'm resting my hand on a shag carpeted chaise lounge. But I digress.


See what I mean, Chili eater...

It struck me that I've been a bit lax in posting lately, so without further ado, stand by for a series of completely uninforming yet timely posts.

P.S. After all the drama, this is what I ended up with.

I've bought my car!
There was a moment there when I thought he might just back down, but in the end things turned out just right.

Also, I had lunch with the SmartyPantsed one the other day, and to be honest it answered a lot of questions I've had lately....
For instance, what exactly is a drunken apple, or are the devil's pickles really all that spicy; thanks to that lunch I now know the answer to both of those intriguing dilemas.

But I digress.

I finally made it to the states, and my little brother is back here too!

I found a great car and will finalize on it this weekend. I wanted to come to Brainerd today, but couldn't reach anyone to hang out with so I guess I have to postpone it for a week.

So, about Valleyfair!!!
When's a good time for you?

So I got around to looking up insurance quotes the other day and guess what...
New company, high premiums, no new fancy faster than the Millinium Falcon type car for me. Right now I'm thinking either Honda Civic or Nissan Altima.

Well, it's been a week and now I am out of my place and back to work for my normal department. Don't have the tickets in my hand yet, but I've been told by a friend who works in the travel department that I'm scheduled to be off the island by the end of this month!

I packed my apartment today and sent it on it's merry way.

So what I'm left with right now is a suitcase full of clothes, a box full of paperwork, a laptop full of music and my favorite chess set ever. I'm coming home by the last week in June, and the in-between of preparing to leave then waiting for weeks is driving me nuts.

I'm supposed to be out of my flat tomorrow, and I'm ready to go, but I work from dawn to (almost) dusk, which over here is pretty long. At any rate I'm sure the manager won't still be working by the time I get off and so I need to figure out a way to get checked out without incurring an extra days' rent. If I have to, I have to, but there are a lot better things to spend 75 bucks on than one more night in this place.

Something I would much rather spend my 75 bucks on is a Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4.
For those of you who aren't familiar with this car it can be summed up in five simple characters. 320hp



Ever since Japan, I've been jonesin for another nice ride. I'm so tempted to buy one of these, I ask you how am I supposed to say no to a car that goes 0-60 in 5.4 seconds?

So a friend and I went to see this movie "The hills have eyes" about irradiated mutant canibals in the Nevada desert. I wasn't all that thrilled about the movie from the beginning because that type of movie really isn't my cup of tea, but there was nothing better to do so I relented... At any rate, the first half of the movie was stupid and boring with all the old horror cliches, but the last half took a surprising turn. In short, this peacefull yuppy cell phone salesman straps a baseball bat and goes wanders through these desert caves in search of the canibals who stole his 9 month old baby.


The guy is a putz, and through the whole last half of the movie I found myself torn between saying things like "that fool deserves to be shot with his own gun" and fighting not to yell outloud as he blunders from one life threatening scenario to the next, and wishing I could be there to help him deliver the louisville slugger of justice. (Especially when he is wrastling the 7 foot axe mutant, and it starts throwing him through the rotten drywall.)
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that if you go your whole life and never watch this movie you'll probably be happier for it, but if you have an hour to waste, the last half is better than a kick in the shins.

Tomorrow's going to be a good day; supposedly I'm gonna re-enlist.

In short it means that I'm bringing my good wooden chess set (Rob, you'd flip over this thing) and after taking care of a few odds and ends, plan to go through with the ceremony then cash in my liberty chit and go play chess and sip lates with friends till my blood turns to liquid caffeine.

Also, my Senior Chief came through for me in spades today... The command was going to give me a letter of extension on my old eval instead of issueing a transfer eval, which would mean that I wouldn't get credit for anything I've been doing since January. I talked to a number of people to try to take care of it, but it wasn't until they had all run into an administrative wall that I called on the big guns. I wasn't sure what I expected, but it sure wasn't what actually happened. Senior laid HANDS on people, and within a matter of minutes my transfer eval was back on track and my faith in the chain of command stood restored.

Well,
As much as I griped about Blogger, I got bored at WordPress with not being able to play around with my template...

Having said that, I'm back and have created a new template to celebrate.
Yeah it probably still looks like the old template to you because they haven't worked out replication issues on their servers; but that's ok, it looks like gold to me.

I'm trying out a new blog...

Catch my new blog at WordPress.com

What can I say, if it doesn't work out I'll be back, but I have a good feeling about it so far.

So Holly (not berries, the frozen one) moved to a new blog. I haven't updated my link yet, but you can find her here. I can't say that I blame her, and if they ever fixed their stupid commenting system to allow haloscan or anonymous comments I might just follow her over. For now, I'm stayin here and will have to content myself with a new color scheme.

I finally got around to watching Jarhead, and about five minutes into it decided that it was going to be a flop of a moive. In spite of this I kept watching it waiting for that magic "aha" moment where it would suddenly make sense and reveal some hidden truth about the tragedy of the human condition. Maybe it happened when I fell asleep, maybe it happened when I went to make popcorn, but probably it just didn't happen at all.

O, wait! I guess it did have one hidden truth at the very end, one which I would be only to happy to reveal. The truth is it this movie is so much worse than I though possible, don't even waste your time.