Catching Up Part Deux

So there was one more weekend where I left off last. About midway through the week I clamped my foot down and said I was definitely not going to be driving anywhere because I had to rest up for my 850 mile trek coming up early the next week, and was planning to just vegetate all weekend. Right. So anyway we ended up down in Pensacola again to help celebrate one of her sister's birthdays. This was an interesting trip as we ended up crisscrossing the entire city at various times, seeimingly whenever we wanted to get somewhere it was clear on the other side of town. It reminds me of LA somewhat, you can drive for like 45 minutes and still be in town. It's not as interesting though, instead of buildings and freeway interchanges you have a lot of swampland and dimly lit highways. Scrabble was the name of the game at one point, and I somehow ended up winning due to some rule about a failed challenge against me giving me a bonus 50 points, although for some reason the word Pez was accepted about halfway through on a triple word score and that gave me about half my total. So yeah more eating out, more buffets, more enjoying myself a little too much. More on that later.

We eventually graduated that Tuesday, and found out we were the top flight in our squadron, which was somewhat unexpected and kind of cool. Was a bit sad to close up shop back at the room, as it usually is when you move your home from one place to the next. Luckily all roads seem to lead to Maxwell at some point or another (or unluckily some might say) so I'll probably be back as a captain for some more fun.

I knew coming back here the scale wouldn't have good news, given I spent six weeks eating out constantly, having pizza for lunch, and all in all not getting the amount of exercise I'm used to. Little did I know it would have 190 pounds worth of issues. Those of you who recall I it 175 a few weeks before I left and was hovering around 178-180 will realize that is a whole lot of work lost. Well I've been cranking it back up ever since I saw the dreadful news and am back to around 185. The new goal is to be back to 175 by my sister's wedding on the 27th, which won't be easy. Alas when you screw around and let yourself balloon, it's a lot harder to lose back what you gained. It's not like I didn't know it was coming though. I just had a really amazing six weeks socially, and sacrifices tend to be made for such rare occurrances.

So now we move on to the difficult concept of keeping in touch intercontinentally, which is definitely not something I've tried. I've hooked myself up with dialpad.com, which lets me use my comp to call her landline for three or four cents a minute, rather than the twenty nine it costs via my cell. She's also found a way to use the military DSN network to get to me, although we won't be able to use that as extensively. Meanwhile we've started up the ol e-mail/e-card thing, although with no computer at home yet that's limited as well. The seven hour time change is most of the problem, so when she gets home from work I'm just leaving for work, and when I get home she's going to sleep, and when I go to sleep she's leaving for work. So we've been using the in betweener times when we can, and e-mailing and text messaging the rest of the time. She's in the process of trying to get leave for my sister's wedding so she can meet the whole family and we can at least spend a couple days together, but barely anyone in her office has been able to take leave so it's looking worrysome, should find out tomorrow. At the same time the price of her ticket is like half what it was a week ago, but it has to be purchased by Thursday, so the clock is really ticking. Here's hoping.

In other news it looks like I'm pretty much in JSUNT class 0505, so this journal will become relevant to those navigator types pretty soon now. Start date is 20 April, with graduation sometime in January I believe. More details as they become available, in the meantime I have another forty days or so to do nothing but work out and explore the wonders of recreation.

It's a little different though this time. Somewhere way over there is someone important. Better yet, she thinks I'm important too. And that's kind of cool.