The New Puppy

No, he's not my puppy, but I played with him therefore I posted pictures.  The doctor I work with got a new puppy on Black Friday.  He looks very similar to my other friend's dog, pictured above.  The puppy is the smaller one.  His name is Bandit.  But my other friend kept calling him Ryan because he wanted to confuse the dog.  Apparently he's done this before.  When he was dating his wife, he constantly would pick her dog up anytime he went up or down the stairs.  The beagle eventually got used to it and then even when he wasn't there, his girlfriend would have to pick the dog up if she went up or down the stairs.  It was pretty funny.  They are married now and they are both great.  Anyway, the puppy is only seven weeks old and is still figuring out life.  He wasn't that great at walking.  And he was really skinny because he is a bit malnourished.  That's Guam for you, though.  The doc who adopted him was all like "I don't know, do you think I can take care of a dog?"  And my other friends were like "you have a medical degree, I think you can figure out a puppy."  All night long they were giving him advice about how to take care of the puppy.  They also showed me Thailand pics because they all just recently went to Thailand together.  They bought me a black star sapphire to replace the one that was lost when I went.  They could only find the stone, though, so now I have to find an appropriate setting.

Thanksgiving II and III

Thanksgiving II was at work.  I don't have any pictures of that.  Basically, we all brought dishes and the command purchased several turkeys.  They deep fried them.  But the weren't cooked.  So we all ate side dishes for about an hour until the turkeys finished cooking.  Needless to say, there was lots of left over turkey.  The best part was this other officer who is probably 6'5" and 250.  Bald head, big everywhere.  I'm trying to think who he looks like because there is definitely some character actor he looks like.  Anyway, he hunts wild hogs in the 400 lbs range with a spear.  I've seen him in civilian clothes and he wears T-shirts with the sleeves ripped off.  He's a big, tough guy.  And he made cupcakes.  Not just any cupcakes, but cupcakes with special chocolate centers.  Where you have to scoop out the cake in the middle and put special chocolate truffle or whatever on the inside.  I talked to him about it and he said, "I just love cooking."  Ummm... okay.  Not the guy I would picture in an apron frosting cupcakes, but he did.  Several dozen of them.

Thanksgiving III was on Thanksgiving day.  Those are the pictures.  The girl in the orange dress top and middle picture and the guy in the teal shirt bottom picture were the hosts.  The husband works downstairs from me.  So I know him.  I don't know his wife that well, but she does some kind of healthcare work.  Not sure if she is a provider, like a nurse, or an administrator.  After dinner, we all gathered around the TV and played some sort of game.  Apparently there is a way to connect your smartphone to the TV and play games.  There was a trivia game where you selected the answer on your smartphone.  If you didn't get it right, you had to compete in some sort of challenge with the other players in order to stay alive.  The last person standing was the winner.  Another game, you had to draw pictures on your phone like pictionary.  Another was making up answers to questions.  So it was fun.

The Long Goodbye

So in my line of work, you often have to say good-bye to people.  Such was the case this past Wednesday.  One of my co-workers left for Norfolk.  This wasn't a great tour for him, so he was happy to leave and sort of snuck out the back without really saying good-bye to anyone.  He was an interesting guy and I'm glad I got to know him.

The phrase, "Save me Tom Cruise!" will probably be the thing I remember about him.  Anytime something hard came along, he would ask Tom Cruise to save him.  And it was funny.  Sometimes it was Oprah Winfrey.  It also took the form of "Help me Oprah Winfrey!"  He was part of our Star Trek group and knew a lot of Comicon type things.  He and another guy were always ordering Star Trek memorabilia and talking about it.  Once I caught him in a very serious conversation with another guy walking down the hall about whether legos were breakable or not.  In short, he was a 12 year old nerd at heart.  And it was great.  I credit him with making the "Everything is Awesome" song our theme song for the command.

He was also a sensitive soul and this surprised me the first time I sort of hurt his feelings.  He's the guy who when I mentioned my birthday, immediately went to the calendar to write it down so he didn't forget.  He was very odd, but fun to be around.  I would sometimes go to the Admin office and hang out at his desk just to hang out.  Sometimes I brought my lunch.  I wish him luck in the future as he starts his last tour before retirement.  Hopefully I will meet him again someday, but it's not likely.  We are in completely separate circles.  But I'm glad I knew him when I did.  So Good-bye my friend.  Fair winds and following seas.

Chicken fight video

Chicken fighting

I was in my house when I saw a chicken jumping outside my window.  I was like "whhaaaat??"  Chickens do strange things.  I looked outside and these two male chickens were fighting.  They would puff out their necks and jump at each other.  By the time I grabbed the camera, they saw me and stopped.  So I didn't get a picture of them jumping at each other.  The chickens around here are violent.  This is the first male on male fight I've seen over what I consider territory, but they fight over food all the time.  If there is something on ground and a chicken is eating it, another chicken will try and chase that one off.

Thanksgiving part I

On Saturday, our ward had it's Thanksgiving potluck.  There was a good spread of food.  The ward purchased a pig and six turkeys.  We don't have that many people in the ward, so I don't know what was done with the leftover food.  Apparently they went to the pig salesman, picked out a pig, which was then killed and transported to the church.  The pig was gutted on site by the second counselor in the bishopric and then put in the ground to cook for five hours.  This pig was a girl pig and was pregnant, so the sister who was there was telling me about finding the piglet fetus.  I gotta say, I probably won't be a butcher if this whole lawyer thing doesn't work out.  I still had a piece.  It was good, but pork isn't my favorite meat.

I took pumpkin bread, which at first no one ate.  It wasn't a fancy presentation.  I had been at a fundraiser that morning, so I quickly came home and then made the bread.  It came out of the oven minutes before I cut it and threw it on a plate.  I didn't even bother to cover it because it's only seven minutes to church.  Because it was so hot, it was very crumbly cutting it, so it wasn't pretty.  It also wasn't pretty because I bought a gingerbread man cake pan and put the batter into that.  I thought it would be cute.  But I didn't have time to make it cute and then I thought it wouldn't be a good idea to bring a knife with the kids around so I'd better pre-cut it.  That meant all the pieces were different shapes and sizes.  But once one brave soul took a piece, then word got around that it was good.  Or so I like to think.  Maybe they just ran out of other food.  But I didn't take anything but the plate home, so I guess it went over well.

Overall it was a good activity.  The fundraiser in the morning was cool.  There were a few of us who went to the gas station on base and pumped people's gas and cleaned their windshields for them.  We made over 400 dollars in just about two hours.  It was crazy.  But at least our fundraising for Team 15 day is over!  Good, it was a nightmare to raise as much money as we need.  We need to scale the whole thing down for next year.  Hopefully I can be influential in that.  I'm sure I will take pics and explain it once the event actually happens.  I do need to find a place on Guam to buy tires.  Mine look like they are about to break.  I filled them with air and there are cracks on them and the tread is really worn down.  Sooo, I'll have to take care of that at some point.

Fishing trip

On Thursday I took off of work to go fishing.  I was a last minute invite.  Another office was going, but see previous post about having people travel a lot.  So they were down a person and needed someone to go.  It was fun, except we only caught two fish.  So that was disappointing.  I also got a little sea sick.  I took a dramamine, but I think I took it too late.  So I eventually slept on the boat for about 20 minutes and then felt better.

Work has been really busy lately, so I didn't know if I could go until last minute.  Our boss had to write his boss an email about the problem I had been working on and on Wednesday afternoon, he said, "come to my office tomorrow so we can work on this email to my boss."  I paused for a second and then said, "but I was going to go fishing tomorrow."  My boss looks at me and says, "really?  where is your leave chit?  are you requesting special liberty?"  Then he and the other two people started to laugh.  My boss then said, "it's a good thing I have a flexible schedule so I can allow my junior officers to go fishing."  He stayed and wrote the email that night.  He's a good boss.

My birthday

My birthday was a bit ago and people had some fun.  I mentioned my birthday was 1 Nov the second to last week in October while eating lunch in someone else's office.  He was like, "What?" and then wrote it on his calendar so he wouldn't forget.  That's when I knew something was going to happen.  I guess I wanted people to take notice, but I didn't really want a big fuss.  When I got to work, one of my co-workers had already gone around and told everyone so I got a lot of happy birthdays.  At lunch, I went to taco bell and got a burrito because I was told I needed to be back at 1130 eating lunch in the guy's office who wrote my birthday down.  It's the best lunch eating office because it has comfortable chairs.  There was a joke going around that I was turning 21 so I could drink now.  I showed up and was the only one who had lunch.  Apparently everyone else tried to go to the commissary for a sandwich but the commissary is closed on Tuesdays.  So then they all sat there and watched me eat my burrito.  I told them I could eat it later, but they were like, no, no, we have to watch you eat it.  When I say "they" I mean myself, two chiefs, and a petty officer.  It was a small gathering, we have a lot of people working on projects that cause them to travel.  After I finished my burrito, they pulled out two four or six inch cakes and put a 2 candle on one and a 1 candle on the other.  They sang happy birthday and we had cake.  I then pulled out a bottle of sparkling apple cranberry juice, poured it into plastic cups, and we all drank to my turning 21.

The real party was supposed to happen on the third.  The movie Dr. Strange was coming out and since all my friends are sci-fi/ superhero folks we were going to go see it.  BUT Thursday came around and we were all exhausted.  Work is super busy, so we pushed it out a week.  On Sunday, the RS president gave me the chocolates and the card.  On Friday, we went to Applebee's and then to the movie.  The cool part was, Friday was Veteran's Day and Applebee's does a free meal, so I got a free meal, free dessert with my birthday, and I drank a water.  I still left a three dollar tip, even though I paid nothing.  I was going to have a frozen lemonade, but they were out.  Then I got presents.  I got two Enterprises.  One is a figure and one is a coin holder.  In the military you have the opportunity to collect coins from various commands.  I only have six or seven.  I'm not that into it.  But some people literally have a hundred.  And there are all these elaborate coin holders.  So mine will be unique.  The awkward part is, this was originally supposed to be a gift for someone else, but the person who made it is mad at that guy so he gave it to me instead.  There are two of us trying to solve the feud between the two, but so far no luck.

Then we went and saw Dr. Strange.  It was different.  I can't decide if I liked it or not.  I liked the character a lot, but I didn't like the weird special effects.  Some of the effects were awesome, but Dr. Strange travels to different dimensions and the portrayal of the dimensions was not so great.  All the colors were these weird neon colors.  But the effects when he was on Earth and the fight scenes were really good.  Overall I liked it, but I'm undecided on how much.  It was clever and I appreciate that.  It also has the same, cheeky humor that a lot of the other Marvel movies have.

Boonie Stomp II

This is cool.  I forget if it's important for something.

Cool moss.  Walking through the jungle is great.  Just wear bug spray.  It was also very humid, so it was very sweaty.

Do you see the crab hanging from the tree?  I've never seen that.

That big blue hole is where a bomb fell.  It blew up all the coral and left only sand.

Blue starfish were everywhere.  Starfish are such weird creatures.

We also went to see a freshwater lake.  There were too many mosquitoes.

This is the whale rock.  See it?  Also, notice that on the way back, the tide is much receded.

With the tide receded, you can see all the rocks.  That's why you wear shoes when you walk in the water.