I have been so congested lately. Barb, too, and to a lesser degree, Tim. Must be the resiliance of youth. I wake up in the middle of the night, hardly able to breathe. A steamy shower loosens my sinuses up so that I can breathe for about eight hours, but it usually comes back. I don't know what it is about this season, but I won't miss it.
Speaking of physical afflictions, one of the airmen came to me the other night and asked, "Can I go home?"
I blinked at her. It was about five o'clock, everybody was getting antsy about leaving in about ninety minutes, but so far none of the airmen had brazenly approached me and asked to go home. Still, I wasn't surprised too much. "Excuse me?" I asked her. "Can you go home?"
I was hoping for a little amplifying data, and I got it. "I've got a migrane," she said, a bit hesitantly.
"Oh," I said. "A migrane." I was about to suggest a trip to the clinic after work, when she provided a bit more information.
"When it starts to get bad like this, I can't see."
"You can't see?" I repeated. I frequently repeat the things the airmen say, in italics, to make sure I'm hearing things right. Must be old age. "Have you asked a doctor about this?"
I thought it was a sensable question, but she rolled her eyes, as if that was an unreasonable idea. "No."
"Well, I think maybe you should," I said, even though I figured she probably wouldn't. She was only twenty or twenty-one years old. Practically indestructable. "Have you found somebody to drive you home?"
She rolled her eyes again. "I don't think I need somebody to drive me home."
"I thought you said you can't see," I pointed out, trying, but completely failing, not to talk in italics. I turned to the guy in charge of operations, and had him find somebody to take her home. I was apparently making a much bigger deal out of it than she wanted, but I didn't care at that point.
I have to get Sean's travel orders ready so he can hop back over her for a visit this summer. He's been away almost a year now. Can you believe it? I can't. Barb can't. He calls every week, and e-mails a bit less than that, and we all miss him in between, but still it hardly seems possible that he's been gone since last June. Or was it July? It really seems like no time at all. As I'm sure the five or six weeks he gets to spend with us will pass in a flash.
It's Thursday morning here, and time for some snow. We're having winter in reverse. January and February were almost entirely snowless; looks like March is going to try to make up for it. Not trying very hard, but trying nonetheless.
I was just counting the days until Barb's graduation, and it occurred to me that Sean's going to miss it by just a few weeks. I'll have to take lots of pictures so he gets to see the goings-on. She's very, very excited — well, relieved is the more accurate word — to finally be putting all this schoolwork to bed. I'm not sure she'll know what to do with herself after this term is over and she doesn't have to work in her little schoolhouse from sunup until bed time. The workload drives her crazy, but who knows what the sudden stop will do to her?
Hoping to do a little furniture reconnaissance next week to try to get an idea for the kind of stuff — futon, bedstand, maybe a light — we can get Sean for his visit this summer, so he's not sleeping on a mat under an army blanket like a back-alley mongrel. Then again, he'd probably like that. But availability should be no problem, it's just a matter of getting off my ass to visit the stores. I know where they are, I just haven't been in a while, so I'm not sure what they've got. Blahblahblahblah.....
My clock won't work. I have two now, but the one hanging in the entrance to the residence will occassionally stop, for reasons I can't figure out. Sometimes it stops at midnight, some times it stops at half-past; I used to think it stopped when it was time to chime, but it also stops at entirely random times, from what I can tell. I don't even try to fiddle with it any longer, I just give the pendulum a nod on the way past, and it picks up and ticks on, but it never shows the right time any more.
I got another one and put it in the office. It'll be right over Sean's head. I suppose I'll have to move it. The chime's pretty loud, but we close the door at night to keep the cats out of there, so it doesn't normally bother anybody.
My Broca's area is starting to hurt from all this nattering. And I gotta pee.
I'm not sure what's going to happen to me at work this week. I finished training my replacement this afternoon, and he's supposed to get his final evaulation Monday night, so by Tuesday morning I should get a phone call ... but they're not especially good about communication up there at the hill, so I might not find out I'm done with my old job until I show up at it Wednesday morning. And then again, I might not be done. This is all as confusing as it sounds.
We got a ton of snow here last night — that's what everybody says, anyway. Actually, we got six inches. It looked like this:
That's the street outside my bedroom window at about nine o'clock last night. When I drove to work this morning, it was impossible to tell where the edges of the street were because the snow plows hadn't been through the housing areas yet. That's why they've got snow poles stuck in the ground along the curbs. You can see some in the photo to the right of our van. They have reflective tape wrapped around the tops. The neighborhood kids usually pull them up within days after the maintenance crews stick them in the ground. Some neighborhoods seem to be worse than others.
You can sort of tell in the picture that the plow hadn't been along.
The snow was about four inches deep all over the van this morning, and I had to dig my way up the steps to the parking spot, so I was running a little behind when I got to work this morning. No big deal; I started pretty early, because I knew I'd be digging and brushing and scraping. I keep a handy shovel in the van just for that kind of work, and I let the engine run while I was shoveling, so I not only got a morning workout and warmed myself up, I had a toasty ride to work. (He who shovels his own parking space while the engine runs is twice warmed.) Sometimes what seems bad at first turns out to be all right in the end.
I can't believe Tim's not in here, begging to use the computer to play Sims. I finally bought a copy of Microsoft Windows XP for the computer I put together, so it's running in top form now and not using the crappy old software I had on it, and so Tim's very happily playing all sorts of games and downloading that rap crap and instant messaging all his friends, who live right down the street and can just as easily pick up the phone. In fact, they call him and ask him to get on the instant messenger &mdash instead of talking to him on the phone. Don't ask me what sense that makes; I guess it's just fun. @Nd ThEy @Ll TyPe L!ke tH!s &mdash it's almost as funny as the baggy pants.
Have you been to see The Passion Of The Christ yet? What do you think of all the buzz? You'd think nobody ever made a movie about Jesus Christ before. I don't know if I'll be able to watch it. There's so much talk about the gore that I think it'll just remind me of that movie Mel Gibson did about that Scots hero (William Wallace?), which was so gory that it made me giggle, which might seem odd, but it was so outlandishly gory and violent that it went over the top in a Monty Python way, so I couldn't take it seriously for a second. People are pretty serious about the Jesus movie, though; I'm worried I'll get stoned if I break out in giggles watching that one, so I'll probably have to wait for it to come out in video.
I'm going downstairs to watch TV with the family unit now.
Time to catch up on some drivel:
Martha Stewart — I'll be perfectly honest about this, even though I know you're probably not going to like it: If I could make the mass media stop talking about Martha by chopping her into tiny little pieces and feeding her to pond carp, I'd cheerfully abandon all my principles and do that. The Martha Stewart trial has pushed me beyond the edge, and has taught me that, at my core, I'm an amoral beast, a danger to myself and to certain others, particulary Fox News reporters.
Michael Jackson — same as above.
Fox News — Just about the only television news program we get here, besides the occassional blurb from CNN. There's a reason that programs like these are on the air — it's because people are watching them. These people must be found and deported to Mars.
Mars — seems to have lost its shine. The only mention of it on television is the jokes that Letterman makes. I have to dredge the internet for the latest news and pictures.
The War Record of Bush/Kerry — This is news?
Well, that's enough about you, let's talk about me for a while: In Misawa, after months of balmy temps and clear sunshine, we're getting the snow that we were promised all summer. It's not a lot of snow, about six inches or so, although to listen to some of the people you'd think we were in the farthest reaches of Siberian Russia. There was a run on bottled water and bread at the commissary last week, and you may hear reportst that some people have prematurely resorted to cannibalism, but try not to panic. We're okay.
You can see photos of our non-winter on the Misawa Snow Cam. Yes, I have so little meaningful work to do that I post photos of snowfall on my own lame internet web site. Well, what do you do? I'll bet you golf.
Nuts. I'm stuck. More later.
We saw "Lost In Translation" tonight, and it was every bit as good as the critics said it was, or at least I thought so.
I can't wait to go to Tokyo now.
I got that day job. 'Ray!
I walked onto the ops floor this morning at the usual time and Chris, the guy I was training to replace me, was sitting beside Mike, the guy I was supposed to relieve of duty.
I looked a little crosseyed at Chris. He gave me a thumbs up, said he passed his evaluation with flying colors.
"What am I doing here, then?" I asked.
So after I congratulated him, and we got Mike's pass-down and packed him out the door, I went up to J32, the day office in charge of operations, and I asked my boss when I could leave to go work in J4, the shop I was supposed to get a day job in.
"You can go right now," he said.
And I bolted like a scared rabbit.
I spent the whole day in J4 with Gary, the guy whose job I'm taking over. He and the LtCol had a little talk with me about excellence sustainment, and then Gary showed me a lot of PowerPoint slides that made me drowsy, but mostly we sat around and shot the bull. So it might turn out to be the kind of do-nothing management day job I like to make fun of, but at least it's not a twelve-hour mid watch doing nothing.
But actually, I know it's not a do-nothing job. J4 is in charge of getting toilet paper and soap and pens and printer cartridges. In a way, my job is a lot more productive that anybody else's in the building, except what the guys in building maintenance do.
But that's just gravy. I'm not standing twelve-hour watches. Today, I cut out of work at three o'clock, in order to make it to PT at 1600. I was home by five o'clock, and Barb finished her final exam early, so we got to sit down to a real dinner together at a normal hour, when usually I wouldn't have walked through the door until about seven.
I report to work at seven-thirty in the morning. Not six. Tonight, I will set my alarm for six o'clock, not four-thirty. I'll be wide awake at four-thirty anyway, but then I can chuckled to myself, roll up tight in the covers, and go back to sleep for an hour and a half. Or just lay there. Even just laying there wide awake would be great.
I get a lunch. I could even leave the building and have lunch in the cafe on base, if I wanted to.
If I can just make this last until I PCS, I'll be good.
Today was The Day I Should Not Travel. I wanted to go down to Hachinohe just to explore, and left the house at about nine-forty. I thought it might be a nice idea to take the train down, just for fun. When I got to the station, it turned out that the train wouldn't leave until ten-thirty, so I bought my tickets from a machine, then strolled around the neighborhood for about fifteen minutes.
When I got back, I had to wait about ten or fifteen minutes before they opened the gates to the platform. The guy at the window stamped my ticket, and I went down to wait with the other people. We'd been standing there just three minutes or so when a uniformed JR employee came down, asked to see everybody's tickets, and then shooed all of us back up into the station.
I waited about five minutes for somebody to explain what was going on, then walked up to the guy at the window and showed him my tickets. "Hachinohe?" I asked. He grunted, "Ten minutes." Okay, I'll wait.
Pretty soon the gate opened up again, and people started filing down to the platform, but when I showed the guy my tickets, he looked at them and asked, "Express?" I said yes, which turned out to be the wrong answer. He said something about changing them, and motioned toward the ticket office.
I'd been waiting at the train station about an hour now, and I had no idea why this guy wanted me to change my tickets. I was going to take the train down just for the fun of it, and this wasn't much fun any longer, so I got in line to ask about getting my money refunded. When the guy at the gate saw me get into line, he came and got me, motioned to the ticket machine, and said, "Please," so I followed him. In the process of showing me how to work it, I gathered that I was supposed to have tickets to the express train, and I had tickets to the local instead. He punched up the controls for the right tickets and asked me to put money in. "What do I do with these?" I asked, showing him the local tickets I'd already pain about ten bucks for. He could only say, "Please," motioning at the machine, so I said thank-you, and got back in line for the ticket counter.
Here's a useful Japanese phrase for you: moh-nee bakoo -- money back. I asked for a refund, figuring that, even if he didn't know English, which he didn't, he'd probably heard that one word before. No. He grunted and shook his head at every word and phrase I tried, but when I asked for my money back, the light came on. "Monibaku?" he asked, and he didn't say it in a friendly way at all. In fact, he was very obviously unhappy with giving me my money back, but he did it anyway.
The episode left me in a pretty foul mood, so I went back into town to cheer myself up at the bakery. There's one on the main street that sells some really delicious stuff, and the women behind the counter are always so friendly; a trip there always lifts my spirits. I went home with some lip-smacking sweets and a slice of the nutty bread I love so much.
In the afternoon, I went to the BX for just three items -- and found none of them. No trace at all. I went back home, settled down with a book, and resolved to read and have a nap. The Fates obviously didn't want me to go anywhere today.
I'm still getting lots of crap e-mail, still scanning my computer for viruses, and still coming up empty-handed with no clue as to how these things are getting in and out without setting off the whistles and bells on my anti-virus software. Computer were supposed to make life so much easier.
I was just watching "Looking for Deborah Winger," a documentary about women actors (they didn't call themselves actresses) in movies, which was actually pretty good. The title comes from the fact that Winger retired from films, opting instead to lead a private life as she wasn't at all happy with the demands Hollywood film makers made of her. Rosanna Arquette, who made the documentary, sat down and filmed frank dinner conversations with a whole slew of actresses (I said the word!), which turned out to be very introspective. No gazing out windows, though.
I also rented "Matchstick Men," which we all watched last night. Lots of fun.
The latest and greatest war of words at work has to do with parking spaces. The reserved ones, to be particular. There's a small lot right out front, and another slightly larger one about twenty yards further away, that has people back-stabbing like never before. And there' s also the few spots along the curb in the main parking lot, which used to be held for the winners of Airman of the Quarter or Sailor of the Year. Pregnant mommies are getting these spots at the BX and shopette, and they're ready to knock off returning war vets to get them at the MSOC.
Has there ever been a workplace that hasn't fought over who gets a reserved parking space? And what's the magic, anyway? When I was stationed at Denver, the war over reserved parking spots was so viscious it was not to be believed. They weren't any closer to the entrance, any easier to get to at all, but having a reserved spot was some kind of cool that was apparently worth slandering your best friend, your wife, your mother. I knocked off all three for a spot in the far corner.
The only way to decide it, of course, is to print up the parking passes for the reserved spaces, put them in a child's inflatable wading pool, drown them in BBQ sauce, and invite anybody that wants one to strip to their skivvies and fight for one and only one, no holds barred, no quarter given. And it should be televised basewide. I'm just dreaming.
Story Time With Uncle Knuckles
These are the days you might fill with laughter until you break
-Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs
For several summers in the early 90s, our family met at a cottage near Sturgeon Bay for a week-long get together, during which we would eat barbeque, play tag with water guns during the day, board games into the night, and especially to just sit around and catch up talking. It was a wonderful way to pass a week in the summer.
Barb, Tim, Sean and I had just done a tour in Germany. Tim was born there, and Sean didn't much remember the States. He especially didn't know fishing. The cottage came with the use of the fishing boat, the docks, the poles and tackle, anything we needed besides worms, which I bought a pail of at the tavern just down the road, and one evening, just before nightfall, I took Sean out to catch a mess of rock bass. A couple days later, Barb spent almost a whole day on the dock with Tim, reeling in a passing school of perch, one by one. It was fishing at its best.
Pete, my brother, was there with us, and one day he and I took the boat out -- I can't remember where we went or who we took with us, except that Sean was one of the passengers. When we came back, Sean stood on the dock waiting as we tied the boat up. He was still wearing a life vest, and said something about jumping in the water, which he knew was only about three feet deep there.
Because Pete and I were busy with the boat, and because we didn't believe for a second that he would actually jump in, we were pretty dismissive about his dare. "Do you want me to jump in?" he taunted, or something like that, and we answered, "Whatever," without looking over our shoulders. "I mean it! I'll do it!" he kept saying, "Do you dare me?" And similar blowhard hot air.
I want to make absolute certain that you understand that Pete and I were hardly paying attention to him, which is not the most sterling endorsement of my fatherhood, I know, but I did not, and I say again, DID NOT ever dare him, and neither did Pete. What one of us said (it's never become clear whether Pete or I said it), and this is pretty close to verbatim, was something like, "Oh, yeh, right, we're going to dare you," because, you know, his mother was just an eyeshot away. We're no fools.
But Sean has never missed an opportunity to get us into trouble, if he could help it, so he shouted, "Okay, you dared me! You dared me!" and we laughed and laughed at him until we heard the unmistakable sound of a seven-year-old cannonballing, fully-dressed, into the water.
It was not, as I said, more than three feet deep under the docks, so he didn't even get his hair wet, and although we quickly grabbed him and hoisted him back out, he was never in any danger -- until he squelched his way back up to the cottage, where his mother got a look at him.
I was halfway between the docks and the cottage when I heard her go off like a steam whistle. No, wait -- I've heard steam whistles, and they weren't nearly as loud or scary. I've rarely seen her so mad. And I've never been sure what she was so mad about. I mean, he was only wet; it's not like he jumped in Jell-O or mud. And he wasn't really very wet, at that. But she was steaming mad, no question about that. And not just at Sean. Somehow, I caught it, too, because it came out that I had dared him to jump in. Or Pete had. Since it wasn't clear who had dared him, we both ended up in hot water.
The episode has become one of those incidents that gets hauled out whenever Barb needs to hit me in the face with, "It was just like that time you dared Sean to jump in the lake!" It's on my permanent record. And so, because it's hardly worth denying any longer, I usually just roll my eyes and agree with her.
It was worth it, though, because I haven't mentioned until now how it was funny as hell. We really didn't expect him to jump in, and we really weren't paying him any mind at all, so when the sound of his skinny butt hitting the water caught our attention, we just stood there staring for a moment, pointing and laughing in disbelief that he'd actually done it, before we grabbed him by the scruff and pulled him in.
These are days you'll remember
Never before and never since, I promise
Will the whole world be warm as this
And as you feel it, you'll know it's true
That you are blessed and lucky
"Security experts downplayed the danger of a Trojan horse program named Phatbot that uses peer to peer (P-to-P) technology to create a network of infected zombies for carrying out attacks or spreading malicious code." (WebPro News)
You know, I used to read prose like this when it was still science fiction, so when I come across it and it's supposed to have something to do with real life, I can't help but smirk.
I found a baseball cap on e-bay with the name of Georgetown university embroidered across the front. I don't wear baseball caps, but it was stupid cheap, and I know somebody who impressed the hell out of me by getting in to Georgetown, so I bought it.
Barb also got me a Starter jacket in Georgetown colors with the Big Dawg on the back and "Georgetown" across the pocket in front. It's real warm, and it looks pretty nifty.
I get into lots of guy conversations when I wear this stuff, which is just about all the time. "So how's Georgetown doing in the playoffs?" a guy in line at the shopette will ask me, and I'll shrug my shoulders. "I couldn't tell you." He'll laugh, like I'm pulling his leg, and try again: "I heard they fired coach Joe Scmoe." I'll laugh right back at him and say, "I don't have the slightest idea." Then the guy will point at my hat and ask, "What, you just like the hat and coat or something?" And that's when I get to say, "No, my son goes to school at Georgetown." This never fails to kill the conversation dead. I might as well have pulled a dead rat out of my pocket and asked if he wanted a bite.
So, if you're trying to break into a guy conversation, take note: Talking about a bunch of guys you don't know who play b-ball for Georgetown is apparently gripping stuff, but if you actually know somebody at Georgetown, don't mention it. Unless you're in a hurry to get out of the shopette.
We got a call this morning from the assistant vice principal, who was talking to Tim in her office about trading spitballs in class with one of his anarchist friends. Just one, though; no bystanders involved, so she was a bit lenient when it came to meteing out justice, letting him off with just a warning. Tim's mother, on the other hand, may not be so entirely forgiving. I feel a pound of flesh may be involved.
Then he got out of school early, with the rest of his peeps, and they stood around on the front stoop, whooping and hollaring at the tops of their lungs. We were supposed to go bowling, but when we got there, the place was filled by a little more than a hundred people who were there for what we in the military term an "official function," which in normal language means "Friday afternoon off from work." If only I could wind up in a shop like that.
So we'll probably have to try again later this evening, even though I hate going to the bowling alley in the evenings. They've got a forty-million-watt twenty-one channel stereo sound system down there, and if it's not cranked up to within a whisker of its loudest setting, they apparently feel that they're not getting their money's worth out of it.
In another age, this wouldn't have bothered me, but I just can't connect with what kids are listening to any more. I was staying with it up until about five years ago — okay, maybe it was more like ten — but now it's so completely out of whack with the musical lobes of my brain that I not only don't want to hear it, I don't want anybody else to hear it, either. Perhaps a Constitutional amendment is in order.
Much Later ...
The party finally broke up at the bowling alley, so we spent about an hour and a half there, goofing around. Tim started off strong, then began to experiment with his game by trying to put a spin on the ball, and his score suffered for it. Barb's game went downhill for other reasons, but none of us could figure it out. My score was pretty good all three games, but it wasn't me, it was the beer. Even Barb agrees with that.
I thought you might enjoy a couple mpegs we shot -- the first one is Barb, the second is Tim, and the third is me. I'm the one who got the strike. Not that I'm proud or anything.
I watched Cowboy Bebop after we got back, a Japanese cartoon. I'd just about given up on anime, but I decided to give this one a shot after I'd seen a jazzy music video made up of clips from the movie. Not bad. Visually, it was gorgeous. Technically, it was directed with a lot of flair and imagination. I thought the scrip was a bit careworn, even predictable, but overall, the movie didn't disappoint. Worth a look.
Not a day off for me as you might expect, but instead a Saturday on which I will work from noon until fourish, at the behest of a coworker who is also a softball coach for a local boys' team. That's why I was free from work most of the day Friday — compensatory time-off, I love it.
While we were in the aisle of the commissary where they sold all the various lavatory supplies, Tim asked for help picking out shaving supplies. I'd guess he finally got sick of the ribbing from his buds about all the peach fuzz on his face; that's when I finally took up shaving. But I couldn't do much to help him out; I'm still shaving in the shower with nothing but a bar of soap and the same two-bladed cartridge razors that I started using in 1980. I mean, two blades? Come on! And I didn't have a clue about shaving cream. So he picked out what looked cool. Why not?
The upstairs bathroom is the only room in the house where the switch for the overhead light is outside the room, just beside the door. I've tried to cipher this one out — it hasn't kept me awake nights or anything, but I've given it a lot of thought, anyway — and I can't figure it out. What possible motive could the architect have had for putting it out there? There's no lack of wall space inside the bathroom. He wasn't worried about a shock hazard, since there's a light over the sink, and the switch is right over the sink.
The only reason I can think of, and I only thought of this because I was an eight-year-old boy not long ago, is that you could turn the lights off on somebody — like your mother or your wife — while she was sitting on the pot. Isn't it just like a guy to think of that?
Did you ever lock the door on your way into a public toilet stall and wonder: Who was the last person in here? This thought teases me when I use the toilets at work, largely because I've been here two years, so I know most of the people and have a passing familiarity with their habits.
It's kind of a weird game, but surprisingly easy to play. I can eliminate the people who are not on watch that day, which takes out almost a hundred names.
I can eliminate almost all of the women, but I have been surprised in the past, and a few of them are pretty daring, so I leave nothing to chance.
If I've pared the list down to just a few dozen (I'm usually not in there that long, but sometimes I need the distraction), I try to find ways to eliminate people who have well-known hygiene issues, although by the time I get to this stage of the game it's just not much fun any longer, and I tend to give up.
and now...
Story Time with Uncle Knuckles
In basic training, everybody was assigned to some kind of extra duty. If you were really lucky, it would be something like lining the shoes up, or dusting the floor, but if you were really unlucky, you'd get stuck with something like cleaning the crappers. I got unlucky.
Laundry detail is one of those extra duties that sounds like it should be fairly simple and relatively painless, but think about it for two seconds: First of all, you've got to keep all the laundry for fifty guys sorted in some way, because all the collection, washing, drying, and returning the clothes has to be done in the space of about ninety minutes. And that's when your sergeant's being generous.
Second of all, you're handling the dirty clothes of about fifty guys, and in every flight, there's at least a half-dozen guys who have maybe heard of hygiene, but never learned the basics. I'll leave it at that.
The day you arrive at Lackland, at about two o'clock in the morning, and the whole next day, you and everybody in your flight are known as "rainbows," because you're all still in your relatively colorful street clothes. On the third day of basic training, we were "pickled*," or issued a set of olive drab fatigues, which we wore for the next six weeks. Because I drew the short stick, I got to make sure everybody's government issue clothing was clean.
Nobody did anything alone in basic; we did everything in twos. For the laundry detail, I got paired with a Gomer who never did learn to march in step with the rest of the flight. His bobbing head attracted the immediate attention of the sergeant, who nicknamed him "Omaha," the city he was from. On the third night of basic training, the night after we were issued our uniforms, Omaha and I took them down to the laundry, dumped them into machines, and stood waiting for the wash cycle to end. This detail would be a piece of cake, I remember thinking to myself.
While the clothes were washing, a runner came in from the orderly room and ordered me to report to the desk sergeant. I can't remember what that was about, but I do remember that he had to chew my ass for a while, and by the time I got back to the laundry, Omaha had put the clothes in the dryer. Into one drier.
Picture it: We had all the white underclothes, green fatigues, and wooly black socks of fifty guys tumbling around in one drier. Well, not tumbling so much as just sort of rotating around their own center of gravity in one huge, damp mass.
"What the hell did you do that for!?" I probably shrieked more than asked Omaha, stopped the drier, and tried to sort things out. But it was no use. Even though everybody had marked their underwear, it was impossible to sort all that crap in the short time we had, so we concentrated instead on getting all the dark clothes in one drier, all the white underwear in another. And prayed.
When we got back to the squad bays, everybody was pissed at us because their clothes were all mixed up, and we were crawling between our bunks after lights out with flashlights in our armpits trading found shorts and socks. It was crazy. But it was nothing compared to the next morning.
After breakfast, we went back to our bay to make our beds, and the sergeant bellowed for Omaha and me to come to his office. We'd barely made our reporting statement when he barked, "WHAT THE FLOP HAPPENED TO THE LAUNDRY?**"
Oh, crap.
My fourth day in the military, my second chewing out. The sergeant chews you out in the first five minutes he sees you, to be completely accurate, but everybody gets that — it's a very impersonal attention, almost a warm welcome compared to what you get in the next six weeks.
I thought of myself as a pretty smart guy up to now. Couldn't even do laundry to keep out of trouble. Turns out, though, that smart guys know fear. Omaha, on the other hand, was taking it in stride.
While I was still trying to figure out how to respond to the sergeant's question, Omaha calmly answered, "Sir, I do not know how the laundry got messed up. I not only had the laundry sorted in alphabetical, but chronological order ..."
Huh?
And the look on the sergeant's face said, Huh? And before Omaha could utter another word of nonsense, he barked, "GET THE FLUB OUTTA HERE!"
That day, while we were getting our heads shaved, a sergeant came in and asked us all if any of us could play a musical instrument. I enthusiastically waved my hand in the air, having been tipped to the correct answer to this question by my dad, and I was transfered to the drum & bugle corps before the week ended — and that's how I got out of laundry detail and away from Omaha.
*At the end of our first week of basic training, we were "canned" — labeled with a name tape over our right pockets, and a tape that said "US Air Force" over our left pocket.
**No, he didn't say "flop," but you know what he said, so I don't feel a need to get literal.
Today was that first miraculous day of summer when the I walked — strolled, really — from my car, across the parking lot, to work, without my jacket.
I love this day. I wait for it ever so patiently. Sometimes the spring brings a day that is almost this day, but not quite, and I have to be careful, because if I let myself get duped by that day, I fall into a monster funk when the weather turns to snow for a week, or something equally depressing.
But this day is different. Even if it snows tomorrow, it'll just be a fluke. Nothing can take the tonic-like effect this day brings.
Now that milder weather is here, I am considering riding my bike to work again, which is even easier for me to do because I've got a day job with regular hours that start after the sun comes up and end before the sun goes down. When you spend all day in a building with no windows, you learn to appreciate the little things.
Which is precisely why I feel caught between a rock and a hard place. The same hours that would make biking to work so easy will also keep me from taking a sit-down lunch at home with my lovely wife, which is also a pretty nice perq of having a day job. But it would be just about impossible for me to bike home and back to work during my lunch hour, and still have time to do anything but wolf down a quick bite to eat.
Yeh, yeh, I know — some people are never satisfied.
Today I bring you, for the sheer fun of it, YELL, a chocolate bar. In Japanese it's just "eh-ru," but in English, it realizes the full potential of being lost in translation, and becomes YELL.
I'm absolutely giddy about this new find. I wasn't even looking for it, but when I found it, I could hardly stop myself from running through the grocery store, looking for Barb, so that I could shove it in her face and boom, "YELL!" in my most emphatic baritone voice. People might have stared at me. I don't know, I was having too much fun.
I decree that all candy should be this confusingly named, so that everybody can point and laugh.
I wasn't going to weigh in on what Fox News, using the most refined traditions of journalism, is calling "The 9/11 Flap," because it makes me feel the same way that driving non-stop across Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota makes my butt feel — painfully numb. If that sounds like an oxymoron to you, it just means you've never driven across Nebraska the long way.
But even though turning on the news these days almost makes me wince, because nine stories out of ten are about supposedly grown men and women calling each other names like a bunch of whiny playground nerds, I still flip across the channels and troll the web sites for that tenth story that turns out to be a jewel
My favorite is the "news" story that Americans are fatsos, really huge porkers, fat almost beyond measurement. I mean, holy crap! You wouldn't believe how really humungous Americans can get! At least, that's what CNN keeps telling me, twice an hour, all week long. And while they're telling me just how jaw-droppingly huge Americans are, they put a clip of some poor tubbo's big old belly or wobbly butt.
If that were your belly CNN was using as the definitive example of the obese American, would that be your wake-up call to lose some weight? Or would you instead feel that you've finally arrived? Just wondering.
Circuit training at PT tonight; fourteen stations, eight circuits of various crunches, lunges, squats, push-ups, dips, and similar torture that made me grovel for a quick ending. Honestly, I groveled. I never knew real grovelling until we started doing circuit training.
The funny thing about circuit training is, the exercises that looked at first to be the easiest have consistently kicked my butt harder than any three-mile run. They've got us doing a back exercise called "Superman." I just have to lay on my belly with my arms and legs lifted off the floor for about twenty seconds. By my fourth time around the circuit, I cry like a baby when I get to "Superman," just literally weep and gibber for mercy. And the "Plank," where all I have to do is prop myself up on the tips of my toes and elbows — I end up shaking and bending and collapsing into a puddle of jelly. I'm a pathetic lightweight.
When we PT, the monitor puts some hip-hop on a boom box and cranks up the volume, presumably so the sound of the old farts huffing and moaning and crying won't demoralize the airmen. Here's a little hip-hop medley:
oh yeh ohyehohyeh oh yeh
oh yeh ohyehohyeh oh yeh
let's get it on, let's get it on
oh yeh
getyer freek on
oh yeh
get it on, let's get it on
getyer freek on
oh yeh
hatchie whatchie doodah wattah winnah
sistah
oh yeh
getyer freek on, getyer freek on
free freek getyer freek on
oh yeh
broadah gonnar muddahr hommer witter lobber
oh yeh
let's get it on, let's get it on
ohyeh ohyeh yeh yeh oh
oh oh oh
oh
oh oh oh
yeh
I don't get hip-hop, but when you write it out, it's just Paul McCartney all over again, except you can't understand ninety percent of the words.
I don't know how to segue into suicide bombers from that, so I'll just get right to it:
The adolescent suicide bomber who was caught by the Israelis told a BBC correspondent that he did it because some guy gave him the vest packed with explosives and told him that, if he matyred himself, he'd go to paradise, where he'd get 72 virgins.
Up to now, I thought that was a tired, racist joke. Assuming for the sake of argument that the BBC translated it right, I've got to ask: If you're going to blow yourself up for a paradise and sex, wouldn't you hold out for 72 world-wise women of easy virtue, instead of virgins?
One guy I know said, You could teach them whatever you wanted. Well, I've got a pretty good imagination, but I'm not ashamed to say I know it wouldn't come close to a cathouse full of experience.
In today's news, a suicide bomber blew up a little too early, killing only himself and not even so much as wounding anybody else. So I'm wondering: Does he still go to paradise and get the virgins? I mean, is it really matyrdom if he blows just himself up? He could've done that in his own back yard. "Sorry, went off too soon, not a matyr, no virgins." That'd suck.
I went the entire winter without falling on the ice, but I came this close to slipping and cracking my head on bare, dry asphalt today as I tried to walk from my car to the post office across the parking lot. The wind was blowing so hard that it actually sucked up a bunch of the Gobi Desert — that's in the middle of China — and dumped it all over Korea, northern Japan, and even as far as the west coast of the United States, if you believe anything the news media reports any more. Just amazing. My corneas still itch from the scouring they got today.