I finally have a job.  For the past week, I spent my time attempting to find an open slot within the Brigade.  Apparently, this is a common occurrence among officers here.  Anyway, I was hoping to be sucked into the hole that the 508th had.  However, a larger black hole opened up around this time, sucking me, a captain, and soon to be more people in. 

I now work for the Public Affairs Officer.  Son of a....  Before, it was pretty demoralizing waking up at 0500, going to PT, eating breakfast, and having to put on a uniform only to have to kill time for 6 hours.  I mean, I could do that in civies.  Also, it's not like I could sit in one place, because, although they weren't giving me work to do, it would irritate people if I were to I sat around with no work to do.  Therefore, I spent the day moving around.

Here's the irony of the entire situation  First off, I vowed that I would not go to any Brigade events.  If I could avoid putting on Class A's, I would.  Now, in my zeal to find work, I've managed to do the exact opposite.  In fact, I've gone beyond opposite.  I'm part of planning a Brigade event: The Sky Soldier Ball.  This is THE annual event  I think I'll be forced to attend, too.  Damn.

Ok, now for a quick food presentation, because 1) I'm lazy,and 2) I don't want this to become a cooking Blog:

   

In the beginning.

 
Brown Sugar in the kitchen.

 
I still have mashed potatoes for the other night.  Damn.

Black 6, out

Today I went to the dentist. Almost 6 hours later and I can still feel the Novocain. In order to pass the time, I've decided to cook. Tonight's dish was orange chicken picatta, mashed potatoes (from scratch), and Pillsbury Grands. Simple, tasty, and not too harsh on the teeth. Orange chicken picatta was what I cooked when I visited Heather last year, long before she decided that she wanted to eat grass for the rest of her life.

Chopping and boiling the potatoes.

The implement of their destruction, and the hand that does the destroying.

 
Materials prepped and moving.

 
The Grands, not looking so grand, yet, and the sauce added to the chicken.

 
The problem that I always have is that there's sooooo much food. I mean, I can eat half of what I make the first night, but the rest is going to have to wait until lunch on another day

I bet you suckers are starvin' like Marvin

Black 6, out.

"Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessle's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever had."  -Fight Club

Well, it would be if I cooked it. Something you need to get if you don’t have it: a griddle. Such a simple item, and yet, it does so much. For second breakfast, I cooked Pancakes and scrambled eggs with cheese. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that with the griddle, cooking them took 5 minutes, the pancakes came out better than I have ever cooked them, and it cleaned up extremely easily. Breakfast was so good, I had to stop and reflect on how good it was throughout the day.

Yesterday night’s endeavor had me cooking sweet and sour chicken for dinner. I almost didn’t do it, since I fell asleep in the middle of the day and didn’t wake up until 2200. However, I worked up the energy, and tried it out. Prep time is pretty quick, maybe 30 minutes of cooking, total.  Here's what it looked like as it neared completion:
 

 
added peaches

 

Picture Perfect (except fpr the decorations).

Black 6, out.

Some of you may wonder what a bored single guy does in the middle of the week.  By "some', I mean "none", but since you're hear, you're going to read about it anyway.  Right now, the majority of my unit is still on leave until Monday.  This leaves me with days that potentially ends at 9 AM, like it did today.

Here's what my schedule looked like:

0500: Wake up, begin hygiene, eat first breakfast
0540: Ready to leave, but realize it's too early.  Check email.
0603: In car
0613: Arrive at Base
0630: Formation and Revile
0635: PT (Today, the XO taught me how to play racquetball)
0730: Drive home
0745: Change, cook and eat second breakfast
0910: Return to Base
0915: Talk to XO, volunteer to help out with Sensitive Items Inventory, realize that he's already got 5 helpers, XO tells me to go home.
0920: Begin taking care of personal tasks (buy gas coupons, stuff for home)

After that, I stopped keeping time.  So far, I read all of my mail from the last 2 weeks, got a Car insurance Quote from USAA (it will be half of what I pay Geico), swept and mopped the second bedroom and the large bathroom, and began an overhead layout of the apartment.

 

• Create a complete top down layout of my apartment using Visio


• Re-sort all DVD’s (waiting for additional cases to catch up to me)


• Create a grocery list and download it to my PDA (waiting on PDA)


• Season my new skillets (need skillets to arrive)


• Create 4 Bo’s (waiting for wood to arrive. This one will take a while, anyway)


• Set up small wireless network in apartment (waiting for phone hookup in May)


• Obtain VIOP Phone (requires internet acess)


• Begin growing Venus fly-traps


• Put away winter clothing


• Re-do workout plan


• Create small box of items that have to do with firearms (slings, lasers, etc)


• Sort books on shelf, and remember that there are more books on the way


• Read, Read, Read


• Study Italian


• Study military tactics


• Clean Apartment


• Write more than one blog entry in order to cover the (other) boring days.

I've finished making the rooms in visio.  Now I need to add all the furniture.  After that, I'll take new pictures and post them here.  Tonight's dinner will be sweet & Sour chicken.  Results (maybe recipe) posted in next entry.

Black 6, out.

I seriously spent a good chunk of the last week of my vacation trying to fix problems with my dad's computers.

I am currently back in Italy. Getting here was half the fun. I flew coach this time. It is different once you see how the other side lives. Anyway I get on the plane sit down, they close the doors, and we wait to take off. We roll down the runway to taxi. I decide to go to sleep while we wait. I thought I heard the words "we're 17 in the order to take of..." come over the system. I don't care because I'm out cold.

When I wake up, all I can think is that this is a pretty smooth flight. Hell, you can barely hear the engines. Then I find out we've been on the ground for the past hour. Damn. Once the plane actually does that flying thing, the story gets boring. I finished Tides of War, which is a good read, but not as good as Gates of Fire. I then started reading another book (shown above). This one is reading pretty fast, so I expect to have it done soon.

Meanwhile, I'm mostly done writing my part of a 12 page group paper for the class that I'm in. I would have done some other things, but that needed to get done first. Tomorrow, I think I'll clean the apartment, and begin planning for all of the small projects that I want to do in my spare time. It sucks to be single during the week.

Just as an update, my new name on AIM is Black6x, which isn't really new, but I'm going to use this one more.

Black6, out

Hung out with Jane again yesterday.  She took me to the top of the Empire State Building.  Now, I've been in NYC just about all of my life.  I think that I might have gone up there once in the past.  Most people in NYC don't go to tourist traps, except during school trips when you're a kid.  Not much to say about the place.  I mean, it's high up.  Anyway, I have pictures, so here you go:

 

 

 

 

 
It's just like Sim City.

Black 6, out.

Damn, I'm slow.  I just got a joke that I saw at least 20 years ago.  It's from one of the old "Merry Melodies" or "Looney Toons", and involves a farm with a bunch of chickens.  When they lay eggs, they go down a conveyor belt to be packaged in various forms.  One of the forms puts a dozen eggs in a carton, and then a powder puff comes down and powders them.  As a child, I thought that this was a visual joke.  "Oh, ha. ha.  It's like putting makeup on the eggs or something."  Yeah, I never understood why the joke was there.

TODAY, I boiled some eggs and was removing the shells, and for some reason, the idea of powdering them came to mind.  Wait a minute.......   Powdered eggs, as in eggs in powdered form.  Something I didn't know existed until I entered the wonderful world of bad army food.

I remembered another video that I had.  If you remembered the entry about blowing stuff up, I have a video of the actual explosion.

What you hear in the video is me announce that there are 15 seconds until when the blast was planned to happen, based on the time fuse length.

Oh, as long as you're looking at cool things, head on over to GDG's site to check out pictures of his car.  Freakin' awesome.

Black 6, out. 

Thank goodness it's easter.  Now I can have soft drinks again.  A man can only drink so much water and milk shakes.

Yesterday, I went to see Scary Movie 4.  Very funny movie, but the way the overall problem was resolved let much to be desired.  It was so bad , people in the audience couldn't believe what was said:
Movie: "Alright, the invasion is over":
Lady 2 seats from me: "That's it!?!"
She beat me to it.  The movie had a lot of visual gags, but I think what makes the movie funny is that, although it's a comedy, all of the actors deliver their lines straight like it's a serious movie.  Even the music at the funny times avoids becoming something reminiscent of Benny Hill, producing something more dramatic like you would expect in a real movie.

Last night, I got to hang out with my old buddies A.J. (who now goes by Arcenis, which is his name, but he didn't use it back in the day) and Jarrad.  We chilled at the Fat Black Pussycat lounge in lower NYC.  It's a really nice place, and if it wasn't for AJ, excuse me, Arcenis, I would never have know that there was a club in the basement of the place.  This night also allowed me to confirm that I can still dance and whatnot. 

On a lighter note, here is the video that I promised.  It's from my last day at Tarin Kowt.

Black 6, out.

Dear everyone, I'm still alive.  Time moves very slow when you don't do stuff, and you can only sleep away so much of the day.  It actually begins to work against me in that I have to be up for some amount of time and physically active in order to be able to sleep.  Needless to say, not being active means that I'm not getting to sleep until the next morning.

I went out Thursday night.   I was achnig from teh martial arts class, and I would have taken motrin, but I realized that I didn't want to mix it with alcohol.  I also figured that the alcohol would do the trick in removing the pain.  I think it did.  Until the next morning, when the pain came rip-roaring back, with the wonderful dehydration that rivals sleeping in the sun in Afghanistan.  Needless to say, Friday was a recovery day, so that I can go out Saturday.

I encourage everyone to listen to this from the guys at Penny Arcade.  They occasionally do Podcasts of the thought process that goes into comics that they draw.  This recording refers to this one.  I encourage to listen to it and not laugh, especially at sections where where words such as "cold shower" or "tea bag" (not what you think).  Please leave a comment on your thoughts if you listen to it.

Black 6, out.

Last night, I went to my old dojo to train.  I had stopped in to visit on Monday, and decided to train on Wednesday because the instructor said that we would be working on basics.  I haven't been training much in the past 2 years, so that was definitely what I wanted to work on.  Instead, when I got there, we worked on a bunch of other stuff.  The night started out with working on taking a person down, so that when we practiced on ground work, we would have a context to put it in.  This is unlike the Army's way of training, because the Army just starts on the ground, but fails to actually tell you how you got there.

Anyway, the technique started with the attacker coming at you, and the defender working a throat grab and takedown to a control.  After a bit, we modified it to the person being taken down was the defender, so his job was to counter the takedown once he was on the ground.  After that we moved on to getting attacked and choked from behind.  Today, my neck hurts.

After training, we went to the Banc Cafe, had some dinner and a few beers.  Discussed world politics.  One of the guys that I was training with was in the British Army, and served in Afghanistan not to long ago.  Around 1 in the morn, we decided to leave.  On the way out, I spotted some cute girls at the bar, so I made a sudden decision to stay for a bit longer.  We talked for a while, on some number of things, and the next think I knew it was 4 in the morn.  The two of them were bartenders, one there, and one at another bar.  They kept getting me drinks.  Some plans were made, but unfortunately canceled, due to the appearance of one of their exes,  but the prospect of hanging out another day was set in place.

Then I took the train home.  At one point, I woke up on the 7 train, and saw that I was at Main Street, WAAAAAAAYYY past the stop I was supposed to get off at.  I haven't been to this stop in almost a decade.  Actually, it's the other end of the line for the 7, so I had to go back 6 or 7 stops, ensuring that I was awake enough to not overshoot it again.  Then I play my favorite game in the world: look at the sky, realize that it's getting less dark, and decided that no matter what, I want to be in bed before the sun rises.  I like winning this game.

Black 6, out.