Which Final Fantasy (IV-X) Character are you?
by steevi
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Well, as of right now, parental type persons are in the air, somewhere over canada probably, or perhaps just getting over the atlantic ocean on their way to come visit out here in Italy. Its going to be an interesting trip, as my parents have never come to visit me where I live, since other than here and NAU I had lived at home. I guess its just kinda strange to have my parents coming, and I could play the my house, my rules card if I wanted to. ^_^ I will have to go into work, sort of, on the friday that they are here.
There is a Jammer Ho-Down next friday, and I will be participating in it. About this time last year, I made a promise to the Chief Master Sergeant of the Weapons Standardization Section that we would compete in one against eachother sometime before I would have to leave Armament Flight. Well, it turns out that he will be leaving the base rather soon, so its time to make good on that challenge. A jammer, for all of you who are wondering is actually another name for an MJ-1 Munitions Delivery Vehicle. Its basically a little tractor with a lifting arm that can manouver a bomb or missile into place, and they are really fun to drive. So, what happens at a Jammer Ho-Down is that someone will make a driving course with cones that you have to navigate around while delivering a rocket launcher pod. the person who does this in the fastest time, with the least amount of penalties wins. I know I have no chance of winning, but it will be a whole lot of fun. I just have to remember which direction to turn the steering wheel, because it is real wheel steering, and it goes in the oposite direction you would expect. I guess it is a good thing I have been practicing every day for the last week!
So there I was cruising…. No racing down the Autostrada at…. Do I dare tell you…. I dare I dare! 167 Miles Per hour. Everyone should experience this speed on the ground at least once in their lives.
And with that, I suppose I need to explain why and how I was driving so fast.
On Saturday, I was invited to go to a little town called Maranello which is a little ways away from Bolonia here in Italy. Well for those of you who don’t know, Maranello is the home to a rather special car manufacturer that goes by the name of Ferrari!
http://www.galleria.ferrari.com/
On the way down the base car club decided to convoy and my friend who owns a corvette was leading the convoy so as no one would get lost, and the civilian chief of the housing flight drove his as well. Well, when we were about an hour away our group was passed by an F355 Spider. It was shortly followed by one of the drivers in our club. He happened to be driving an early 1990s Ford Mustang that used to be a police cruiser in Arizona. The chase didn’t last long as we caught up to the Mustang in less than 2 miles.
Over the 2-way radios we were carrying came a call for the “Vette to hammer the next one” Well, that meant either us or Jerry, and I just happened to be driving at the time. Not more than 10 minutes later, another Ferrari, passed the group. Well, lets just say that the green flag came out, and that the Corvette can accelerate like a bat out of hell even while already going 75Mph! However, I looked back in my rear-view mirror and noticed that Jerry was already on his way to catch the Ferrari, and then I heard him call it out on the radio. I followed Jerry for a few moments, then Randy, the owner of the Corvette I was in, asked me to slow down, he said that one of the half-shafts had been acting up, and that if it were to come apart on us, it would be a very bad thing. I gave in, being that it wasn’t my car and all.
Before long Jerry caught up, and the chase was on!
Several minutes later, and some miles as well, we finally caught up with Jerry, and there was no sign of the Ferrari. Jerry gave us a thumbs-up, and called over the radio: “Splash One Ferrari!”
We later found out that at 165MPH the Ferrari driver gave up and let him pass!
The Ferrari museum is a cool place, but will be much better once its renovations are done.
Back in September, Aviano had its annual Air Force birthday Ball. Aparently, last year it was a rather horrible debacle, with speech after speech, and lecture/slideshows out the wazoo. This year, I knew the people organizing it, and what the theme was going to be. Lets just say that it was great! I got to wear my Mess-Dress again, and had a great time. The USAFE Big-band came and played, and the food was also fabulous.
Just prior to the Ball, we had the UCI which stands for Unit Compliance Inspection. For my flight, we kicked ass! We got an Excellent out of a possible Outstanding – Excellent – Satisfactory – marginal – Non-Compliant. Overall, the base got a Satisfactory, with numerous areas getting less than good results, but there were mitigating circumstances. It turns out that the vast majority of the inspectors were Augmenters who, though they know the job they were inspecting, knew squat about inspecting.
At the out-brief the base commander, after hearing the results, had a few words to say to us. He said that though this inspection didn’t go anything like we expected, he is confident that we can get the job done, and get it done well. He said that though he knows that we can’t change the grade we got, he knows it doesn’t reflect what we really do.
I’m sure you all at some point have seen a movie that you are ashamed of having seen. It turns out that The New Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is one such movie. It is supposed to be the prequel, telling us the story of the Green Destiny, and company before the 2000 movie of the same title. I figured that this would just be some Hong-Kong knockoff. Well, it turns out that this movie is low budget, even for the kind of movie it is. It looks like it was filmed with a home camcorder, and I didn’t watch more than about 30 seconds. What is so bad about this you may ask….. I bought it. If only I hadn’t, and it wasn’t on sale either.
I think that’s all for now.
So after I got back to work, I walked in one morning just prior to roll call, and noticed that someone was sitting in my desk. I was thinking “Who would dare sit in my desk knowing I will be here soon”. Well, it was my long lost Flight Chief who had finally come back to work, after a four month rotation to the fight in the Persian Gulf, a two week recouperation period, and a whole month of leave. Well, I will say that he deserved the leave, as he got some pretty not nice situations he had to handle while down in the sandbox, but at the same time, he also got some really amazing things done, like setting up the Armament Systems Flight back shop for a new base in that region, and having to entertain numerous high profile air Force personalities who liked the look of the place so much that they would come on down just to see the place.
I finally got to meet one of my neighbors who, it turns out owns one of the Corvettes on base. He is a really cool guy, who even lets me drive it on occasion. And because of this, I want to kill him. See, he infected me with the Corvette bug. It will be a few more years before I can afford the insurance on one, as it turns out, getting a relatively new, used Corvette is mot anywhere as expensive as you might guess. I recently saw a 2001 corvette with not a whole lot of miles and no problems listed for under $25,000.00 it makes me wonder what the catch is, though it was in Beuchel Germany.
Anyhow, we went driving a few weeks ago, and went to a place called Cortina. It is a rather spectacular ski resort town where the 1956 winter Olympics were held, and where the ski scenes in the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only were filmed. And the drive there, was nothing short of amazing. Not because I was getting to drive in a really cool car, but the view, the entire way there, all 100 kM of it was absolutely spectacular.
But at the same time he is something of a problem, see he is also trying to convince me I want to by a Mini CooperS. A little while back I was having a major coolant problem in my car. And at that point, with the trouble I have had with it already, if it was going to cost a lot to fix, I was going to get a new car. Well, it turns out that I only needed to replace the water pump in my car, but he is still pestering me to get the Cooper. So I went and took one for a test drive. The dealer was really cool. He let me take the car out on my own, and told me to have it back before they closed, and that I couldn’t go further than the Italian border. WOW! Talk about freedom to drive! So I followed his suggestion and took it up this winding mountain road, and had an absolute blast. That much fun in a car should be illegal. And this car was even a standard transmission. The clutch was just about perfect; I had no complaints, and considering I had never driven it before, got really good at shifting within about 5 minutes.
It also turns out that I can get one, completely tricked out with all of the add-ons I want, for a heck of a lot less than you might think. But 23k is still a lot of money to spend, and while I really like the mini, its not exactly what I am looking for in a car. At least I don’t think it is. I may still get one before I leave Italy in a year, but I haven’t made up my mind yet.
I also started playing Paint-ball again. It’s a lot of fun, and a whole bunch of the guys from my shop really enjoy getting a chance to shoot at their LT and have nothing bad come of it. Well, nothing bad per se. For every time one of them shot me, they got shot at least three times by me in return. And no, I didn’t cheat. Though I will give Animal props for hitting me in the neck, which was a difficult shot to get off. This has made me realize that playing for fun, is so much more enjoyable than playing against the competition freaks from ROTC I used to play with.
And through out all of this, I had been toying with the idea of adopting a cat. I had decided that while I am doing better about going out with people and being social, it would still be nice to have someone or something to come home to at the end of the day. Well, I had not planned on getting one until I had done what I thought would be a reasonable job of kitty-proofing my apartment, but about three days after I had decided that I was going to get a cat (just not for a while) than an opportunity came up for me to adopt one. A family was giving away a pair of cats, a kitten who was about one month, two at the most old, and her mother, who I was told was a year old. I fell in love with the kitten pretty quickly, and they asked me if I would also take the mother. I thought about it for a while, about half an hour, and decided to adopt them both. So I have been learning to live with cats. I decided that the best way to kitty-proof my place would be to follow them around, and as soon as they started playing with something I didn’t want them to play with, I would put it somewhere they are less likely to get to.
That was three weeks ago, and things are going nicely. Both cats were unnamed when I got them, and they needed names. Well, the kitten was really easy to name. The first thing she played with when I let them out of the kitty carrier was my sandals, and that was her name. She plays with them all the time, even when I am wearing them, but then again, she plays with all of my shoes. The mother was another issue entirely. I was having a bugger of a time figuring a name for her, and I started calling her Momma Cat. Then I stumbled on the fact that one of the singers in the band The Mommas and the Poppas went by the name of Momma Cats, so that’s what her name became. MommaCats.
Sandals is napping on my shins, as I sit on my couch typing this.
I know we all go through phases of having some really crummy computer luck, and I just went through one again. 2 of my three computers bit the dust because of a virus that attacks Windows 2000 or XP when I was trying to download the patches for them to prevent just such a thing from happening. Well, I ended up having to reinstall both computers, and even had to replace one of the hard drives in my desktop. I had thought that the main hard drive had also died, but it turns out that the signs of death were just because of the virus it had. On the plus side, I finally got an external enclosure hard drive, so now I have a sort of a 120gb iPod to take with me. ^_^
Everything is finally back to normal, or nearly back to normal as the case may be.
Incidentally, even if the recipe says to cook it in the microwave, never make paella in the microwave.
Where to begin, where to begin, where to begin. In realizing that I have sorely neglected this little place yet again I came upon an even more pressing problem. Do I post everything that I intend on saying in the chronological order that it happened in, thus making anyone who reads it read through the whole thing just to get to the resent stuff? Or do I post in reverse order, making things appear as though I had been posting all along? Or perhaps a third option, though I find it to be a tad bit silly, to post every different thing in its own post, in a round about way making up for the lack of posts in both number and volume of text?
Well, I think I’ll just go and see what happens and post as it makes sense. Besides, I have a poor track record with huge posts eating themselves.
So, way the heck back in July I took another trip across the ocean, and the entirety of another continent to find myself in sunny San Diego California to attend the wedding of AzDiva and her FlyBoy (I never did find out if he has a screen name, so this one will do for now). While there I got a long promised trip to the beach, which made three trips to three beaches, on three different coasts on two different continents within 30 days!
Going off on a bit of a tangent here for a moment, I will say that all three beaches had very different personalities, though the beach in SoCal and Bibione (Italy) were rather similar in terms of people’s dress, or lack thereof.
Holly Crap1 I thought the jet-lag was going to kill me this time. Each time I tried to eat something; I would be able to eat about five bites before I thought I was going to be ill. I’ll also partially attribute it to stress, but that really sucked because I was pretty much hungry the entire time. And we all know how I like to eat, especially when I am hungry.
Anyhow, the wedding was quite nice, and a good time was had by all. I even got to wear my mess dress for the first time. I got a few LoveBoat comments for how some people thought I looked, but I think I looked pretty good in it, and was happy to finally get to wear the thing, since it’s a mandatory purchase for me, and I hadn’t had a chance to wear it yet.
While there I also got to see MadClawed, who I hadn’t seen in seven months. We got to spend some time together, and were able to clear up a lot of the confusion and other things that had been plaguing us for quite a while.
Unfortunately, everyone had to leave before I did, which makes it a really good thing that I changed my tickets to head back to Italy sooner than I originally planed. I say it is a good thing, because if I would have stayed for as long as I had originally planned, I would have stayed in SoCal until late Thursday night, and I was able to head back early Monday morning. Since the wedding was on Saturday, and everyone was either honeymooning (ya, right, like I’m going to interrupt on that) or on their way home, I had pretty much all of Sunday to my self. So I did what any self respecting movie watching enthusiast would do…. I went to the movies. I went and saw not only Spider Man 2, but also King Arthur. I was thinking about seeing more, but I thought that two movies in a row was about as much as my but could handle, besides movies are more expensive in San Diego than I thought they would be.
I don’t know where to begin, or what to say, or even how to say it, so I guess I’ll just give it a go, and see what happens. For some of it though, I really don’t want to talk about it, and if you need to know, you already know.
The last post, I made here, back in early may, about not having the internet in a place called the crack house, ended up causing a rather large amount of trouble for me. Maxwell Air Force Base is a rather strange place. It is the headquarters for the largest major command in the Air Force, has a rather large sum of money tied up in base improvement projects, and more stars running around than anywhere else with the exception of the pentagon. Overall, it’s a nice base, it is even the campus for a rather famous military college, but it does have one little problem. Its lodging renovation project is not finished, and rather behind schedule. Of all the stories I heard about the course I was going to take, the one that I heard the most was about this horrible old hotel/dorm facility that was a nightmare to stay in. There were two buildings you didn’t want to stay in, 1413 and 1412. They are old, decrepit, full of cockroaches, and in desperate need of being torn down. Well, I got placed in 1413, known as the crack house, because (I am told) some of the “projects” are nicer than what we stayed in. Now in reality, it wasn’t too bad, there was a microwave, fridge, working television in each room, and most importantly the A/C worked quite nicely. But the worst part for a web-head like me is that the telephone lines wouldn’t support the internet. Simply put, dialup wasn’t an option. I was successfully able to connect twice. The first time I was on for about 5 minutes, at a reasonable speed (for dialup), and in that time, I not only got hit with the sasser worm, I also downloaded the patch to fix it. The next time I was able to successfully connect (if you can call it that) I was on for a grand total of 12 seconds, and got a maximum connection speed of 15bps. That’s right Fifteen bytes per second!
So, I decided that I needed to post something here to explain why I wasn’t on the net, that no one would hear from me until I got back to Italy. So I did so, from one of the computers from the classroom that I was in. It was a day later, that I received notice that I was to appear before the commander in the afternoon. It turns out that I was “misusing a government computer” by posting to my personal webpage. That as an officer I am supposed to set the example and that I should know better than to use a government resource for personal gain. Oddly enough, he never mentioned the fact that I had viewed personal web pages as well. Now I know what I did is hardly illegal. In fact, there are even published guidelines for what I can and cannot talk about in my blog now. But this was an academic environment, and we were being held to a different standard.
I think my ass is finally back to its normal size, after having had so much of it bitten off and chewed on.
The course I went back for was ASBC, the Air and Space Basic Course. Also known as the Alcohol, Sex and Beach Course, for the amounts of them that went on. The course primarily focused on how to plan an air battle campaign from scratch, which is done by people much higher up the food chain than lieutenants. Essentially, the course was a six week course on not drinking too much to get to work in the morning. Fortunately, no one got into any real trouble, and the majority of the pain was all academic related. I did earn a new call sign though. I am now known as Crash to the classmates from that course. The first weekend we were there, we went to the movies, and my knee collided with a cup holder, and it really hurt. Well, I wasn’t able to run, and hardly walk for the next while. Then, just about as soon as I was all healed up, we went to go run the obstacle course. This was one of the cooler obstacle courses I have ever run through. There was one obstacle in particular, called the Gut Buster, and for good reason. It is a rolling telephone pole suspended at a diagonal angle which you have to go over. Well, the low end is about four and a half feet above the ground, with the high end being much higher. So, as you can imagine, the only real way to get over this thing is with a flying leap, to land on your midsection, and then try to throw yourself over. I hit it going nearly full force, ribs first. It hurt. The next obstacle was similar, and I hit it ribs first as well. Needless to say, I thought I broke my ribs on the left side. After going to the flight surgeon, and a full set of chest x-rays, it was determined that I had not broken anything, merely bruised the rib itself. Though I will say that for as much as it hurt, I wish I had broken the rib, it would have been worth it them.
One night I woke up to a skittering sound coming from the desk in my room. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it was something on one or my papers. So I turned on the lights to discover this rather large roach on the desk. Much crashing, smashing and chasing around ensued, along with much noise from the crashing, smashing, and chasing. This went on for about ten minutes until I finally hit it pretty well, near the door, but it didn’t die and limped out the crack under the door before I could hit it again with my shoe. The next morning when I left my room to go to class, there was a black sock filled with wet tissues attached to my door nob. I quickly cut it off with my knife. Apparently I got this because my classmates thought I was masturbating, and doing so rather loudly. It’s a good thing this happened near the very end of the class, because this was rather insulting and mean spirited. I would like to think that any intelligent person could tell the difference between the sound of someone trying to kill a cockroach, and someone beating off. I guess the caliber of people becoming officers in the Air Force is declining. Sad really.
I think that’s enough for now. I’ll post more later.
I'n not dead, the internet just wont come to those of us who currently live in a dorm known as the crack house.
Lets see here, not so tasty news, reasonable news, good news, better news, really good news, great news, really great happy news!
So first off I should say that I am typing this while I am fully decked out in my chem gear and that typing with three layers of gloves on is no easy task. This is my third attempt, and I am using two pencils to peck at the keyboard. Stupid surprise exercise.....
Ok, on to the actual news. Recently I have been having a rather yucky rash of bad luck in the kitchen. It must be because I have been lazy and making hamburger helper, but I simply follow the directions on the back of the box, use fresh ground beef, but it still tastes terrible to me. Last night I ended up throwing out yet another batch of food because the sauce tasted burned to me, but i made quite sure to never let it quite come to a boil, to only simmer. Grrrrrrr.....
The reasonable news is that my long lost package finally arrived! In it was all of the Guiness that I had been waiting for as well as the Game Cube and its cool stuff as well. Super Smash Brothers Melee is very cool, but it really needs more than one person to make it fun to play. That is not to say however, that fighting three computer controlled characters is easy, just not as zany as with other people.
After much bashing of equipment and my head into the wall, my home network is finally up and running. I haven't tried to make it work wirelessly quite yet (at Icchan's suggestion), but it is running. All computers on the Project SEEDS network can now communicate with eachother, and it was good. On a bit of a side note, I ran out of internal power cable splitters while assembeling Knives and was unable to connect the cool blue front led on the case. I did however have a spare fan connecter, so I thought that I would give converting the two plugs to work a go, and I actually pulled it off! Simple wiring actually, but I did it, and I am justly proud of myself for my first real case mod, however minor it may be.
My next TDY is coming up in like a week and a half, and I recently made my travel arrangements. I now have tickets in hand and only had to make two trips to get them. The first to make the travel arrangements, and the second three days later, as suggested, to pick up the actual tickets. This time I made sure that I had both legs of the trip issued to me as well.
I filed my taxes like all good tax paying citizens should, and I kinda view it like I am paying my self (which in a very roundabout way I am). Turns out I am getting a nice tax return. I'll tell you what I am going to do with it in a little but.
I also got my car back, though this did happen two weeks ago. It costed a whole bunch less than I was afraid it would cost, so thats a really good thing. I should be getting my insurance payment for it before too long. I'll also be telling you where that money will go before too long as well.
Actually I will tell you where this sudden influx of money is going right now. This morning I bought my tickets to go to San Diego for AZDiva's wedding in July! Granted I ended up spending about $150 more than I should have bacause of an error in the page, but I got them. The problem was that I had gotten this amazing business class fare on British Airways for a total of $950 American dollars, and it was round trip too. That price also included all of the fees and taxes, so it was a truly amazing deal. Well for some stupid reason (it said I timed out) when I went to pay, the web page got an error and when I went back to book the same flight again, the deal wasn't there. NOTE: I am quite amazed that Civil Engineering patched the hole in the roof so fast. Well, I ended up getting my tickets through another airline for a bit more than I had hoped to pay, but I got them. Now all I have to do is convince my commander to let me take some time off, but I don't think that will be a problem.
Well, thats all of the news I have for now. I'll post more after I get home. And yes, I did finish typing this thing after I got out of the chem gear.