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…

Last weekend we were treated to a really magical sight: the field up behind our house was sparkling with millions of diamonds of dew.  The sun was coming up just so and it had been misting for the 2 days prior and it was just incredible.  It was like a present for me to see it glittering up there and of course I couldn’t resist tromping through the field in my pajamas with my camera like a wrecking ball to the dew. 

I got a lot of gorgeous pictures and some lessons learned on what to do next time and I can’t wait for it to happen so I can get more.  Let’s just hope I get the chance before we go out on our deployment next month.

In the meantime, enjoy the pictures.  They are really lovely when viewed at their full resolution so be sure to click on the pictures and then zoom in on them to see them larger.

If you have a moment, let me know which 3 are your favorites! There may or may not be an incentive for doing so…:)

Happy New Year from the Sigs!  I will certainly try to be better at posting next year!

Seriously, could this kid BE any cuter?

This has been a long time coming.  She doesn’t wash it after swimming, or doesn’t wash it well, and she doesn’t condition it.  And on top of that, she does not brush her hair.  I brush it when I’m home but it needed to be brushed a lot more than once a day or every other day or every three days when I have duty.  It got to a point where it was so damaged that she couldn’t really brush it at all and it started matting in the back.  Not a pretty sight.

So I decided to cut it, and I let her pick out the style, and she found one in a magazine that the stylist kind of followed except that she decided to take it upon herself to assume that she shouldn’t put any hair products into her hair so she kept cutting shorter and shorter.  While I’m not entirely happy that she didn’t cut it how we asked it to be cut, it does look super cute on her and it is so. much. healthier!

Isak also got a haircut so the Shaggy look he was rocking has been scaled back to a more respectable little boy length.

This picture was just too cute not to share.  This is a look I’ve seen from Anja a lot lately, the scrunched-nose giggle face.  I love it.

One thing that the kids have been asking since we got orders to Spain way back in March or so was “Are we going to see snow??” They were so little when we moved away from Iceland - Isak was 3 and Anja was not even 2.  When we lived in Washington from 2002 to 2005, it snowed maybe twice the entire time, and both times it was a forgettable dusting.  And then, of course, 3 years in Spain and there was not a flake to be seen.

So we moved to the Pacific Northwest where it’s mild and rainy year round.  Not cold, not snowy, but mild and rainy.  One would think that in a mild and rainy climate, if the temperature drops to below freezing it would be cold and snowy, yes?  Apparently, if the temperature drops below freezing the clouds have nothing better to do except move to Wisconsin to dump snow there instead.  My kids have been understandably disappointed by the clear blue skies over the last week as the temperature dipped all the way down, according to our thermostat, to 11°.

But this morning I was sleeping in, until I heard a loud yell of, “Kids!  Look out the window!” with an instant response of “It’s ssssssnnnnnoooooooowwwwwwwwiiiiiiiinnnnnnngggggg!!!!!!”

It started out slow at first, just some flurries, but it turned into a winter wonderland of fat, fluffy snowflakes that ended with about an inch and a half of snow.  The kids, however, didn’t know how long it would last so they wasted no time in getting out and enjoying it.

See all those little patches, and the long spoke-y lines?  That’s how much snow it took to make a snowball at this point.  But they did a good job of amassing a small arsenal of them, ready to launch at unsuspecting parents.  Little did they know that I was watching from the upstairs loft.  I love the view from here, especially when it involves sneaky little ones plotting for our demise.

Can you name three unusual things about this picture?

1. Isak is wearing pants.
2. Isak is wearing shoes.
3. Isak voluntarily got himself wet, although he probably didn’t know it when the snow was still frozen.

The kid hates pants, and he hates shoes, but he was dressed so fast in layers of clothes, socks and shoes, and out the door before I even knew what was happening.

Anja, on the other hand, is NEVER one to pass up on an adventure.  The snow brought out the best in her beautiful, energetic personality.  She’s happiest when she’s outside, and today was not only no exception, but her happiness was at a whole new level.  She couldn’t get enough of it.

Who needs a hill to roll down when you have our driveway?  I wish I could figure out how to calculate the slope, but unofficial calculations show it’s The Perfect Slope For Turning Oneself Into a Human Snowball:

She really just couldn’t get enough of it.  No matter that there was barely enough snow to cover the ground, she was GOING to make the most of it.  I love this picture; I can just feel her love for being outside and the excitement of finally being able to make a snow angel.

And then my cover was blown, and the even bigger personality came out…

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any “after” pictures to show how much snow we ended up with, but it was quite a bit!  Probably close to two inches…enough for mini snowmen complete with mini carrot noses (sorry no pictures!)  If it snows overnight and is enough to close down the schools (from what I hear, 4″ is more than enough to shut them down around here…wusses!), they are going to have so much fun tomorrow they won’t ever be able to have this much fun again.