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.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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".

Why the long face?

Molly's a city dog who was getting her first real taste of the country dog life, and I'm telling you she didn't want to get back in that truck when it was time to go.

I'm leaving Japan today, in exactly 93 mintues to be exact. Two years will change a lot of things in a man and I'm interested to relfect on the changes I've seen take place in myself. I had a few close friends here, and leaing them was hard. It's not like when I left Bemidji or Brainers, although that was hard too I knew I'd be back eventually to check in on things. Not so with Japan. We exchanged email addresses and did the handshake man-hug thing and tried not to dwell on the idea that we'd never see eachother ever again.

When I arived at the comand, I was new to the police field, and then somewhere between the 30 man bar brawls, dead bodies, child abusers, more dead bodies, child molesters, rapists, and trying to keep living bodies from becoming dead ones my friends and I suffered together and grew together until one day I looked in the mirror to find that the balding pot-bellied computer geek had been replaced by someone a bit leaner, a bit harder and a bit balder.

I'm through with police work for a while now as my next command is going to be oriented in a slightly different direction. I'm learning the local language already "Shokran Gazillan " and plan to become as fluent as possible throughout my time there. I have this sinking feeling that I'm going to spend more time there than I am supposed to, but right now I'm content to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Valleyfair is going to be open while i'm back in the states!!!
"WHOOOOO'S COMIN WITH ME?!"

Also, my camera broke yesterday while I was taking some shots of Landmark Tower. It's a few years old, and I'm debating now whether to get it fixed and keep it around for a bit or just bite the bullet and get a new one. The pictures (I hope) should be recoverable and will make a nice addition to the "Studying Japan in charcoal and chalk" site that I'm hoping to put together.