To clear up confusion from my last post...

'duty station' is where I'm stationed for work. Currently this is Bahrain.
'Next duty station' means the place I want to work at when I'm done at my current duty station.
I had 2.5 years left when I set foot on Bahrain, so after one year here I'll have one and a half left.
Most billets come in one or two or three year increments. In order to get to my next duty station I will have to choose one year orders and extend for six months or choose two year orders and obliserve (add time to my total overall time in service) for an additional six months in order to fulfill the two year requirement.
originally I did want to stay in Bahrain for the rest of my time in the Navy, but for a number of reasons I've decided to make the most of my remaining active duty time. There are currently four duty stations I'm looking at possibly trying to pick orders to: San Diego, Rhoda Spain, or now this Riverine Group, although I don't know if they'll be up and running soon enough for me to get orders with them before my time is up.
I want orders to San Diego because I hear from everyone who's been there that it's a rough command where you a lot of real cop work and I would actually have a chance to obtain a license through the San Diego P.D. and work with them in a reservist status.
I want orders to Rhoda, Spain because I've never been to Spain and hear it's nice. Also, it's a slower, quite command and I would have a good chance to advance with my schoolwork. Where I currently have little time for academics in Bahrain I would have a lot of time to devote in Rhoda.

Also, I made it the three miles yesterday with only a little bit of trouble.

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Kung Fu Quote Of The Day!!!
"Suck the coffin mushroom now..."
-Unknown

I think I may have found my next duty station.

Also, I have to start running again. :(
I'm in good enough shape that I can do our PRT now without having to worry about it, but the Navy is going to get harder with it's standards pretty soon and I want to be ready when it does. Towards that end everybody I know has been running at least three miles for their PT and although I've been trying to avoiding it, I can feel capitulation right around the corner.

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Kung Fu Quote Of The Day!!!
"You're a bad guy, where's your library card?"
-Unknown

The weather today is awesome! It's only 90 and has such a low humidity that it actually feels like 90!!!
I saw a seashell in this empty lot as I was walking the other day and it struck me as peculiar. I immediately felt a kinship with the thing for we were both obviously foreigners to these sun blasted flats. At any rate I picked it up and brought it home. People here laugh at the though of pocketing anything so worthless as a seashell, but we don't have a whole lot of them where I'm from and I guess you could say it's kind of a novelty.

It looks like I won't be riding a horse any time soon, the weather is just too hot for it right now. Cooler times are just a few months away so I'm holding out hope that a reprieve from this heat is still out there somewhere.

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Kung Fu Quote Of The Day!!!
"Let us not forget to form a team up together and go into the country to inflict the pain of our karate feets on some ass of the giant lizard person."
-Unknown

So I sat in on my first formal counseling session today.
A seaman on my section slept through muster and it was on me to correct the discrepancy. Actually, it was supposed to be on me, but when I notified HT1 (our team leader) that I'd contacted her and she was on her way to muster with us at the office, he decided that he would council her and I would sit in on it. (Since she's a female and he's a male there needed to be a third person in the room to act as an impartial witness for both parties.)

He told me ahead of time that since it was her first time he was just going to "give her the warning" and leave it at that. True to his word he warned the crap out of her. In fact, he warned her so well that if she's late for anything else in the next two months I'll eat my boonie hat.

She really is a good kid, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. At any rate, I've only been with this team for a few days so this gave me an idea now of how he deals with people, and what I can expect from him as far as the overall leadership decision making process.
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Kung Fu Quote Of The Day!!!
"This will be of fine service for you, you bag of the scum. I am sure you will not mind that I remove your manhoods and leave them out on the dessert flour for your aunts to eat."
- Unknown

MA1: "Schaefer! Make sure you see me after guardmount this morning."

that's how my day started.
ok, ok, my day actually started much ealier with a bike ride and weight lifting, but that quote is how my work day officially started.

As it turned out things are good and I was asked to fill in for someone who is on medical leave. It's nice to be thought of, but I informed him that I still had another week before I take the classes that will fully qualify me for the duty they need filled.

He said he'd check into it and call me back.

Some interesting things have been happening to me lately. The appartment I have been waiting on fell through, so now I have to scramble to find something else. That's ok though I'm sure there's something else out there. Also, I may not be on the net as often from now on as my duties have increased and I simply won't have time when I do have access, and won't have access when I do have the time.

Keep smiling,
Ace

I haven't had a lot of free time to post lately as I've been trying to tie up some loose ends. Today was our first day of summer heat. As one contractor put it, summer has finally caught up to us. It isn't the heat so much, (I think it only got up to 105 today)it's the humidity that is on the rise. To date, it's been a dry heat. All that changed today and now we're in for a few months of nastieness.
But I digress...

I picked up a bass the other day for a song, (Ibanez GSR 190) but have to locate an Amp and someone to teach me how to use it. I've fiddled with it a little bit and actually feel like I'm learning something.

Ok, someone else needs this computer so I've got to cut it short.
keep smiling,
Ace

P.S.
Robert the Nazi is dead...

My agent, the landlord and I all came to a mutually beneficial agreement and now my pay won't be jacked up for the next year to come. :D

Also, it's been unusually cool over here the last few days or so and made for great running weather. I was sort of a bum and ran only once, but in my defence the two other times I had planned to were superceded by political protests.
Want to hear the funny part, they weren't even protesting us... Apparently they were mad at the editor of a newspaper, who's shop is right outside the base, for publishing an editorial cartoon of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “manipulating” the results of the recent Iranian elections.

To make a short story long the idea of jogging through an angry mob over here, even if they aren't necessarily angry at me, was more than enough to keep me home for the evening.

I had blueberry pancakes this morning. Not Navy blueberry pancakes either, I'm talking made from scratch with actual berries and everything-they even used real butter and served them with mapleish type syrup-BLUEBERRY PANCAKES!!! There's this place over here called Ricks country cooking, and i've been hearing about it for the past three weeks from everybody. Ok ok, it was a bit expensive, $9 for three six inch cakes and a litre of o.j., but I put some Nina in my discman and savored every expensive bite. They weren't as good as the golden delights my sainted Mums and Pops can produce, but I'd say hands down they come in second.

Also, my agent and I are having issues with my contract. Apparently the landord want's three months rent up front for me to move in. Rent is fairly expensive over here and three months is roughly equivalent to buying a nicely maintained used car. The good news is that I recieve a monthly alotment for the rent, so really I only have to come up with the second and third month in advance and even then there are short term loans I can apply for, the bad part is that for the next year, each month they'll be depositing my alotment and then removing it twice because they forgot that they took it the first time. Suffice it to say taking a loan from your boss/payroll provider/accountant/sole means of financial support is a daunting thing to undertake, and requires a tremendous ammount of trust that no paperwork will get misplaced and nothing will get screwed up.

I graduated today!
I guess all good things must come to an end and so it's time for me to once more join the ranks of productive personell and pull my weight around here. I got to meet my section leader and he seems like a pretty decent sort. I think I'm going to like it out here. Everything is much more high speed low drag and the sense that what we are doing really matters pervades every aspect of life.

My textbooks have arrived! I haven't actually signed up for the classes yet, but since I'm sure they'll approve my chit for school, and since I wasn't sure how long it took to get the books, I send off for them ahead of time.

We spent a lot of time in the sun today working on some training evolutions but had to call it short when people began to show the signs of heat fatigue. I'm not in the greatest shape in the world, but I have managed to run a couple of times per week while out here and I think that helped. As I'm typing this it's 1807 and still 95, but as soon as I'm back at the hotel I want to take a run down along the beach to see if there are any open apartments back up in there.
I think I found the place I want to move into, the problem is that it isn't empty quite yet and won't be for another month or so. That works out ok with the Navy, I don't have to have a permanent home until the begining of August, but I hate to think about waiting that long for the place simply because someone else could still get it before I do and then I'll have two weeks left to start from scratch and find somewhere I love. The place I want is in the same building as my friend from Japan, has two huge bedrooms, a huge kitchen, and two bathrooms, but most importantly of all it comes with a huge private patio overlooking empty sand lots, a whole lot of highrise apartment complexes and about 75 feet of oceanfront. Call me a geek, but I can't wait to do late afternoon homework out there.

In a related story, Grapefruit May Make Women Seem Younger...

Everyone out here speaks english or spanish or some other non-arabic tongue.
I'm trying to learn Arabic and thus far the only people I've found to practice on are the guy's selling five dollar rollexs and nikke shoes.

Still, there's a class that I'm checking into and will probably start attending here in a few weeks that's supposed to teach basic vocabulary and culture. As much as I'm looking forward to that I can't wait to get into my own place.
One more month... one more month... one more month...

I'm going to go horse back riding next weekend!
It would have been in just a couple of days, but my checkin process was set back a bit so I have to come in this Saturday morning to makeup a few classes. That's ok though next week isn't so far away.

Also, I've been running on base here but never off until today. It was really an interesting experience. Halfway home this group of construction workers about ten stories up on this new highrise started hollering and giving us the thumbs up. I looked up to see that they don't use any safety gear here. I thought for sure this one guy would lose his balance and fall off he was waving at us and hollering so hard. It brought to mind something someone told me earlier today, "not everyone here is a F@#%!ng terrorist, most of these people are really quite nice..." at any rate, it made me smile.

So there's this club at my hotel that's so loud you have to yell in the rooms just to have a conversation with someone. By rooms I mean your hotel room, and by club I mean booty shakin, wall pounding, thankfully shuts down at 12:30, do they seriously expect anybody to sleep in these rooms ever, type club.

I guess that's just how they do it over here. I've already requested to change rooms once and that didn't really help the problem although the old wet towel under the door seems to have helped a bit. At any rate I'm only here for another month so it shouldn't be too bad.

Holy crap is it hot here.
We were in the transport on the way to the hotel last night at about 1900 and the outside temp was 105!!! Don't know how accurate that was, but still it's hot out here.
The gym out here is supposed to be pretty nice, but I haven't had a chance to get to it yet. Altogether this is shaping up to be a nice place with the possibility that I'll actually get to rotate out on time.

This week has been pretty nice! I was able to go and visit a number of friends in addition to just sort of chilling out and taking it easy. I'll be back through the state one more time on Memorial Day to catch up with one last friend and say goodbye to a few others before taking off.

Here's a pic of my Granny.

My kid brother finally got hitched!
What could be better than that you ask.
Decorating his car of course!!!

(I know it's spelled wrong, that wasn't me)

My Mums!



ALSO,
BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND...

The Story Of The Story Of My Camera..

Things to remember when viewing this file.
* The file is 1.04 mb and my take a moment to download.
* It plays with either windows media or divix.
* My parents are so cool I would have just given the camera to them if they'd have asked.

The last couple of days have been pretty busy. My brother is getting married this weekend and since I have time off I volunteered to lend a hand in setting things up. 46 banquet tables and 350something chairs later the U-Haul was loaded and ready ready to truck on out to the reception site for unloading.

Believe me when I say there was nothing gentle about the ride. That poor poor truck, I think we might have broken it.

On a much more enjoyable note, I was able to help build the dance floor for the wedding!

CanMan, MadChatthew, Holly and I all played canasta the other night. CanMan didn't want me on his team cause it's been a while since I played and he he thought I wouldn't be any good, so MadChatthew took me as a partner. CanMan was partially right, but it turns out that MadChatthew was good enough to compensate and managed to capitalize on their one mistake and carry "US" to victory.

A picture speaks a thousand words,
MadChattew and I are "US", CanMan and Holly are "Them".