Well since this is the weekend and I have not done one of these in awhile this post is going to be all about me.
The first thing that I am excited about is that I won my first Soldier of the Month Board after my third try. I will be getting a COA along with a closer parking spot for a month. Also it gives me a excuse to post a picture of me in my Class A’s.
Oh one thing I wanted to thank this site on was because we look at fake vets I found that AR-670-1 questions where one of my better topics in the board. Speaking of AR-670-1 what badge group does a Combat Action Badge fall into if the Infantry Badges is group one and the Medical Badges are in group two?
Also I am going to use this post as a excuse as a reason to put up a newer picture of my son.
That is him doing a web chat with the Grandparents. He has gotten a lot bigger and stronger since we got to Alaska. He is going to be turning three this December. Were does the time go.
Yeah, it’s my 40th. Hate birthdays because they are generally a disaster, but I am enjoying the benefits of my mid-life crisis with my 11 years junior future child bride, so I have nothing to bitch about. Well, except this fahkin’ test I am taking in T minus 7 days which will be the death of me. For those curious, I expect to be taking it again in February. I simply underestimated the amount of time I would need to study, something Susan has been warning me about for eons. Seriously, 27 damn subjects. Are you kidding me? 6 essay questions, a practical test, and then 200 multi-choice. I will do well on the latter two, but the essays will be the death of me.
Anyway, by way of understanding, on my birthday in the past I have been dumped twice (by the same girl) and had my car stolen. I’ve been beat up, beat someone up, lost my car at a Dead Show, lost my mind at the same show, and suffered a series of other calamities. So, it was no surprise when I logged into Warcraft last night to find that WoW would be down all day today. Of course it will. The one day I set aside to play, and I can’t. Then I get on the net this morning, and one of the first things I see is this:
Um, yeah, thanks Dick. Let me tell you about my goat. When I was a kid I went to my Uncle Dean’s place in Maine. He was uber-rich, although I didn’t know it at the time. He lost his leg as a kid, and my grandparents had a hard time affording prosthetics, so when he got old enough he started working in a prosthetics plant. Anyway, he did really well. At one point someone told me that he owned the largest log cabin in the country to have an indoor pool. Either way, I loved going there because he had a farm of sorts, with pigs, sheep and goats. Somehow we convinced my dad that my brother and I needed a goat, so we got Pepper. Dude, best pet ever. Pepper would walk to the bus stop with us, and while we went to school he would go hang in the corn lots which bordered my house on 2 sides. When we got back he would be waiting for me and we would go play in the sprinklers etc. During the summer he went to camp with us, and pestered folks for Good and Plenty candies, which he had an unwholesome love for.
Anyway, as I grew older and got involved in sports, I spent less time with Pepper, so my Mom, who was a visiting nurse, would take Pepper on her rounds. Anyway, this old blind couple my Mom looked in on took a love to Pepper, so sometimes when we were real busy, Pepper would go stay with the blind people.
Until the day these dipshits tied up Pepper in the kitchen and left the basement door open. Thanks Dicks. So, Pepper died from hanging from some negligent behavior, and I honestly haven’t forgiven those people to this day. So, a big thanks to that douche Alton Brown for bringing up that painful memory first thing this morning. Caro and I are getting a brother or sister for Mosby when we get a house. If Mosby had been a she her name was going to be Pepper Pugglesworth. Anyway, just yesterday Caro torpedoed my idea of getting this Porcupine as a pet, which I thought looked very much like a “Pepper.”
So anyway, if anyone knows where I can get a goat, call me.
On another note, Caro is refusing to make me lobster tonight, on the basis that she didn’t know how to cook it. Which is fine, because she is making her lasagne, which is awesome. But her latest excuse on the lobster cooking (mind you, all you do is boil water and drop them in) is that lobster cooking is clearly a dangerous endeavor, and as proof she offers this:
So I had to go to Pittsburgh yesterday to get my bride’s green card renewed – worst trip ever. Why would a city have two addresses exactly the same ten miles apart? The immigration office was at 800 Penn Avenue, however, when my GPS got me there, it was a used car lot in a ghetto area. When I asked the local operator of a rap music store how that was possible, he told me that there was another matching address across town.
So I went through midday traffic across town. My Garmin GPS kept me driving in circles around the block when I got there trying to steer me onto a street that no longer existed, apparently. Finally, I just parked in a lot and started looking for the immigration office which, it turns out has absolutely no markings, signs or anything else you’d expect a government customer service center to display. And the temperature was anything but temperate.
Anyway, that’s my last trip to Pittsburgh ever. They obviously didn’t want me there, and the feeling is now mutual.
This whole Al Gore-getting-a-divorce thing has me pissed off. He and Tipper “grew apart”…what does that mean? My wife and I married 33 years ago; We met in an elevator on January 15th, 1977 and married in a civil service on April 15th, 1977. We powered through some very difficult times, not the least of which was three teenage girls in the 90s.
We ran out of things to talk about at times. Eleven years ago we were in virtual poverty (something Al Gore hasn’t experienced, I’m sure) when we moved to DC, then took off on our separate careers from our tiny apartment in Northeast.
For more than three years, we didn’t see each other from Sunday night until Friday afternoon each week because of our hours. We piled our money away until, finally, it didn’t make sense for her to work because her wages equaled our taxes, so she quit being a nurse at Walter Reed and we moved to Silver Spring, MD to a bigger and cheaper apartment. I began telecommuting 3 times every week and we were home together all of the time, almost. Still no problems.
This year we took our pile of cash and bought our first house and suddenly we had to take care of stuff landlords always worried about before. Luckily, we had a pile of cash with which to employ the entire state of West Virginia. Neither of us are contemplating divorce.
Divorce is a tool of the young – a selfish tool to perpetuate their youths. (Yeah, I know, so yell at me.)
According to Ace, Gore is divorcing because he had a fling with Laurie David. Is there a bigger skank than Laurie David? That’s what rock purveyors and entertainers do to keep the attention on them – Gore was almost our president, f’Pete’s sake. Personally, I feel loads better about casting my vote for Bush in 2000, don’t you?
To me his current personae is like one of those fiftyish bald guys driving a Corvette with the top down and his ponytail (wrapped around both sides of his head, of course) waving at the college chicks in Georgetown. Grow the fuck up, Al, you’re such a douchebag that it’s splashing on the rest of us.
I was looking at Facebook the other day and saw that the gunner on my old tank is coming home from Afghanistan today… Yah, he re-upped after being out for I don’t know how long and he’s older than his Battalion CO. Anyhow, I saw this over at Theo Spark’s place and was just a little moved. Maybe you’ve seen before but if not, enjoy. Every Soldier/Sailor/Marine/Airman deserves this kind of welcome home….and if you can still see the monitor at the end of the video, check your pulse….you’re probably dead…
Today in my summer session geography class, a disaster the size of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico struck our basement classroom-THE PROJECTOR WASN’T WORKING. Paralysis and panic seized the instructor, who had no training on how to teach a class without a PowerPoint presentation (or on how to write on a whiteboard). She called ASU’s tech support who promised to send someone to the classroom right away to help mitigate this epic emergency. While waiting for the cavalry to come and rescue the class from our PowerPoint deprivation, the instructor rambled incoherently on topics ranging from the World Cup to why she likes Al Gore so much. Finally tech support arrived and immediately pushed one button on the projector which fixed the problem. Tech support than returned to their dungeon fortress to continue playing World of Warcraft and Farmville. The day was saved and learning occurred.
This was a pretty common occurrence during my first semester at ASU. Instructors and professors have become so reliant on PowerPoint to teach a class that when it doesn’t work (which is frequent) they don’t know what to do. I had at least five classes canceled throughout the semester because a projector or computer wasn’t working. My girlfriend told me that it was common when she was at University of Arizona that students would intentionally break the projectors in the hopes that class would be canceled. The problem of over-reliance on PowerPoint presentations is not just confined to academia unfortunately. As many of you know, PowerPoint has infected the US military to the point where almost nothing is done without it. In fact a couple of months ago the New York Times ran article that implied that the overuse of PowerPoint was hindering military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and forced officers to spend hours creating intricate presentations instead of devoting time to actual operational tasks. Some choice quotes from the article:
