Thursday, June 29, 2006, 04:48 AM
Quick story about my awesome van for ya then I'm really hitting the rack. My van is the greatest...I spent $800 to purchase it. It's got a rusted out hole in the roof that leaks onto the back seat when it rains out. That's now covered with duct tape (soon to be replaced by aircraft tape). Awesome.
The latest issue is that the radio seems to be on the fritz. At first I didn't know what was going on so I keept on noticing when it cut out and would try different things. On my way home from work on Monday I noticed that every time I'd peg the gas pedal, the radio would come back on. After the RPMs would start to decline, it would cut off again...weird, huh?
Needless to say, my initial thoughts were wrong. It had nothing to do with the gas pedal at all. Yesterday I realized that every time I hit the driver side speaker, it would come back on.
So, for now I drive down the road hitting my speaker every so often. This weekend I'll take the cover off and actually fix the wiring. But, that's what $800 buys you, right? Sounds good to me!!!
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Thursday, June 29, 2006, 04:25 AM - Family, PC
Every once in a while, you readers out there can get a window into my soul. The entry that I posted (and subsequently removed due to complaints to the FCC) regarding poop is not one of those. This is one.
Two days ago when I was driving into work I heard something on the Ministry of Information's double speak radio station (i.e. AFN Radio, where all the great propoganda comes from!) that caused me to think about my life: most dads only spend an average of 10 minutes a day with their kids. 10 MINUTES?? Really? How awful!
So, that night I came home and was playing with Nathan and putting him to bed. As we finished up the nighttime routine (I've blogged about that a few times...read the archives if you're uninformed) and Lisa put him in his crib, I kissed him good night and lifted up the railing. Foolish me, I lingered too long looking at his sweet face before walking out and he locked his radar onto me. As soon as I started walking out of the room, he rolled on to his tummy, continued to stare at me, and started crying. I closed the door enough for him to think that we'd left and watched him through the crack.
I couldn't help but think about how innocent he was laying there. He didn't have a care in the world...all he needed was for us to love him. I thought about what I'd heard that morning and how much that bothered me. If I don't have anything else major going on that day, I'll spend about 45 minutes with he and Lisa in the morning, about an hour with them over lunch, and since I usually get home around 5pm, spend about 2 hours with him at night. That's a total of almost 4 hours a day in his presence, affecting his life.
Anyway, standing in the doorway, I watched him struggle to fall asleep and whimper/whine for some reason or another. My guess was that he wanted his mom to rock him to sleep because he feels safe in her arms. She makes him feel loved and therefore comforted. I got such a guilty feeling in my heart for thinking in the last few months that he needs to "cry himself to sleep". What a selfish thing to say! The only reason I want him to cry himself to sleep is because I want to do something else. Because something else is more important to me (i.e. watching TV, surfing the Internet, talking to our neighbors, etc).
In the long run, however, that's not the case. That's not at all the message I want to send to him. That just happens to be the short term answer. So, in light of these feelings, I walked into his room and tried to soothe him and rock him to sleep. Well, I no longer have the magic touch. So I did more harm than good and he ended up crying longer and harder when I put him down each time that he was at the beginning.
The moral of the story is: I've learned that it's really easy to say "it's 7:00pm and he needs to go to bed" and just leave him in his crib to cry it out because that's when I want to clean up the kitchen, pickup the family room, surf the internet, whatever. But that's not the right thing to do.
The right thing is to understand that there's a schedule that he needs to be on (which is good for him) and put him to bed around that time. More importantly, "putting him to bed" doesn't necessarily mean that I just dump him in the crib and say "goodnight"! I need to actually help him go to sleep. If I don't, then I'm probably sending him the wrong message.
I remember when we first got on the island, we tried to get Nathan to sleep through the night. He would cry for 2+ hours straight until we gave up and went to get him. We probably tried that for 2 weeks. Needless to say, he WASN'T READY. It took us 2 weeks to realize that. So, we kept meeting his schedule for the next couple of months. After that, we tried it again and he cried for about 45 minutes and then went to bed for the rest of the night. All he needed was to mature a little so that he could understand what was going on.
Anyway, enough rambling for now. Gotta hit the rack...it's another early get up tomorrow.
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Sunday, June 25, 2006, 09:57 PM - Family, Pictures
;)
While our neighbors were out having a baby yesterday, we brought their dog Millie over for our family story time. She was a little bit nervous, so instead of having her stay with us all night, we put her back in her own house. Either way, Nathan LOVED having her there for story time. For those of you out there who are dedicated blog readers, you know that our evening routine is eat dinner, go for 2 laps around the neighborhood, every third night get a bath, change diaper, fight with Nathan to put his PJs on, Momma nurses Nathan, Daddy reads stories, Sandy sleeps on the floor, and then we put him in his crib and kiss him good night. Well, we added Millie Rock last night to the story time part and Nathan was excited. Click on the related link below for the rest of the pictures...
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Sunday, June 25, 2006, 09:43 PM - Family, Food, Japan, Pictures
I love being a day late on my blogging. It suits me 
;)
As you already read on Lisa's blog, we went to Gala yesterday. That place is freaking awesome!! Click on the related link at the end of this entry for their english website. It's basically a salt factory and you can also blow glass and make pottery there! They've got a gift shop, a pizza place, an ice cream shop, and a japanese restaurant that does yakiniku outside! That's my new favorite place to take people.
Here are the pictures from yesterday: http://www.thedrews.net/pix/index.php?aid=104
;)
One of the things that Lisa pointed out while we were eating our Taco Pizza (pictured here) was that the pizza was cooked, then cut into pieces, spread a part a little bit, and THEN the lettuce, tomato, and cheese were added to each individual piece! You gotta love the Japanese! Nathan had a plate of Gohan with his taco pizza of course.
;)
Lisa, Nathan, and I shared a melon soda slurpee and a coconut ice cream as well. Naturally, because we were eating it, Nathan needed some too. I guess he likes cocunut ice cream, huh?
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Saturday, June 24, 2006, 08:44 PM
I've been censored. Sorry folks, move along, nothing to see here.[ 3 comments ] ( 18 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
Saturday, June 24, 2006, 03:11 AM - Technology
For those of you who have been trying to call us for the last couple of weeks and our Internet Phone rings 4 times and then you get voicemail, I think I've fixed the problem. See...on our end, the phone would never ring. So, we thought nobody we were missing all these calls because we'd get a whole bunch of voicemails emailed to us!!
Anyway, it should be good now. Sorry for the delay in fixing things...you'd think that someone who did this for a living would be able to fix it quickly, huh?
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Monday, June 19, 2006, 03:39 AM - Family, Food, Japan, Pictures
This morning, Jeff and I got up at 3am to watch the USA vs Italy World Cup game. We played pretty well until the last 10-15 minutes of the game. It seemed like all the players just quit. Except for Keller, the goalie. He seemed to have been pretty bad the whole game except for the last 10-15 minutes. The ref made some bad calls also, which will affect our next game against Ghana.
After that, I came back over here and played with Nathan for a little while. Then he went down for his nap (early again). After that, we went to Tropical Beach again and took Nathan swimming. He wasn't so sure about the water...but who is at first? He has kind of the same expressions as when he first started taking baths. No doubt, he'll grow into it.
It ended up being a beautiful day for the beach. The water was perfect, the clouds blocked most of the sun, and there was enough moisture in the air to not make you feel cold after you get out of the water.
Go ahead and read Lisa's post for all the cool insight into Nathan's beach-side eating habits. For pictures, click on the related link below.
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Sunday, June 18, 2006, 03:59 AM - USMC
Today we executed Caleb's birthday present. A couple of weeks ago, we gave him a tour of a CH-46 helicopter, given by (as it turns out) one of our mutual friends who is a Ch-46 pilot. Brandon did a great job with the tour today. It was incredibly hot out, but he came in wearing his flight suit and showed Caleb all the gear they wear and took him all through the helicopter. We came and brought Jeff and Stephanie as well. It was really cool![ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
Saturday, June 17, 2006, 11:25 PM - Family, Lisa, PC
We were married on June 16th, 2001 - 5 years ago yesterday! Wow...that's a lot to take in! Yesterday morning I came home at about 8:00am after being on duty the previous night and showered. I spent a little time with Nathan and Lisa and then went back in to work for a couple of hours. At 1:00pm we had a bouling tournament to raise money for the Marine Corps Birthday Ball in November. The HQ pretty much shutdown and everyone was at the bowling alley having a great time. I cut out a little early to get back here and spend more time with Lisa on our anniversary.
When I got back, Lisa was cleaning the kitchen in preparation for our baby sitters coming over. Lisa of course asked when she was going to get her present
She gave me mine right away. She made an awesome slideshow from all of our pictures together, cataloging our time together. She also made me a really cute picture matte that has all of the important dates from the time we first met up until now. Also, as you already saw on Lisa's blog, she sent me the same card as Marc and Vivian!! After she finished unloading all of her presents, I couldn't very well hold out on her so I gave her the tanzanite necklace I bought for her.
Of course we also got a great gift from my parents: an ice shaver! We've been wanting one for a long time but never really looked into it. Well...we've made drinks for us and Jeff and Stephanie the last couple of nights
Tonight, for example, we recreated the "Kiss on the Lips" from the Cruise over Christmas.
After the gift exchange, we finished cleaning up the house and went out to dinner. We got take out from Ono Kau Kau and went to the sea wall to eat. We watched the sun set (kind of...it was pretty cloudy) and came home after about two hours. Jeff and Stephanie were like "we weren't expecting you home for a couple more hours...what's going on?" Ha ha ha...little do they know that we don't go out!!!
Anyway, it was a great anniversary and we're looking forward to seeing what the next 5 years holds for us.
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Friday, June 16, 2006, 01:28 PM - USMC
Last night, my "midnight muse" was duty. I was (and am still) standing duty for my unit last night. For the uninitiated, it's technically a 24-hour post where I answer phones, check the barracks, enlisted club, chow hall, etc to make sure things are orderly. Also, I serve as a single point of contact for my unit during non-working hours. In turn, that means that someone can reach the unit at any time, day or night, to relay information as simple as "hey give so and so a message for me" to something as important as "you need to recall the entire unit because we're going to war".
Everyone prays for a calm night with no incidents of Marines being stupid. It was going pretty well until I got a call from LtCol Johnson from "18th Services" on Kadena at about 8:00pm saying that two of our Marines had gotten into a fight at Chili's and were being disrespectful to the officer. I thought it was a little strange when he kept asking if we taught our Marines how to act around officers and that they wouldn't give him their names, just that they belonged to my unit. Then the guy said to me "are you giving me lip, Lt?". Then the laughter started. Thanks, Jeff. Yes, I got punk'd by my neighbor. He talked to Lisa and she gave him my phone number here. I was already going through in my head what I needed to do and how the conversation was going to go with the XO. Being a 2ndLt is awesome
Anyway, after that the rest of the night was quiet. As I toured the 5 barracks that our Marines occupy, talked with each of the barracks dutys, and checked out the enlisted club, my muse came to me. No matter how much I like or dislike a job that I have in the Marine Corps...how could I leave it? The question of should you stay or should you go when your End of Active duty Service (EAS) comes up always plagues people. In my case, however, I LOVE working with Marines. I love getting to know them, leading them, taking care of them...everything. The community that we build for them is amazing. On the base that I work at, we have places to live (much like college dorms only you have to clean every Thursday), fast food joints, restaurant/bars, movie theater, bowling alley, USO, shoppette, gift shop, and the Marine's place of work. All of this is provided to each Marine so that he can accomplish his mission. In turn, he gives his all each and every day.
Sure, we have our fair share of s**t-bags, but the vast majority of the Marines want to do the right thing, want to lead other people, want to leave things better than they found them. How could I get any more job satisfaction than that? Among other things, my CO has put me in charge of taking care of 25 Marines so that they can accomplish the mission. Life doesn't get much better than this. Well, I guess once I move out of "Lt-land" things will be better, but that's for another blog post
.
I dunno...it just hit me last night that I love working with these guys. I know that I'm gone away from my family at times, that I might be sent off to war, and sometimes the ultimate sacrifice must be paid. But as far as job satisfaction goes, I couldn't have a better job. Maybe that'll change in a couple of years, but I doubt it. For now, though, I couldn't be happier.
I've been together with Lisa for 10 years, married for 5, a Marine for 2, and a dad for almost 1. The greatest experiences of my life are as a husband and father, no doubt. But every day I grow more and more proud of being a leader of Marines.
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