New Year's Video II

Another New Year's video.

New Year's Eve Video I

New Year's Eve was a tempered fun.  We went to another JAGs house and played games for a bit.  I like games.  It gives some structure to social time.  Then we went back to my friend's house.  They weren't there because they had a family emergency so that's the tempered part.  It was sad to be without them and knowing why.  Still, it was an enjoyable evening.  We stayed up until midnight and that's when the racket started.  Guam likes celebrating things with random gunfire.  So that's what you hear in the video.  Those aren't fireworks.  Then they had a parade at midnight.  I took a video of the parade but it exceed's blogger's limits so if I can figure out how to condense the file size, I will post it.  It is very typical of a Guam parade. 

We went out onto the roof and took a video while the gunfire was going on.  I ended up spending the night at my friend's on the couch because I didn't want to get hit with a stray bullet or something.

Post Christmas Activities

So during Christmas, one of my friends was telling the other how high a fire can go if you burn a Christmas tree.  This was their first Christmas with a real tree so they weren't entirely sure how to get rid of it.  Especially in Guam where there aren't really ways to do it.  So they burned it out back.  It burned fast and hot.  These are the chickens my friends have.  They lay eggs and then they give the eggs away.  I'd never seen inside the coop before, so I asked to take a picture. The bucket is a little nest where the chickens go to lay their eggs.  Apparently you can buy all kinds of fancy little houses for chickens to lay their eggs in, but a bucket from Home Depot also works.

San Carlos Falls

Here we were supposed to go up the river on the left, but instead we kept going.  Only wrong turn we took.

This is when we realized we were going the wrong way.  This pool is deep and we had to swim across.  As soon as I got across this guy says... wait, we're going the wrong way.  So then I had to swim back.

The Tuesday hike we went on was to San Carlos Falls.  It is a good hike.  Steep.  That's why we have the ropes.  We went immediately after it rained so the trail was extra wet and slippery.  My GoPro was a bit dirty, hence the haze in some of the pictures.  I just bought a new casing and I think I may put some rainx on it so the water doesn't stick.  It's really hard to clean a case when you go swimming in dirty water.  The guy in the Navy blue shirt was our guide.  In Guam, you can only go hiking on trails you've been on because otherwise you don't know where they are.  He'd been before, so he knew where he was going.  After this, I went to work as outlined in one of my previous posts.

Swimming Puppy

He was so cute!  And you can hear how proud his dad is in the video.

Christmas afternoon

This is a beach on base we went to later on Christmas day.  It was a lot of fun.  We were joined by another couple and their two, large dogs.  The puppy was very good at get sandy.  It stuck to him extremely well.  He was a little afraid of the water at first, but once he got past the shoreline, swam like a champ.  I got to go paddle boarding for the first time.  It was alright, but I prefer kayak paddles.  This was like a really long oar and you had to keep switching sides.  We could have gone to another party, but decided just to sit on the beach until the sun went down.

Christmas Morning

So apparently my two friends went to this friend's house for breakfast one morning and he made eggs.  Very runny, very not so good eggs.  So for Christmas they got him the Roll-E or whatever it's called.  It "makes the perfect egg every time."  It also makes them into a cylinder with no seasoning.  You crack the egg into that thermos looking thing and a few minutes later it rises up and your egg roll is done.

For breakfast there was a quiche and waffles.  There may have been other things, but I don't remember.  Both the quiche and waffles were delicious.

There beagle likes to hang out here.

The puppy and Conrad playing with, I think the puppy's new toy.  They like to play all the time and they look alike, too.

They got me a present!

The people I generally hang out with.  Pete, Lauren, Richard, Max.

My super cool knife that they got me.  When I get scuba gear, I'm supposed to attach this and then if I ever get stuck in something while diving I can cut my way out.

On Christmas morning first thing I did was go to church.  But church is only an hour long when it falls on Christmas.  So I was able to attend my friend's late breakfast.  They were going to hold it without me because they thought I had church, but then I said, nope, only an hour today.  It was fun.  Food was good, I'd just ended a long week, so it was nice to relax.  Later in the day we went to the beach and I'll post those pictures later.

Christmas Eve we went to someone from work's house and ate food and had fun.  It was your normal social gathering.

Scuba Course

This is the Octopus at the dive shop where I got qualified.  I took my scuba quals on 21-23 December.  It was fun.  Much funner than I anticipated.  I thought it would feel claustrophobic and restrictive with all that gear.  It didn't.  It felt fine.  I also thought I would have trouble equalizing the pressure in my ears.  The first time I went down, I kind of did, but I haven't had any trouble since.  You descend and ascend slowly to give your ears time to equalize.  It is pretty cool.  I didn't think I would like it very much, but I did.  There is only so much you can see snorkeling.  But scuba diving you see a whole lot more.  I ordered a special scuba GoPro case so when that gets here I will be able to take pictures.  The GoPro case I have now should be good enough for the dives I do, but the back cracked at some point a couple months ago.  I don't know how that happened.  I went to try and find a replacement back, but they don't sell them separately.  So I figured I might as well get the one made for scuba diving.

The scuba course was only a couple days.  You do the bookwork (5 chapters, not very long), take and exam, and then do skill work in the water.  You should be able to finish all your skill work in one day, but we took two days.  My partner I was getting qualified with was from Hong Kong and he just didn't seem to understand the concept of how to go under water or swim or anything.  Watching him try to float was pretty funny, but I didn't laugh out loud.  A couple times I exchanged looks with the instructors, who were very patient, but getting a little frustrated at times.  He was a nice guy, just not what you would call coordinated.  The only thing I really had trouble with was hovering.  This is where you try to stay between the top of the water and the bottom without moving.  You are supposed to use your breaths to help you hover.  If you inhale, you float a bit.  If you exhale you sink a bit.  But there is a time delay so you if you don't time it right, you end up sinking too far or floating too high.

I'm currently contemplating buying scuba gear.  I think I will.  As long as I get 50 dives in before I leave, it is worth it.  Renting a tank of air is only 5 dollars.  But if you have to rent the equipment it is 40 dollars and you can't always rent the nice stuff.  So I think I will do that.

The Really, Really Long Week

You can see the winding path down for the golf carts.

This was a tree behind me when I took the above pic.

For two weeks in December we all go on what is called stand down.  This means that you go into work and then leave whenever you are finished.  If you don't have anything pressing to do, you don't have to go in at all.  It is supposed to be a relaxing time.  However, I had several things going on this week and it became very, very busy.  On Monday, I had two reports that had to be signed and sent out that day.  My boss was leaving to fly to the states, so I drove to meet him out in town and had to do this twice because for whatever reason, the page numbers were messed up.  Then there was a typo in one of the letters and I had to scan his signature to copy/paste it to another document.  All of this took up precious time for the more pressing matter I had to do.  So I didn't start on my next, most important, assignment until later that day.  People were giving me a hard time about working and I was a little mad at them because they didn't know what I was working on and I wouldn't have been there if I didn't have to be there.  That is something that really gets me mad.  People telling me to leave work or not work hard.  I work as hard as I need to and if there is nothing to do, then I relax and take off.  But work ebbs and flows so sometimes you work hard and sometimes you don't.  But don't tell me how hard I need to work or that nothing I'm doing could possibly be important enough to keep working at.  Anyway, because of this attitude, I decided to take my work home.  I went to my friend's house because it is difficult for me to work from home.  Working from their house was much easier.  I worked late.

The next day we had our command hike to Tarzan Falls, posted earlier, and I went.  Then I ate lunch, collected my stuff from work and went back to my friend's house to continue working.  I worked late that night as well.  The drink is something they got me when they went out to get food to cook.  It was good, but I didn't like the seeds.  The good news is, I finished my project.  The only thing left to do was get it signed the next day.

Wednesday morning I went into work and got all the exhibits ready for my project.  They were already scanned in so all I had to do was make sure they were all there and had the correct enclosure numbers on them.  I sent my draft letter I had completed the night before to the attorney out in San Diego who needed it.  He called and I made a few last minute changes based on his suggestions.  Then I waited for my acting boss to come in to sign it.  I had talked to him the day before and said this needed to get signed and sent out Wednesday morning.  Apparently he missed the morning part because I called his cell phone after the duty officer said he wasn't coming in that morning.  Sure enough, he was out golfing with his son.  Doing the math I realized there wouldn't be time for him to finish his golf game and come into the office.  So I googled the golf course, and of course it was the furthest golf course from work, and then drove to meet him so he could sign it.  The timing worked out perfectly as they were just finishing the 9th hole.  For those who don't know golfing, the 9th hole is always close to the clubhouse so that the golfers can get refreshments if they need them as the 9th is the halfway point in golfing.  So I only had to wait a few minutes for them to pull through in their golf cart and him to review and sign the letter.  I took a picture of the golf course while waiting as it was very pretty.  He signed it, I drove back to work, scanned it, composed an email with all the exhibits and sent it out to the list of people waiting to receive it.  At this point I only had one hour to make it to my scuba qualification course and no time to prepare for it.  You are supposed to do all the reading for the course before you arrive.  That didn't happen.  I show up and my nerves are a little fried from having to rush that morning and coming so close to deadline, but it turns out the other guy in the scuba course hadn't done the reading, either.  So we sat for a few hours going over what we should have done before.  I made it three chapters in and got really tired.  The other guy was much slower, so the instructor let me go home and said we would do chapters four and five later (there are five chapters to scuba quals).  I went home, ate dinner, and then starting thinking about the project I had finished.  This project was a confinement letter.  We put someone in jail in California and his hearing was coming up.  I had to write a letter justifying the confinement for a hearing officer and including the information I based my justification off of.  This was a very complicated case and I thought it might help the government attorney to have a demonstrative exhibit.  So I stayed up until 11pm working on a visual aid timeline to go along with the hundreds of pages I had sent out earlier in the day.

Thursday was the best day that week.  It was the time in between putting him in jail and the hearing, the calm before the storm if you will.  So I went to work only for about an hour or two and then met my scuba people at 0830.  We went to a beach and started learning how to scuba dive.  The two instructors were great.  They were funny and I appreciated their light humor.  The partner I was learning with was from Hong Kong, spoke English okay, but didn't do very well at swimming, floating, or really anything.  It took four times as long to do anything.  We were supposed to go through all of the scuba skills in one day and then do two boat dives the next day.  That didn't happen.  We made it through half the scuba skills in one day and had to cancel the boat dive and continue to work on skills the next day.  But the slow pace was relaxing.  I just floated a lot waiting for the other guy to master a skill.  I got sunburnt.  We went to a sandwich place for lunch and then finished chapter four.

Friday came and this was D-day.  The day of the hearing.  It was due to start at 0800 Guam time.  So I figured if I waited at work until 0800, I could still leave and meet up with the scuba people at 0830 and the hearing would have started and then I was in the clear.  That didn't happen.  Instead, I was greeted early Friday morning with a news article about one of our boats.  The article was positive in nature, but the content was an ethics violation.  I found this out from the JAG who overseas all the JAGs in the region sending me the article and asking me what ethics analysis had been done.  Nothing, I didn't know about it.  Thus started a flurry of phone calls and emails for the next couple of hours trying to get approval for this thing the boat wanted to do.  Apparently one of the sailors has a very rich father with very rich friends and they were giving a New Year's/ Christmas party to the boat that was going to cost $24,000.00.  When people donate things to the government, an ethics analysis needs to be done because you don't want someone to accept a gift from a government contractor, or because they are high ranking, etc., because you don't want there to be an appearance that someone is trying to buy government favors.  Well, this guy did this for the boat last year, but the price tag was much lower.  Low enough that the acceptance authority for the gift was in-house.  This year the price skyrocketed but since they did it last year, they didn't bother to tell me.  The amount was so great that it exceeded the Admiral's authority to accept.  And that's why I got the email.  The news article raised a lot of high ranking eyebrows.  So a lot of last minute activity was at hand.  Luckily the JAG that sent me to email was in a much better position to handle this than I was and she took over lead to get things straightened out.  I still had to work on it a bit that morning.  I called the scuba instructor and said I would just meet them at the beach but would be about 30 minutes late.  I got this issue to the point where I thought we were good enough to leave it (it was two days before Christmas and 3k was supposed to be spent that weekend), and then I went home and changed into my scuba stuff.  Driving to the beach, which luckily was near my house and near work, my cell phone rang.  It was the attorney in California handling the jail thing.  There were two reports missing from the exhibits and they needed them.  So I turned around, called my scuba instructor to say I would be another hour, drove back to work, found the reports, and emailed them to a legalman at the jail.  I waiting for confirmation they had been received and then went back to the beach.  (On the way out the door, someone stopped me and said another boat had rented a bunch of vehicles from Hertz to use while they were in port and had crashed all of them and now Hertz was sending pictures of the damage and wanted the government to pay for it and what should he do?  I was like, forward me the emails and I'll handle it later because there is no way I was stopping to work on it now.  That is not an emergency.  Still didn't get the emails, so I will have to follow up and see what happened with that.)  I finished my scuba diving stuff, we broke for lunch and were all supposed to go to a restaurant like the day before, and I checked my voicemail.  Boss JAG had left a message saying things were NOT handled the way I thought they were with the boat's Christmas extravaganza.  So I called her, got more information, said I would shower and go to work to resolve the issue, and then hung up.  I turned the shower water on, and my phone rang again.  It was the XO of the boat in question.  He said he wanted to know if I knew what was going on.  I said yes, I was going to go into the office and I wanted to CO of the boat to meet me there in about 20 minutes.  I hung up, got in the shower, rinsed all the sea water off, got dressed, then changed my clothes (I literally put on the first shirt and shorts I saw because I hadn't done laundry in about two weeks due to work, it was hideous.  Even with my low standards I couldn't go out looking like that.)  I called the scuba instructor for the third time that day and said I would not make it to lunch, but that I would meet everyone back at the dive shop, went to work, found the letter the CO needed to sign, edited it to be right, the boat XO called and asked when I wanted the CO there, I said "ummm... now."  I waited for the CO, he came up, signed the letter, I wrote an endorsement, signed it myself, scanned the two pages in, and sent it out to boss JAG.  Then I went to the dive shop to finish my scuba quals.  I took the final exam.  I was really tired and had a hard time staying focused long enough to read each question.  But I finished and passed.  Then I went home.  I texted my friends saying I had finished my scuba quals and it was a disaster.  I then went to their house to tell them about it. They were making Christmas cookies.  All I wanted to do was make Christmas cookies because that is fun and it was Christmas.  I told them about my day, said "I'm going to take a nap."  And fell asleep for three and a half hours.  I went home around midnight, went to bed, and then we finished making cookies the next day.  And went scuba diving.

Christmas Lights

I wish I had more pictures of Christmas lights but I didn't really get to go around and see them.  They were around, but not nearly as many people here decorate for Christmas as back in the states.  The first pic is outside the Outrigger resort.  The second is in a parking lot by a mall where we all went to see Star Wars and the last one is across the street from where my friends live.

Command Christmas

Our command Christmas party was 40 dollars a ticket.  We held it at the Outrigger Resort.  It's super fancy.  The food was alright.  I wouldn't say it was terrific, but it was decent.  I wore my Hawaiian shirt like a lot of other people did.  Pete, the guy with the pots and pans, wore a matching outfit with Richard, who is another one of our friends and married to Lauren, girl in red dress.  He was complaining about how he has no pots and pans and wouldn't it be cool if he won them (they were a door prize).  Then he won them and laughed really hard.  It was a nice event.  Walking out I got a little lost trying to find my car.  The resort connects to a mall and I couldn't figure out which escalator I came up.  So I walked around a bit but eventually found my car.  Like everything in Guam, the resort was nice, but the parking garage was dirty, the doors didn't work, and it smelled like cat pee.  So nice meets gross once again.  I survived the walk to my car and made it home just fine.