Saturday, June 30, 2007

Maine ho!

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Look like it's going to be a busy busy Fall! We've got O's tickets for 9/8 in Baltimore. GT flex packs went on sale today, so we got hooked up with tickets for BC on 9/15, Clemson on 9/29, and UGA on 11/24. Then we've got tickets for GT at UVA on 9/22. And we're getting Army@GT tickets on 10/20 through Emily's dad. Yikes! I'm not sure that we'll be attending the Clemson game, so if someone else is interested in those tickets, let me or Emily know. July is already chock full of activities, then we have a mild lull in August before September kicks into high gear. It's going to be October before I even know what's happening!

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Emily's been sick teh last several days and I've been fortunate not to catch it. Now that I've said that, I've doomed myself to get violently ill while on vacation in Maine. Oh well. The issue last Friday spilled over into the weekend, but I had some hardware shipped overnight, solved the problem, plus another problem, and then got scolded for my trouble because I didn't follow the proper procedure to deliver assets to a boat. Whatever. I caused someone to have to do a little extra paperwork after the fact in exchange for allowing a boat to leave port with a fully operational system. Even if I caused a schedule slip or we missed a contractual delivery (neither occured), I still saved the Navy untold many thousands of dollars by not having to delay deploying a boat or having to reschedule an acoustic trial, and I saved our company the embarassment of a global Navy message stating that two of our systems were unavailable during an acoustic trial. I think the personal cost to me far outwieghs the consequences of having nto followed process, which in this case would have been akin to not acting at all since following process would have prevented the necessary hardware from arriving in time. I will gladly take the bullet on this one. It's too bad the production manager is too shortsighted to see that I did more good than harm when everyone else can clearly see it. *shrug* In other news, um, other news, um... I dunno, my life has been dominated by work recently, so I'll be glad to get out of town and go do something fun with Emily for a whole week. Lindsay is in town for a couple days, so we hung out at Bobby's last night. She drove a dagger through my heart when she mentioned she was interested in going to UGA, but fortunately, she seems much more interested in UNC, which I can at least abide as another ACC school, and it's certainly less snooty than her other choices of Duke, Princeton, and UVA. I'm secretly dissapointed that there are so few engineers in my family (we're a family of doctors, laywers, and teachers). Jennifer is at least seriously into biology, and her brother Darren is headed to SoCal to work for Northrun Grumman, so I have to appluad that. Figures that the only other engineer would be a fellow Yellow Jacket. ;) I'm running out of cousins though, but I've got my fingers crossed for Nathan; he's about the only one who's shown any real technical prowess or interest. But then, his interests change on a weekly basis, so who knows. I guess I'll have to wait until my friends and relatives (or Emily and I) start having middle and high-school age kids to try to push engineering on them. Maybe I should rethink Hrothgar and Helmet and consider naming my kids Maxwell Fermi and Tesla Faraday? I was also sorely dissapointed to learn that Bobby's (really Wilson's) puppy Molly isn't so named as an abbreviation of Molybdenum.

Friday, June 22, 2007

I got tickets for Weird Al this morning! I'm so pumped. I've been doing everything in my power to not have videos constantly streaming in my office today. Actually, a MARMC guy has been doing everythign in his power since I've been on the phone with him most of the morning about a problem with a boat that I fixed a month ago. Why sailors can't just leave things that work alone is beyond me... But no no, they had to try to break something that was working fine and then try to fix it and proceed to break it even further. I'm going to be super upset if I have to go fix the same problem twice. At least from the relative comfort of my desk, it's not so bad. Anyway, no bad vibes can affect me, Weird Al is coming to town, and I've got tickets! =)

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Things have been so busy the past 7 weeks or so. June is more than half over and I barely remember May at all. I've been travelling a lot and then we were in Savannah for wedding stuff and we're getting all our plans in order to leave for Maine next weekend. I'm very excited about this trip. I've never been up that way. Pop-pop and I went hiking in Vermont and New Hampshire, and of course I've been to Groton, and I had a brief visit to Boston when I was interested in MIT, but I've never made it all the way to Maine. We've got a lot of things planned to see and do, but nothing so rigid that we can't try something different if an opporunity presents itself. Work is going fine. We're kind of in a lull at the moment, so while I have plenty to do, most of it is the kind of annoying stuff thst we kept putting off before. So we're actually inventing work for ourselves because it's more fun that way. There's an easy way that's annoying or a hard way that's fun. Hmmm, tough call on that one. ;) If we were pressed for time, yes, of course we'd go the easy route, but we're not, so fun way ho! Wedding stuff is coming along, though we still have a couple big items left to check off. We've got a date, a ceremony location, a reception location, a priest, a photographer, a cake, and a blocked hotel, so I think we've got the most important pieces covered. We've got a temporary rehearsal dinner site which I'm not sure is going to be able to accomodate us fully, but at least we have a backup. We have a couple other ideas, but we really need to look at the places again since a monkeywrench got thrown into the mix last time. Emily's going home in mid-July for a friend's wedding, so maybe she can pop her head into a couple places before we make a final decision. We haven't decided on a homeymoon location yet either. I think we've narrowed it down to Hawaii, Aruba, the Virgin Islands, Malta, southern France, or eastern Spain. I'm a little concerned that the Meditteranean may be somewhat chilly still in mid-April, so we may be sticking to either Hawaii or the Caribbean, but we'll see how that works out.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Mmmm, Slurpee... I had to go to Lockheed today, and my god was it sucky outside when I left about an hour ago. My car temp-ometer said 101 outside (so give or take 10 degrees I'm sure). But it was humid like crazy. I didn't see on the sign this morning, but I'll bet we had another Red Alert air quality warning today. Anyway, I needed gas, so I stopped at Citgo, even though it was 3 cents more expensive than the Shell up the street expressly because they had a 7-11 attached and I could get a Slurpee there. Mmm... Totally makes up for being at Lockheed. And I'll take a Slurpee-induced cold-headache over a Lockheed-headache any day! ;)

Monday, June 18, 2007

Craigslist provides an important service, but damn does it make me angry sometimes. It's not really the website's fault, but the people on it just make me want to punch them sometimes. Just because something says OBO doesn't really give you carte blanche to offer whatever you want. If I listed something for $250 OBO, chances are pretty good that I'm not going to sell it to you for $35. Certainly half the emails I receive are bogus to begin with, and half of the valid ones never return your emails. Eventually I manage to sell the things I'm trying to get rid of, but it's cvertinaly not without its share of hassles. I use Cragislist to avoid having to box things up and take them to the post office (like I probably would using eBay), but I'm about ready to just go back to using a more binding service (like eBay) again.

Monday, June 11, 2007

I should have known better. I don't even know what I was thinking. But when Emily and I were at Moddell's yesterday, they had Calvin's Lions jersey on display (next to Brady's god-awful-ugly Cleveland jersey), and I started to wonder if Detroit played Washington this year and if so if it was at Fedex Field. Both turned out to be true, so I decided to investigate tickets. $70 minimum for partially obstructed view tickets. Nice. I could get season tickets for Tech for less than what I'd pay for a semi-decent seat for a single 'skins game. Stupid NFL. Since I'd like to actually be able to see CJ take on Washington's safety-heavy defense, I think perhaps I will curl up on the couch with my big screen TV instead.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

I'm in Norfolk again. Whee. Yet again my clearance is nowhere to be seen. So after the hellish 8 hour drive thanks to a multiple-vehicle truck accident that closed I-95 South north of Richmond all morning, I arrived and still wasn't able to actually do anything. *sigh* It's like 2 weeks ago all over again! It's even the same boat. I feel like I just got home and I'm already on the road again. Oh well, such is the life of being low-man on the team. I just wish I felt more useful when I went on these trips because most of my billed time is travel and waiting around the pass office or making phone calls about not being to get on base. I guess I should be heartened that it's so difficult to get in, but it's not like the perimeter fence is really going to keep anyone out who wanted to get in badly enough. I suppose that's why they have two armed guards at every entrance to every boat on the yard. *shrug* Time for bed so I can wait for our security people to come in tomorrow to the 15 angry phone calls I left them and hope they call me back.

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Thank you HBO! As part of our move, we got HBO and Cinemax free for three months. Recently, HBO has been showing all 6 episodes of Star Wars back to back. I took the liberty of recording them all in HD and have spent most of my weekend watching them. Ah procrastination...

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  • I'm Rev. Adam
  • From Oakton, Virginia, United States
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