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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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…:)

Another year of me trying to make Chief is here.  This is my fourth time up now.  I took the test in January and really sweated it since I hadn’t had time to study, but I made board.  Funny thing, when the results came out I skipped directly to the line that said whether or not I made board and didn’t look at the rest of my profile sheet (kind of like a report card that breaks down your score compared to others and tells you how you did in the various sections).  Just yesterday, both of my guys that were eligible got promoted to E-5 and after asking them for their profile sheets, I realized I hadn’t looked at mine yet.  When I pulled it, I couldn’t believe it - I got my highest score ever and landed myself in the 97th percentile for everyone in my rate who took the exam.  Big accomplishment for me. 

Since then, I’ve had to put together my package for the board and send that out, and now it’s just down to waiting.  The board was originally scheduled to convene on June 21, which meant I obviously would have made it this year since that’s my birthday and really, the Navy has never given me so much as a card so I think that would’ve made up for it.  Unfortunately for me (and, well, everyone who actually lives or works there) there was flash flooding in Tennessee right where the board meets and the entire base was under water, so the board has been delayed by a couple of weeks.  There goes my birthday present this year!

Besides the whole trying to make Chief deal, things have been great.  I was a little bit worried that I wouldn’t like being on the ship, especially because when I showed up everyone (and I mean everyone!) said how awful this ship was.  Well, I have been loving it.  The job is fast paced and always interesting.  I have a fantastic office and I look forward to coming to work every day.  We finally got out of the yards in January and we’ve been getting ready for our deployment this year since then; I’ve been gone for 63 days already this year.  I will say that some of the preparation for deployment has been ridiculously stressful, particularly our last underway but I will spare you the details and say only this:  Sailors are some pretty incredible people.  We train to save our ship, which means we train to fight all different kinds of fires, combat flooding, build structural supports at a moment’s notice, patch pipes that are pushing out hundreds of gallons of water per minute…we are smart, innovative, and most of all, dedicated, and I am proud when I see my shipmates working together during our training sessions.

We’re getting ready for our deployment soon; this is our last in-port period which means my job has gotten way busier than its already busy pace.  Everyone is trying to get legal assistance before we leave.  Everyone is trying to kick out that bad seed sailor before we go on deployment.  Everyone is stressed out so there’s an increase in alcohol-related incidents.  Everyone needs everything done RIGHT.NOW. and our office gets hit particularly hard by it.

Our deployment was extended long before we ever even started preparing to go out.  Because of other ships being delayed by repairs and being diverted because of crises (USS Carl Vinson, another carrier, responded to the disaster in Haiti), it shakes up everyone else’s schedule which means we have to leave earlier than planned and be out longer than planned.  It’s going to be an interesting deployment; it sounds like we aren’t getting many port calls which to me is the biggest disappointment of all.  If we’re going to be on an extended deployment, I wish at least they’d take care of us and let us get off the ship for some cool liberty ports but instead we’ll be hitting liberty ports in the middle east and really?  does that sound fun to anyone? 

At any rate, the ship is great, I’m proud to be here doing what I do, and I am glad I took orders here.  It’s hard on the family, but we talk about it and hopefully the kids will understand someday why I have to be gone so much.  We talk about it often and they seem to understand but only time will tell what kind of effect these next couple of years will have on them.  I wish I could take them out with me so they could understand the importance as well as the excitement of the Navy, but unfortunately they still frown on 9- and 11-year-olds going on deployments.

That’s all for now, I hope you all understand why I haven’t been able to post.  So far this year I’ve been gone 63 days already; come this summer I’ll be gone the rest of the year and the beginning of next year.  Hopefully I’ll get another couple of posts in before I leave so I can catch everyone up on the kiddos and their awesomeness and maybe even a house post so I can update on how things have gone with us settling into our first home.  We have plans to go home in June so hopefully there will be fun things to talk about then.  In the meantime, I am active on Facebook where I post a lot more frequently (hey, all that’s expected of me there is one line every few days!) and if I take pictures, most of them go up on my Flickr page. 

Until next time…

It is so nice having a friend live nearby.  The longer I’ve been in the military, the less interested I’ve been in making friends - there’s always that thought in the back of my head that we’ll leave in just a couple of years and from my experience over the last almost 13 years, we always say we’ll keep in touch but it’s never the same.  Some friends you do keep in touch with, but chances are we’ll never see each other again.  And because of that knowledge of leaving, I never really get close to anyone.  But I miss having a good friend; I miss having someone who I can just hang out with without having to worry about entertaining because I know that we’re both happy just being together.

Since she’s been here, we’ve had a couple of dinners together, a sleepover for the kids, and just friendly stopping by for an hour to hang out together.  Last night was an early Easter dinner and a “TruTV” stupid parties marathon while the kids ran crazy. It’s great because not only are Kristina and I friends, her husband and B get along great and the kids all play great together.

I think one of the things that makes me happy is knowing that while I’m gone, the rest of the family will have friends to keep them company.  If only I didn’t have to go back out to sea or move away in a few years.