One myth that is pretty well-accepted in the Navy, at least on our ship, is that when they bring out the good food, the bad news is sure to follow. 

A few nights ago, there was lobster.  I’m not talking about lobster tail or lobster soup, no:  I’m talking about giant red-clawed behemoths with wee rubber bands as claw protectors.  I’m talking about head-to-tail, eyeballs and feelers, legs and oh yes, all that nasty gunk inside. 

I’ve never actually eaten a whole lobster before, and it turned out, neither had enough other people that the ship, in true Navy fashion, came up with a step-by-step guide on how to eat a lobster, complete with pictures.

I was glad I wasn’t the only person who’d never eaten a lobster, so I didn’t feel quite so … uncultured.  Neither had my friend Sarah.  Who, upon inspecting her stretched out, inverted lobster, declared: “It’s a boooyyyy!”

Of course, no lobster dinner is complete without a TV interview with a live lobster.  By this point, Sarah had completely given up on the crustacean version of the dinner and had settle for a sandwich.  I think the live lobster may have taken it personally.

I could not bring myself to eat the heads….there was a nauseating glob of really gross yuckiness so really, all that got eaten was the tail.  Which left the heads for a photo op!

Oh by the way, I chopped my hair off.

Breakfast, Saturday morning:

Mmmmmm.  The bacon wasn’t bad, the plum was awful; the only redeeming quality of my meal was the pre-fab lemon poppyseed mini muffin.  That and the water.

Being on the ship, life does not just revolve around doing your regular job.  On top of the day-to-day duties required of you in your office, there are other things here and there that keep you busy - collateral duties.  Easily the most time consuming and demanding of them for me is being on the damage control training team. 

On a ship this size - well, on any ship for that matter, the crew is trained to save the ship.  Disasters like the USS Forrestal, the attack on the USS Cole, and the more recent massive USS George Washington fire are sobering reminders of how important damage control knowledge is for the entire crew.  To train, we run drills among other things. 

When it comes to these drills, the more realistic they are run, the better.  In our last drill, we had a simulated aircraft fire…but since there were no aircraft on board at the time, we had to work our way around that.  For this particular fire, we had a giant screen with a fire projected onto it, along with an audio soundtrack of fire crackling (where did they download that, anyway?  iTunes?) and 4 smoke machines set to full blast.  Considering the space, those puppies did a good job of filling it up with smoke.  Then the lights were all cut off, and the damage control training team (DCTT) had red lights that were waved as the fire simulation.

Multiple teams came in to fight the fire, and it was an impressive sight.  Since we had run this same drill just the night before, I knew what it would look like and I thought it would be great to bring my camera, especially since I knew that the training team would not all be required at all times.  So I snapped pictures throughout the drill.  I upped my ISO to the max (3200) and had my wide-angle lens on so I could catch as much as possible, but that meant that I was shooting at f/4 which, considering how dark it was in there, was ending up with sloooow shutter speeds.  It was a huge challenge to get the pictures, but when the smoke had cleared (ha ha! literally!), I walked away with some great shots.

I was showing the other guys on the team some of the shots as I was taking them because they were long exposures and looked very cool.  This then got to the attention of our fearless DCTT leader who brought it to the attention of the person who was running the drill who brought it to the attention to the executive officer who brought it to the attention to the public affairs officer.  Who brought it to the attention to his media team who showed me how to prepare the photos for publication and then sent out the pictures to Big Navy.

Who published the pictures on navy.mil where the picture ended up as the #1 picture in the Navy for today. 

All in all, 3 of my pictures got published on navy.mil, which is just incredible to me.  I am very proud, and thankful to everyone that was involved in this - as you read, that is a lot of people!  I am at a great place where I have continually gotten support in just about anything I’ve wanted to do…in fact, that’s not just here but pretty much everywhere I’ve gone.  I am truly fortunate to do what I do, and I’m glad to be doing it here, now.

Here are the rest of the photos…

I have always been very prone to motion sickness.  I’ll never forget that time when I threw up in the garbage can at Six Flags Great America after going on that stupid ride that spins until it makes the floor drop out from under you as you’re plastered to the wall courtesy of centrifugal force.  Or that time that we drove all the way across Spain to catch a flight to Iceland, except that we took a wrong turn and ended up way off schedule (a problem when the airport is 9 hours away) and had to drive down the side of a mountain with hairpin curves every 30 seconds; when we got to the bottom the kids were howling in the back in tears, clutching their stomachs with their faces the colors of Dr. Seuss’s eggs, and I’m trying to comfort them as I’m feeling equally nauseous and also panicked about missing our flight.

The ship isn’t quite like that.  No dramatic hairpin turns down the side of the mountain.  Instead there’s this constant gentle rocking, and gentle rocking isn’t bad unless you’re the kind of person that gets nauseous watching The Office because the camera moves too much and makes you sick.  It only takes a few days for me to get used to, but every time we go out to sea after being home for a while, it’s back to square one.  First it’s the awareness that we’re moving, then there’s the light nausea, then you go to sleep and depending on the state of the seas, you feel like you may roll out of your rack and onto the hard deck.

But for me, the worst part is the morning.  When I wake up, my nose stuffy as always because of the complete lack of air circulation in my rack with its curtains blocking the light, and I have to dismount in an awkward movement of rolling over and sliding off until I get my footing.  When my feet touch down, my head is still sticky with sleep inside and my back is confused as to why I keep making it move, and then we move up and down a wave.  It’s cruel, you know, to have to deal with being stupid in the morning and not be able to stand up properly.  I try to make my way through the narrow passage between racks with people’s towels, shower bags, and uniforms hanging in the way, through chairs and hanging curtains, all while having to pee because I would rather hold it until I spring a leak in the middle of the night instead of having to deal with all of the moving bologna at 2am.  I finally make it to the bathroom, having spun wildly away from the locker that jumped in front of me as we rocked one way and the chair with the girl sleeping under a sheet as we rocked the other.

I finally get to the bathroom, that refuge of privacy with its 6 toilets for all 100 or so girls that share this bathroom, and lock myself into the stall thinking that maybe the ocean can’t get me here.  I’m surprised every morning to find out how wrong I am.

We left today for what is supposed to be an extended deployment.  As we leave, rumors abound: We’ll come back for a few days to Everett (that’s stupid and makes me mad), we’ll come back for a few weeks (which would be great unless I make Chief because then I wouldn’t be able to go home, anyway), and we’ll be gone the whole 8 months.  I’m putting my money on the whole 8 months.

I brought everything on board in installments over the last several days to lighten the load, so last night I was just left to bring some food and shoes.  I’ve made everything fit into the very limited space I have (I’ll post pictures soon!) and I feel surprisingly settled in, considering this is our first day out. 

We were delayed by several hours in leaving due to a technical problem with … something.  An antenna, maybe?  A radar?  Whatever it was, it caused a 9-hour delay, but we set sail just before sunset.  I went up to the hangar bay to watch us cast off the lines, joining many of my shipmates as we watched in anticipation.  I think everyone must have mixed feelings: sadness, anxiety, excitement.  It’s never easy to leave our families behind, but it’s good to just get this show on the road.

So now we hunker down for a long several months - close to a year! - and hope that the time flies.  I have a few goals in mind that I’d like to get a move on, but the easiest one for me is going to be to read every night - I brought a few good-looking books with me, varying from easy reading (the New Yorker Book of Food and Drink - thank you, Elizabeth!) to the dramatic (Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper), to the long and drawn out (Halldor Laxness’ Independent People and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude).  Should keep me busy for a few months of a-few-pages-here-and-there reading before I go to bed.

And with that - it’s off to bed for me, time to curl up in my 3-sided steel box on my 3″ thick mattress with my pillow requiring wadding and shoving in the corner.  At least the feelings of goodbye hugs and kisses are still warm in my heart.

I’m off!  For 8 months…or so.  Off to sail the seas, to work hard, and to hopefully make a few friends and have some great new memories.

In the meantime, enjoy a video of Isak playing my absolute favorite song ever that he’s played…Red Rose Rendevouz, a jazz waltz that is just incredible.  I’m very proud especially since he’s on summer break from lessons and has done this completely on his own.  He has worked very hard to get it put together before I leave and it has left me in tears several times because he plays with such beautiful feeling.