New dog

Got a new puppy today. Her name is Zoe. She's a mastiff mix. I think she is going to be huge. But we'll see. She is really sweet, but already quite a bit of work. Like most pups, she doesn't really like her kennel at the moment. It took her half an hour to stop crying tonight. Hopefully she'll get better sooner than later.

Our cruise

Cruising is fun. I am not sure if it is my favorite type of vacation. It is a unique experience...well compared to other vacations. The actual cruise experiences are rather cookie cutter. Seems that long time cruise vacationers have difficulty finding new things to do. Every day has similar scheduled activities and menu items are standard American buffet or restaurant fare. They do have a couple unique restaurants. For a flat cover fee you can dine there. We went to the steakhouse. The steak was impressive and the cute little appetizers and large desserts were very tasty. One aspect I'd the cruise that never fails to impress is the superb service staff. The wait staff is great at what they do and the room attendant assigned to us is amazing as well. Almost everyone we've encountered in the service department really helps make the trip.
Cruises have too many nights that require dressing up. I really dislike getting dressed up. Every now and then I forget how dumb it is and think it will be cool. Then I dress up and cannot wait to get out of the ridiculous clothes and uncomfortable shoes. We did however go to every single dress up night and an additional one at the steakhouse. Why? Well apparently the cruise saves the best dinner faire for dress-up night, which means if you want to eat anything but buffet food, you dress-up. Oh well, we changed as soon as we finished dessert. :-)
A cool thing about the cruise is it took us to 4 different islands. This was sweet. However, they pulled into and out of port on the ship's schedule, which sometimes meant early mornings. Not the coolest. But it was still nice. We drove around Nassau and Providence Island of the Bahamas for the better part of a day and found a nice beach to tan on. The water there was rather cold, probably because it was the Atlantic still, but we enjoyed watching the ocean and having fried conch at a local joint. Next stop was St. Thomas. There we went on a shore excursion that we had previously booked through the cruise line. It was a lot of fun. The catamaran took us to St. John, which is a pretty smaller island with pretty clear water and decent snorkeling. On the way back the crew raised the sails and took the scenic way back, while serving us Champagne and rum punch. We bonded more with a couple we'd met at The Alchemy, a hang out spot on the ship. We spent a good amount of our evening free time with them and also took a tour with them to the Bacardi factory in Puerto Rico. San Juan, Puerto Rico was our next stop. We got a taxi to the local rum factory and took a tour and then had lunch at a good Puerto Rican restaurant in old town San Juan. Our last stop, and one of the neatest islands, was Grand Turk. It seems to be 100% reliant on tourism, and mostly cruse tourism. It has a barrier reef that made our power snorkeling excursion very cool, and we heard made for an amazing scuba diving experience. The water was incredibly blue and clear. The only unsettling part was the barracuda that kept following us around. The island itself seemed to be falling apart quite a bit. They were still recovering from a Hurricane that hit some 4-5 years ago. I can't imagine the cost of living there. The island's main resource was its salt lakes that are no longer worked. But for a tourist, it is an ideal location to visit. The last bit of our cruise was a day at sea that we spent learning about the history and making of cocktails. We hit a storm mid-afternoon which made the ship rock quite more than normal, but the ship is so big it did little more than make walking in a straight line or standing still hilarious.

Got a flight scheduled to Bagram for later this morning. Happy to be getting to my base so I can settle in and start flying. Planning on keeping myself busy with work and exercising, then MBA classes in August.  And hopefully SOS in correspondence when the captain's board results come out. I am going to try to keep a blog or email chain updated while I am gone. However, I have not had much success with blogging regularly, or keeping in touch via email, so we'll see how it goes. These  first couple blogs will be posted after I am settled in Bagram, because of internet short comings here in Manas.

Deployment journey has begun

Starting my first deployment. Just getting in country is a huge ordeal. Started traveling tuesday. It is saturday, and I am still waiting for my last flight to get me in country.

Well, MC-12 tour take two has begun. More time away from home, more living in California. California is a sort of scary place. I feel like things are more intense here, maybe there are just more people in a smaller place than I am used to...also things are a lot more pricey. I am nervous again about starting the program. Nervous that I will stink at flying, nervous that I will be in the wrong place on day one, nervous that I don't actually exist in the system (my name isn't on the roster yet), nervous that I will be late, just nervous in general I suppose.

Date Night

Josh and I finally had a special date night this weekend. It has been a while since it has been a real date. Though we do tend to meet for lunch and spend us time together frequently, this was more. We went to a fancy pantsy restaurant on the river called Brave New Restaurant. The place had delectable food, a romantic atmosphere, and higher than average prices. Perfect for a dress-up date night. The place proved to be an interesting location, tucked indiscriminately on the second floor of a business complex away from downtown, but close enough to provide a gorgeous view of the skyline over the river. If a person was not looking for it, they wouldn't find it. And even if they were looking, it might be difficult. Thankfully, I had perused online reviews and learned of this oddity beforehand. After dinner, we saw a movie, The Hunger Games. We have both been reading the books and thought we would see what we thought of the movie. Not sure what the director was thinking, perhaps he was intoxicated for the movie's making, but that camera work felt as if an iphone camera was doing the shooting - constantly out of focus, jumpy, and not actually clued in on what the audience wanted to see. I was just thankful that it was right-side-up. Who knows with the artsy nonsense, the director could have gone even more ridiculous with the iphone camera phone filming and spliced it together sideways and upside down. The actual plot and characters did a very good job of portraying the book, and I hope the second and third films are not as plagued with overzealous camera work.

I had the privilege of having both of my brothers visit me at the same time. It was great to be together again. It felt a lot like hanging out when we were all at home. Of course there were vast differences. For instance, it was my home, my one brother was on his way to being stationed on a Pacific Island, and the other is working and going to school full time to be a computer scientist/programmer. Life sure is different than I pictured it when I was 16.