Happy New Year! The usual way the O-Family spends New Year's Even is to stay up all night playing games, watching movies, and eating lots of snack food. The food is normally the packaged frozen stuff, like Bagel Bites and Tater Tots, but this year we rolled dozens of lumpia, a sort of spring roll filled with chopped veggies and some kind of vaguely familiar but unidentifiable ground meat, and by the time we were done I had eaten way too many of them and felt like I'd been stuffed like a Christmas turkey. Barb said she was feeling just a tad plump, too.
A long walk was what we needed after a feast like that, so I talked the rest of the O-folk into going into town last night to sing karaoke at the bar just a short walk outside the front gate. We knew it was snowing outside, but we didn't know it was snowing like crazy until we climbed the steps to the street and started slogging through six or eight inches of the stuff. Walking to the front gate under normal conditions doesn't take longer than ten minutes, but we probably doubled that. And of course Tim was way too cool to wear a hat, so his hair was quickly frosted in a way that didn't have anything to do with overpriced salon visits.
When we finally got to the shelter of the karaoke bar on the corner, it was closed. Or it wasn't open yet; the two O-Folk who can read Japanese, Barb and Sean, couldn't figure out from the sign at the entrance whether or not it was opening late and staying open until New Year's Day. (I said they could read it, not that they could understand it.) Something seemed to be scheduled to happen at ten o'clock, but it was too damned cold to wait in the doorway to find out what, and the snow, besides coming down so thick that it was getting hard to see, was falling in bullet-sized chunks. We headed home.
Somewhere along the trek, Sean tried to bury Tim in the snow, but he slipped and fell, pretty much turning himself into a snowman. He jumped up and tried to bury Tim again, but he only slipped and fell again, which really cheesed him off, so he chased Tim all over the neighborhood. Tim knew how to hide out in the yards way better than Sean did, though, and made it back without getting caught. Barb and I kept a much more pedestrian pace, walking hand in hand along the road where the snow wasn't so deep, so she didn't get quite so much in her boots.
Back at the O Manse, we watched Japanese variety shows, ate snacks and drank bubbly until the countdown. The show we ended up watching featured the same guy who comes on every year to carry out some insanely elaborate stunt. This time he jumped into a giant flaming Daruma doll, but he couldn't just light it on fire and jump in. He had a team of people haul it to the top of a ramp while taiko drummers hammered away; he changed his costume several times and ended up by wearing nothing but a loin cloth; and three pop celebrities stood on the sidelines to comment and applaud. This show goes on for hours. Last year it dragged out so long we took to flipping channels. This year, I fell asleep just after he jumped into the flaming Daruma doll, so I missed the show after where he emerged wearing nothing, but holding a water dipper where he could keep you from seeing too much. He sang a song while forty guys with Daruma doll faces painted on their bare butts danced in unison behind him. Lucky for me — or not, depending on how you look at it — Barb taped it so I could watch the next morning.
Other featured acts: A band that played "Swing Swing Swing" while seated upside-down; a guy who knocked over lit candles popped champagne corks
That's New Year's in Japan.
This is the first day of 2005, the year that I retire. In just 243 days I'll be Mister David Okonski, although I sort of doubt anybody will be calling me that. I'm thinking I won't be hearing "sir" much anymore, either. I'll proabably have to put up with "Hey, ah ... what's your name again?" for at least a while, but if I work hard enough, I figure that in just a few weeks I can graduate to "C'mere! Yeh, you!"
It was another day of seemingly simple plans taking a long detour to get to the finish line. Barb and I headed for Hachinohe after lunch to visit Oki-Doki, the second-hand shop where you can get just about anything — phones, musical instruments, old clothes, laptops, pachinko machines, and a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh in any size you can imagine. Barb wanted to collect some Japanese pop music CDs, which you can pick up at Oki-Doki for just about nothing. The language is simple and the CDs all come with lyric sheets, so for a couple bucks she can buy some really great Japanese language lessons. I was just tagging along to browse. It's always worth going along to have a look at the whacky stuff on the shelves; anything I end up buying is just icing on the cake.
We couldn't just go straight there, though. We almost made it to the Momoishi toll road before we passed a couple dogs running through highway traffic. The roads were ice-covered and narrowed by the snow banks plowed up on either side. I don't know how they managed to run through the traffic without being hit, but by the time we circled back, one of them got off the road, and Barb managed to snag the other one. There was no answer when Barb called the phone numer on the dog's tag, so we returned to the base and put the dog in the animal shelter.
There. An hour and a half were gone, and we were no closer to Hachinohe than when I was brushing my teeth after lunch. The trip was going pretty well, all things considered.
We did finally manage to get to Oki-Doki. I didn't buy anything with Winnie-the-Pooh's picture on it, although it would have been easy to get a clock, a coffee cup, a jacket, a record album, a game, or just about anything else covered with Pooh. I don't know what it is about Oki-Doki that draws people to turn in their used Pooh, but I saw more Pooh there than I've ever seen anywhere else. I think I'd better stop this before I get myself into some really deep Pooh.
When we took Tim to buy shoes last month, we had to make a deal with him: he could have any shoes he wanted, but he had to pay the difference for any shoes over fifty bucks. It's not that we're cheap, although we are. It's that he grows so fast we have to buy a new pair of shoes for him every six weeks. I'm serious. The kid's growing like a weed, and his feet are growing like a weed with great big feet. So we set a limit of fifty bucks, because you can still get shoes for fifty bucks or less, although I guess only nerds wear them because Tim won't have anything to do with them. He wants ENORMOUS SHOES with chrome fenders and air pumps built into the heels. I'm not making that up. He doesn't want to lace them up, either. Laces are so eighties. Kids haven't laced their shoes for twenty years now, did you realize that? His shoes have a smooth front that makes them look like a pair of matching white Ferraris, and there's a flip-down gizmo in the back with a dial and a set of steel cables made specially to cinch up the front because it doesn't have laces. Do shoes have computers built into them yet? I'll bet they do. I'll bet there are shoes equipped with GPS and cel phone communications.
Then there are Sean's shoes, which he's been wearing since the early days of the Reagan administration. Somewhere deep in the most impenetrable recesses of Sean's mind he has anchored the belief that nobody should ever throw away any clothes that aren't falling off their bodies in tatters, because that would be wasteful. He once wore a pair of gym shoes that he held together with duct tape, which he re-applied when the old layer of tape wore out. When he got to the point that he was wearing what was essentially a pair of slippers made of duct tape, his mother threw them out. She still hasn't heard the end of that.
Today was my first day back at work after the holidays, but it still won't be the first full week back. Did you know we had two four-day weekends back-to-back? Friday the 24th was Christmas eve, so that was a natural; Monday the 27th was a "family day," so we got that one off, too. Friday the 31st was New Year's eve, another natural; and Monday the 3rd was another "family day." The commander of Pacific Air Forces declares a "family day" to give us time off to bond with our family unit. My family mostly sat around and ate junk food, played board games, watched movies, spent hours in front of "Sim City 4" (or at least the guys did), and otherwise vegetated. It was a glorious waste of time. We had so much time off that this morning when I met Tim at the breakfast table we both had the same look on our faces: We were two shackled prison laborers headed back to the salt mines. His was called "school," and mine was called "work." No more Sim City all day long; no more flipping pointlessly through twenty-four channels of video drivel on the television. Oh, the agony.
I've hatched a monster head cold; it's been incubating in my sinuses for the past forty-eight hours. All the space between my ears feels like it's filled with wet towels. It woke up with an appetite, and now wants to head for my chest, where it can get really good and gunky. I'm trying to NyQuil it to death. If I can dry out my sinuses, it'll just curl up and die in there. The down side is, it'll feel like something curled up and died in there.
This is Sean's drinking bottle.
Several years ago (that's not a typo, it was years ago), I drank beer out of this bottle, and Sean thought the bottle was so cool that he asked me if he could have it. Not knowing any better, I said yes. He kept it filled with water and carried it around the house with him to drink from. Then he began to carry it with him on trips out of town, and eventually he took it with him when he went back to the States. When he came home from school this Christmas, he still had the bottle with him.
At first, his strange attachment to the bottle was a bit eccentric, then a bit annoying, especially when he drank out of it at the dinner table. Now it's just flat-out crazy that he would have such a strong attachment to this old beer bottle that he would carry it with him from one side of the globe to the other, over and over and over again.
Srangely, I can't bring myself to simply dispose of the bottle, but that doesn't mean it's not the perfect target for practical jokes. The idea first hit me when I picked up the cork from the bottle of champagne we drank on Christmas eve. I had to whittle the cork down a bit, but eventually I was able to jam it into the neck of the beer bottle. After wrestling with it a bit, he was able to pull it out, but then he made the mistake of putting the cork down right next to the bottle and leaving the room. I jammed it right back in. I think Tim did a bit later, too. Sean disposed of the cork after that, probably by eating it, and we couldn't pull that prank any more.
The next time I saw the bottle, it was next to his plate at his place on the dinner table, as if it were part of the place setting, like the glasses we boring people drank out of. Sean was upstairs playing Sim City, or doing something else he'd never willingly walk away from, so with no fear of discovery I ran to the spice cupboard, fetched the spicy gyoza oil, put a dab on my finger, and spiked the mouth of the bottle with it. He noticed, but it wasn't the jump-up, what-the-heck-is-this reaction I was hoping for. I think he almost liked it. Curse me for not thinking of using the Cayenne pepper.
The next time I saw the bottle without Sean around, it was in the fridge. Another inspiration hit me. I got one of the two stuffed mouses that Barb bought for the cats, which the cats almost completely ignore, and shoved it into the bottle, then replaced the bottle in the fridge. Backlit by the fridge light, it was impossible to overlook. I sat down at the kitchen table with the crossword and waited for Sean, who was just coming in. He walked right past the fridge not once, but twice. I would have thought that was a statistical impossibility if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. He went off to watch a movie or something else that would take way too long for me to want to hang around, so I never got to see when he opened the fridge and found the mouse in his bottle.
The next prank is in the works now. I can only hint that it will involve more than one bottle. Details to follow.
Here's Barb slurping up a bowl of her favorite toasted sesame ramen soup at a new Chinese restaurant we visit in Shimoda. I had the spicy tofu, which was pretty tasty, but it was my second choice after the chicken cashew, which they were out of.
This is Day Five of my marathon attempt to sample every cold medicine that's available over the counter in a vain attempt to unblock my congested sinuses for just ten minutes. That's all I ask. The wads of unmoving muck filling every nook and cranny of my head has got to be the worst part of having a cold, and there are times when I'm sure if I became just a tiny bit more desperate, I'd claw my own eyes out for just a little breathing space. Being just a tic short of crazy — although there are some who might disagree — I rely on self-medication in the quest for relief. I've come close to success once or twice, but only close enough to make me whimper for the possibility, however distant, of more. After all these years, though, I'm getting the feeling there can't be anything out there that would help me. I would've found it by now.
We had snow last night! Nobody saw that coming, except the guys at weather flight, who put it on their cable-television slide show last night, but anybody who's been here more than a month knows better than to believe them. So we all went to bed last night without a thought in mind about snow, and this morning the sun rose on a clear day to reveal four to six inches of the stuff.
"I have just six months until retirement," I told the sergeant who was standing close by to watch me pee into a cup, "and this is one of the things I'm never going to miss about the military."
"I'm going to deploy to Baghdad in two weeks," he told me. "It's going to be better than this job."
Okay. He got me on that one.
I can't even pee into a cup the right way. The sergeant in charge of collecting the specimens (now there's something to put on your resume!) chanted a pre-recorded litany of instructions to me as I stood ready. I was to retire to the toilet with the observer, rinse my hands off with warm water only – no soap! – then fill the bottle at least half full, close the bottle in view of the observer and return to the desk.
First thing I did was wash my hands with soap. I didn't even touch the bottle with my soapy hands, but we had to start all over.
To start over, I had to return with the observer to the front desk, where the sergeant asked me to remove the label from my specimen bottle and crush the bottle under my boot. She printed a new label and fetched a new bottle, and had me verify once again that the bottle was empty and clean. I had to sign for the clean, labeled bottle and retire once again to the toilet, where I rinsed my hands in warm water only and then, and only then, filled the bottle with my, ah, specimen. There. Job well done.
The Air Force conducts these tests much, much more often than they used to, reasoning that it works to reduce drug use in the military. Whoever employs me next will have to pay me a ton of money to get me to pee into a cup again.
How'd it get to be Friday already? Well, here's just one example of how my time gets used at work:
I had to go pick up a truck from the motor pool. Should have taken about thirty, no more than forty minutes to sign it out and drive it back. There was a bus that ran from Security Hill past the motor pool at ten till the hour. I got caught up in something else, though, so I had to take the only other bus, which runs through the north area before it goes to the motor pool. No problem, since I figured it would add only ten minutes to my trip. What I didn't figure was that the bus driver would be taking his nap while I was on his bus.
Instead of making the turn he usually takes to the motor pool, the driver sailed right past it. I didn't say anything because I don't ride the bus often, and they change these routes all the time. I thought maybe he was going to take the next turn. He went right on by. I still didn't say anything because he did it so casually, like he was used to it. It must've been a route change, I told myself. But now I was stuck. We were headed to main base, to make about forty-two dozen stops at the various offices and houses, and there was nothing I could do but ride it out.
But I don't think he was being casual at all. I think he was dozing through most of the route.
He drove right through a red light and didn't stop until he was in the middle of the intersection. I don't know what woke him up to the fact that he was running against traffic, unless it was the cars and trucks rushing out of the crossing lanes straight at the bus. That kept him awake for a little while, but by the time he was cruising through the housing area he was dozing again, and he drove right past a couple of people waiting at a stop in a shelter. They got up and stood in the door as he approached, and he didn't even blink until he was fifty feet down the road — and then he looked back over his shoulder to check if there was anybody in the shelter. When he saw that there was ... he just drove on. Never stopped! Pretended he meant to leave them standing there!
When I told this story to Tim, he thought it was physically impossible for anybody to drive a bus while you were dozing off. I guess he thought the vehicle came to a screeching halt when the Sleep-O-Meter detected heavy eyelids in the driver's seat, or something like that.
The trip through the north area, down through main base, and back up to the motor pool takes an hour. I walked into the door at Vehicle Dispatch almost an hour and a half after I walked out of my office.
After I gave the dispatcher a word or two about the bus driver, I went over to Fleet Management and presented my memo to the clerk, asking for the truck. While he was putting all the paperwork in order, the chief of Fleet Management walked over and introduced himself. We talk on the phone all the time, but this was the first time we'd met face-to-face. "You're here to pick up that truck?" he asked. "Hope it starts!" And he chuckled the way a used car salesman does when you drive away in what turns out later to be a huge, stinking lemon.
"I hope so, too," I answered. "It's my only way back to work."
The truck started with no problems, not that I was too worried. It was sitting in the lot in front of Vehicle Maintenance, after all. Getting into it was a trick, though. It was parked in a very narrow slot between an aircraft de-icer and a street sweeper, and the cab of the truck itself was made for somebody about eighteen inches shorter than I was. Worming into the driver's seat through the barely open door reminded me of spelunking, but in a cave with windows. And after I started the engine, I saw that the mirrors were all wonky, so I had to adjust them. I squirmed out, fixed them, and squirmed back in. And then I thought of pulling forward out of the parking slot. Slap hand against forhead. D'uh.
By the time I returned to work with the truck, I'd burned up a little more than two hours, and I wasn't done with the truck yet, but ... it was time for lunch.
I can't drive a government-owned vehicle to lunch, so I took my own car home, and drove to Fuels after, where they made a gas key for the truck. Fuels is on the side of the base furthest from Security Hill, where I work. It took about twenty minutes to drive back. I checked into the office, ran a couple errands, then got the truck and drove back to Fuels to fill up the tank, and by the time I finished tootleing back and forth from that, it was just about time to wrap up in the office and head home for the weekend.
What is it about barbers that turns little kids into absolutely uncontrollable screaming beasts? I was getting my hair cut this morning, and three chairs down some dad was trying to get his one-year-old to hold still so the barber could take a swipe at him with an electric clipper, but the kid wasn't having any of that. He was squirming and kicking and stamping and very nearly head-butting dear old dad, and he could have gotten away, too, if mom hadn't been close at hand to push him back into dad's arms every time he got more than halfway out of the chair. He had quite a set of pipes on him, too. I thought he could've shattered the mirror if he'd just cranked up the volume half a notch more.
This week I got a barber who was a speed demon, so I didn't catch her in time to stop her from taking off a little too much. Man, she was fast with those clippers! She didn't buzz me, but I only wanted a bit of a trim so I'd look just a little less than shaggy. She clipped me closely enough that I'll easily be in regs for the next two weeks without any maintenance.
Barb took me out to New Miyaki's Chinese restaurant tonight. The school where she teaches English gave her two gift certificates, each good for a thousand yen toward a couple meals, and she was nice enough to ask me instead of one of her teaching buddies. I guess they weren't available. We had a wonderful 7-course meal, and I went to the bathroom while she settled the bill. When I came out, she handed me the certificates and said, "I'll let you figure out why these are no good." Across the middle of the card in big, black letters the legend read, "GOOD FOR ONE MEAL AT OLD MIYAKI'S RESTAURANT". She teaches English, she just doesn't understand it.
Man, this Sunday's crossword has me frozen out! The theme is beer, so I thought it would be right up my alley, but I've been working on it since last night after dinner and so far I haven't been able to figure out even one of the trick answers. I did manage to somehow bust the upper left corner loose, but except for a few easy gimmies here and there, things have come to a screeching halt. You wouldn't happen to know a four-letter word for "velvet ant," would you?
I'm starting the search for a car today. Been putting it off too long, mostly because there is almost nothing on this earth that makes me as grumpy as shopping for a car. And when I've been away from the States a couple years, leaving me unfamiliar with the current market, it makes me much grumpier than usual. I need Pepto-Bismol, or the blessed lack of consciousness that blunt trauma to the head brings, to get through it.
I don't want a new car; I'm really shooting for something about five years old, give or take; the kinds of cars that were new when we left the States six years ago, and it's funny but I don't have any memory what was coming out then. I just wasn't paying attention. Right before we left I was commuting to work in a Volkswagen camper van that was built in the eighties, but that's completely out of the question. It was nice enough to go camping in, but it had no heater. I've decided that I'm not going through a single Wisconsin winter in a car with no heater.
The family car back then was a Ford Escort wagon that we bought new in '94. It was a sweet little car, but it was mostly little. Very little. We need something a tad roomier this time. Something like the Volvo sedan we drove in England would be nice. What would be really cool is if we could have the American version of the Toyota Vista we're driving right now. Well, what would be really cool is a stretch limo and a liveried driver to meet us at the front door and hold an umbrella over our heads. You know what I mean.
Ready for some gee-whiz information? While I was trying to find out what the Toyota Vista is called in the States, I found out it's one of the top-selling cars in Vladivostok. If I could only find a way to get ours over there without paying an arm and a leg for shipping, air fare, bribes and whatever ...
I had to shovel about six inches of snow out of our parking spaces this morning, after Tim cleared the sidewalks from our front door to the pavement. Normally I would say “after Tim did an outstanding job of clearing the walk,” because normally he does a superlative job of it, the kind of job that all other snow shovelers can only hope to someday achieve after years of careful practice. This morning, however, he did a really weird thing. The walk from the door was cleared, and the sidewalk past the house was cleared – not a speck of snow on any of it. From the top of the stair to the sidewalk, though, he first cleared a narrow path about six inches wide, so that he could get out onto the sidewalk to shovel it. He cleared the sidewalk from end to end, shoveled a path to the car, and called that done. A fine job. But to walk back to the house, he had to step through the six-inch gap he opened to get to the sidewalk. He never widened it. Said he forgot. I finished that part for him with two scoops of my shovel.
Tim asked me this morning if we were still planning on moving to Wisconsin this year. I said planning doesn’t have anything to do with it at this point. So far as the air force is concerned, we’re moving!
Then he wanted to know how poor we’re going to be; are we going to be just a little poor, or will we be really poor? I guess he’s been listening in while Barb and I were talking about how much we have to earn to make ends meet, and the plans we’re making to seek employment. We’re not going to be poor at all, but we figure we’re each most qualified to find work immediately in the clerical and administrative services, and work up once we’ve got our feet on the ground. He heard us ribbing each other about working for minimum wage and thought he’d be eating fish heads and rice this time next year.
One of the most enlightening aspects I've seen while job-hunting these past few months is learning that some of the jobs I thought were held by very highly-trained people don't require more than two years of “work experience” and a valid driver's license. The job of Deputy Sheriff of Dane Country, for instance. He does everything from patrolling a beat to processing arrests, and the basic requirement for his job is common sense.
A staff office worker in the State government, or at the University of Wisconsin, however, almost always requires extensive knowledge of computers, word processing programs, spreadsheets, and “outstanding communication skills,” sometimes in at least one second language. Additionally, you must be able to multitask, and function smoothly in recurring crisis situations. A thorough knowledge of the terminology of the relevant academic discipline is desirable. All this experience gets you ten-fifty an hour.
Bring your high school diploma and driver’s license, though, and you can get the salaried job at the sheriff’s department.
And the most humbling experience I think I've had all week came when I found a job at the University of Wisconsin for a program administrator. The job description was, item-for-item, an exact description of the job I'm doing right now. It was filed under limited-term employment, which meant it was not a staff position. It paid $11.35 an hour and included no benefits whatsoever. A glorified temp. And not all that glorified. Funny thing is, I’d really like that job.
You’d think I’d get out of shoveling snow at work. I’m a Master Sergeant, I’ve been on the job for more than twenty years, I’m Superintendent of Joint Supply, Approving Official of the IMPAC Program, Vehicle Control Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge ... I could go on naming lots more arcane-sounding titles with words that start with capital letters, but all that means precisely squat when I have to put gas in a scooter and it’s up to its axles in snow. There’s no regulation anywhere that says I can’t pick up a shovel.
I dug out two vehicles, actually: the one I had to gas up, and the one right next to it, the one that the mail room uses every day and that the night shift buried in snow up to its bumper. Smart.
If this all sounds like a lot of bother, I like getting out of the office. Any time they’ll let me go anywhere outside the building and call it an official duty, I’m on my way. That business with the truck a couple days back was a lot of extra work, but I was outdoors, and it made the day pass quickly. Same with today. I got a lot of routine maintenance done, and the day went by in a flash. I love it when that happens.
Our vehicle fleet has a lot of very useful trucks, dozers and vans, and there are also three scooters. They’re tiny green trucks about the size of skateboards. Two people can fit in the cab if they really like each other a lot, and the back can carry a couple boxes of Kleenex and a bag of thumbtacks. I honestly don’t know what they bought these things for. They’re fun to zip around in, a little like go-carts with four-wheel drive, and I suppose somebody’s found a practical use for them. I take them to pick up supplies at the store, when I’m filling a very small order.
And then there was today, “light vehicle maintenance day” on my calendar, “Dave’s OFO in the scooters” on everybody else’s. Filling gas tanks, putting air in the tires, that kind of thing, only the nearest service station’s a fifteen-minute drive from work, so there’s a lot of travel time. Zip down to main base in a scooter, do the maintenance, zip back, eat lunch, zip down to main base in another scooter, repeat chorus until the song fades out. It’s a lot of futzing around, but it’s got to get done, gosh darn it.
It was a long, cold day without any of the snow we were promised. There was so much ice on the road this morning, though, that I was almost disappointed not to see at least one car in the ditch on the way to work. Either the spirit of Darwin weeded out all the really bad drivers, or they’d actually learned something from the hundred or so wrecks we’ve had in the last couple weeks. For about a week there it looked like we were going to run out of cars before we ran out of careful drivers. In the first week when we had really heavy snowfall, we had dozens of wrecks, and averaged eight a day. I saw two wrecks on the way to work one morning, and the next guy who came into the office said he saw a third wreck that must’ve happened just moments after I pulled off the road. But now they’re not trying as hard to crash into trees and each other.
Every beer drinker should have his own special hell.
Barb went to the commissary this morning to shop for the weekly groceries. She must have been happy with the grocery list, because she didn’t say anything to anybody on the way out the door. She usually has to put each of us in a head lock and drag us into the kitchen to make us add anything to the list, stuck to the fridge door. The idea is that we’re supposed to add things as we use them up, but the fridge is very frequently empty at the same time the list is, which exasperates Barb no end.
It took almost two weeks of begging to get Sean to pick up a pencil with a thought of adding anything, and then he said blankly, “There’s no list on the fridge.” Apparently he’s never started one, there was always one just there.
When Tim adds grocery items, he nearly always does it with a sarcastic tone. Tim does everything with a sarcastic tone. large kellog’s corn flakes 47 boxes is typical, and a cutting response to the time his mother brought back a single box of shredded wheat after he wrote “cereal” on the list, but didn’t specify what kind or how many boxes.
He also asks for four quarts of milk each week. That’s not being sarcastic; he’ll really drink 4 quarts of milk a week.
Movie Time: Tim and I were watching The Transporter the other day and decided that this is probably the Best Beating People Up Movie that we know of. Criteria for this category: The good guy has to beat the living daylights out of at least a dozen bad guys in as convincing a way as possible. It helps if he also beats up one uberbad guy.
All the action in every Clint Eastwood flick ever filmed looks sissy compared to the beating that Jason Statham gives to fifty or sixty bad guys in The Transporter. And that’s the whole movie. There’s an eensie-weensie little plotette about bad guys smuggling illegal immigrants, but this film hardly lets the plot get in the way of beating people up. The acting’s okay, the chase scenes are all right, it’s got a few explosions, there’s just the tiniest suggestion of romance and sex, if you can imagine Jason Statham in a romantic role, but there are some truly kick-ass beatings. I mean it. It’s as if Statham’s playing a guy who can’t solve a problem without kicking people until they’re moaning bags of hamburger. I think the police inspector is the only guy in the movie who doesn’t get socked in the face. It’s two hours of nearly non-stop flying chop-sockey, and it’s even faster-paced with beer.
Barb thought I should say more about the milk. I’ll try, but the English language is poorly suited to describe our family’s complex relationship with the drink.
Not only do we have a growing boy in the house who can easily go through six half-gallon cartons of milk in a week, but when both growing boys are in the house, we could easily fill a separate fridge with nothing but milk and still probably have trouble keeping it stocked. “Voracious” doesn’t begin to describe how they hunger for milk.
And not just any kind of milk. The youngest boy will drink only 1% milk but, given the choice, he puts only skim milk on his cereal. Barb prefers Lactaid in her coffee, but normally uses non-fat milk. I’m lactose-intolerant, but I don’t much like Lactaid, so I drink vanilla soy milk with my meals, and pour chocolate soy milk on my cereal in the morning. (Go head and wretch; others do, too, but it’s really much more delicious than you might think.)
When the oldest boy is home, I think he’ll drink whatever milk is on hand, although he prefers vanilla soy milk, so we have to keep more than a gallon in stock or I’ll have to go without.
Finally, Barb tries to keep a half-gallon of lactose-free milk in the fridge all the time for cooking cakes, breads, eggs, whatever. All this adds up to roughly forty-two dozen gallons of milk crammed into every nook and cranny of the refrigerator. On the day that Barb comes back from grocery shopping, there isn’t enough room in the fridge to squeeze in an extra leaf of lettuce.
A couple of contractors came into the office late this afternoon, about ten till four, and asked for one of the sergeants. That particular sergeant was in and out of the office all day long, chasing after the dozen or so VIPs who are visiting the site to inspect our mission statement, frown at our processes, and generally make life much more interesting for everybody.
“Does he know you’re coming?” I asked the contractors, who replied in the affirmative. “Well, he’s a moving target today, so if you want to see him, you might have to wait ten minutes, give or take. Might as well make yourselves comfortable.” They took the seats I offered them, grabbed a couple of magazines, and settled in.
I ran off to take care of a couple errands of my own, and when I came back about ten minutes later, they were still thumbing through our dull magazines. I said hi on the way to my desk, where I added a few items to my shopping list, double-checked the inventory, looked up the prices, and totaled the bill. I think I answered some e-mail, too. When I was done, they were still waiting. It was about quarter past four, fifteen minutes before the whistle blew at the end of the day. I logged off my computer and sauntered over, hoping not to appear too eager.
“Say, just what are you waiting to talk to sergeant so-and-so for, anyway?” I asked.
“We want to ask him for a ride,” one of the contractors answered. Thought so. I’d seen him schlepping them around before.
“Where do you need a ride to?” I asked. I always end my sentences with a preposition when offering rides.
“The commissary,” was the answer.
“Well, I’m finished with my work, I live on main base, and I can give you a ride, if that won’t mess up anybody’s plans,” I volunteered. And you know what? They jumped at the chance to get out of there. How about that?
We played basketball for PT today. I don’t know a thing about basketball. Well, I know one thing: the ball goes in the hoop. If anybody tries to get me to play basketball with them, though, it’s like when they try to talk to me in a foreign language: I just stand there, grinning like a moron.
I told the PT monitor all this. “I’m not saying I don’t want to play, I’m just warning you.”
“Sounds like a ringer,” somebody said.
“No, honestly,” I pleaded, “I know absolutely nothing about basketball.”
“Yeh, whatever,” the PT monitor answered, not believing a word I said.
There were five of us to start, so we broke up into two teams of three and two. I was on the team of two. “Take the ball out,” the PT monitor said, tossing the ball to me.
“Take it out where?” I asked, so he explained it to me. Apparently I had to start the game by standing out of bounds and throwing it to my team mate, which I did. Then I ran down to the other end of the court, because I was the only other guy on the team. It seemed to make sense. I was just past the mid-court line when he threw it to me, and I figured this was as good a time as any to take a shot, so I fired it in the general direction of the hoop ... and it went in.
And not just the first time. I shot most of the time from mid-court, because when I got closer to the hoop, I missed every time, but from mid-court I had about a 50-50 chance of making it. I think I sunk about six shots that way.
“Ringer,” they called me.
We’re getting lots and lots of snow this month. Nothing like you’re getting back there in the States, but lots for a winter in Misawa. The old-timers still brag about below-freezing temps and snow up to the roofs of the houses, but this is the first year since we’ve been here that we’ve had snow that stuck more than a couple weeks, that snow has fallen every day for a week, that it actually feels like winter.
Or, more telling, that people are having to learn to drive like it’s winter. Most of them are just not catching on, so every new week brings another lecture from the commander to “drive according to conditions,” only after so many weeks of that it’s starting to sound more like pleading than anything else.
I drove to work in a light snowfall two days ago, when the road was blanketed in fresh snow and the plows were just beginning to make a pass at the main roads. I turned onto the road that branches off the perimeter road to the place where I work and suddenly found myself at the back of a train of six cars going ten clicks down the hill. I craned my head out the window to see where the accident was, but all I could make out was a string of cars, and it turned out that there was no accident, but that the guy in the dark coupe out front was simply not going to drive fast on the unplowed road, and we were all just going to have to learn some patience getting to work this morning.
When we finally got to the parking lot, I followed the slow guy until I got a good look at him. It was a visiting TDYer, somebody here on temporary duty for a week or two. Probably came from southern California or Texas and had never driven on snow before in his life until he showed up here and had to drive a rented car down a hill through flurries, sliding all over the wrong side of the road while a dozen or so impatient drivers tailgated him. And he probably thought going to a conference in Japan was going to be relaxing.
Barb took a sick cat to the vet yesterday and came back, three hours later, looking like she’d gone ten rounds with George Foreman. The cat was not one of ours, but a cat from the shelter, and the vet was supposed to check it for infection, but three people couldn’t hold it down long enough to get a needle in and draw blood. This cat weighed just five pounds, and when she curled up in anybody’s lap she was the sweetest little kitten, but when any one of the vet techs tried to poke any part of her with a needle, she turned into a giant economy-size package of whup-ass. Barb was in permanent nap mode for the rest of the evening.
I’ve got tennis elbow, and I don’t even play. I went to the clinic on Monday because my elbow always felt like I’d just pranged my funny bone, and the doctor told me it was a case of tendonitis. Even though I’m so far from athletic that I never get near it unless directly ordered by at least a lieutenant colonel, I get tendonitis all the time. Must be in the water here or something. The doctor prescribed the usual bucket of painkillers and a cuff-like sling that I wear around my forearm that’s supposed to take the pressure off the tendons. I think it’s working, but it also makes me look like I’ve got one big, wonky overstuffed sofa cushion wrapped around my arm. And it somehow gets wet all the time. I guess it’s soaking up perspiration off my arm, but I didn’t know I sweat that much.
A bucket of painkillers is the standard treatment at the local clinic. The last time I went in, I came out with a prescription for 800 milligrams of Motrin twice a day. I think I took three or four doses and felt more nauseated than the last time I accidentally channel-surfed into a Pauley Shore movie.
Barb got a call from TSA today, the federal agents in the white shirts who screen your luggage at the airport. She put in an application a couple weeks back, and they called back to ask if she was still interested. There was the small matter of a test she had to take which they administer only in the States, probably because it involves powerful x-rays and a rapid-fire cavity search, but maybe they can figure out a way to do that at a military base. I once considered applying, but the nightmare scenario that made me rethink that idea was that they’d take a look at my long military record and decide I was perfect for a desk job filling out performance evaluations in a cubicle where Neil Diamond was playing on the overhead speakers.
We were supposed to have one long, vicious winter storm all weekend, but today the sun is out, the temps are in the fifties, and the snow is melting away. It’s not much like winter out there. Meanwhile, back in the States my mother writes that she went to northern Wisconsin for a couple days to go skiing and the temps never got up into the double digits. I’m starting to wonder if I picked the right part of the country to retire.
Barb went to her first day of work at the on-base café; she’s a “barista.” That means she serves coffee ... and takes your order, stocks the shelves, sweeps the floors, counts the change, et cetera. It sounds a lot like a “waitress,” except with that certain magical touch of sophistication.
It’s happened to all of us at one time or another: When the boss at the café handed Barb her official barista name tag, it read: “Barb Okinski.” My drill instructor used to call me “Okinski,” usually at the tops of her lungs, and Pete sent me one of the name tags they made for him in basic training that read “OKINSKI” in big capitals. I don’t know how they all get it so consistently wrong like that. It’s also kind of weird that they spelled it wrong at all, especially after we had to fill out I don’t know how many forms to get those jobs.
She takes orders and stocks shelves with foodstuffs; I take orders and stock shelves with copier paper. We’re both sort of doing the same job, once again, just not in the same place.
I was looking through job vacancies again this weekend, and among the many jobs I’m not qualified for was the job of nuclear reactor technician. Did you know there was a nuclear reactor in downtown Madison? I don’t know why that surprised me. I guess I sort of hoped that nuclear reactors were all out in the middle of nowhere, or at least far from dense population centers like college towns and capital cities.
This particular nuclear reactor is at the university, and if you know how to operate a reactor and would like to apply for the job of running this one, they’ll pay you sixteen bucks an hour. That also came as a bit of a shocker to me. Bus drivers in Madison make fourteen bucks an hour, but for the people to whom they entrust the safe operation of nuclear reactors, they toss two bucks an hour more into the kitty. Hoo-eee.
I also sort of hoped that nuclear reactor technicians were recruited in a much more rigorously selective, even secretive way than by simply placing a classified ad on the internet and taking applications as they came in. I imagined perhaps there was a Beknighted Atom-smashers and Nukers’ Guild, into which only the select were inducted to learn The Craft Of Which They Do Not Speak. But apparently that’s not the case.
I should have learned that not everybody feels the way I do about radioactive emissions when I found one day while I was out bike riding that there was a huge pile of nuclear waste in the middle of Denver. I stopped in a beautiful park at the top of a hill with a wide-ranging view of the city. A nearby sign explained all the sights you could see from the hill and then mentioned, a bit too casually I thought, that the hill was actually a huge mound of radioactive soil that came from a nearby cleanup project. Trucking it all away to a disposal sight was apparently too much trouble, so they just bulldozed it all into a heap, covered it with topsoil and made it into a city park, complete with trees, paths, swing sets and a sign telling everybody how lucky they were to have it. The park was in no way a health hazard, of course, the radioactivity safely contained under the layer of topsoil posing absolutely no health hazard. When I read things like that, I jump right back on my bike and speed away, never to return again.
ALIENS! There are manga aliens at the Shimoda mall! I like to stop to say hi to them whenever we visit. They give Tim the shakes whenever he comes within a quarter mile of them, so instead of saying hi he makes mewling noises like a cat in a blender. He’s almost as creepy as the bug-eyed mannequins when he does that.
Manga are a kind of cartoon book that are so popular I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised to see mannequins that look like they just popped out of the latest issue. Boys in manga books are skinny as lamp posts and usually very pissed off; the girls have legs six feet long and enormous bazooms. Everybody seems to have eyes as big as dinner plates.
I’ve read about a half-dozen manga translated into English. Maybe I’m missing something, but they’re really just two stories repeated over and over again: In one, the world is coming to an end, or has already blown up somehow. The people in these stories are so emotionally wound-up that I don’t see how they need that much more drama to make their lives readable, but what do I know?
Then there are the stories about a nerdy guy who finds himself surrounded by pert young girls who can’t wait to find an excuse to take their clothes off. More often than not, they don't even wait for an excuse.
There a third story that combines the two, but it doesn’t benefit much from the added complexity.
It’s the thirty-first of January already! I know only because I’ve got a short-timer’s calendar on my desk at work, and I put a big X through each day. Putting that first x of the month is a bit daunting, but this month seemed to flash by at a blistering speed.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t care to know how quickly the days are passing, but I have a very keen interest in getting to August 31st as soon as possible. If that were possible. I don’t really think the calendar’s helping, but ... what if?
