Today it was back to work! Hooray! Who needs vacation time anyway! I love working!

*cries*

I'm not the only one laboring away today… seems my sister is soon to be the proud possessor of a daughter. I'm looking forward to an email with the final results. Although I confess that the whole height and weight and length thing has never enthralled me. I just settle for "small", "medium", and "large" babies. Odds are it'll be "large".

Seriously, it's nice to be back at work, especially because I was expecting that there'd be a huge backlog, and there isn't. The downside is, I already discovered that some of what was done while I was gone, was not quite done to my exacting specifications. But hey, I wasn't there, I can't complain too much… I'll just see to it that the discrepencies get corrected.

Also, I may be on a subtropical isle, but I work with high-pressure gasses. So I got a small case of frostbite today. Whoops. Doc says it'll heal on it's own.

It's been a long time since we had any leave. Everyone was checking back in today, and I shook the hands of plenty of new spouses. Three of the guys married their Japanese girlfriends, one guy flew home to marry his American sweetheart, and two of the squadron's corporals married each other. Awww. So now one of those two is being transferred to a different unit (still on this base) as the DoD disapproves of married couples serving in the same unit.

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Turns out that the stormy weather this weekend was the fringe of a typhoon. This keeps my streak intact- for every typhoon that has impacted the island while I've been here, the bad weather strikes on a weekend. I'm now five for five on that.

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Well, I had been planning on going to Shuri Castle today, but it's raining in a manner that will make siteseeing not overly fun. I hope it'll clear up this afternoon.

Last night I'd been planning on a quiet evening at home, but one of the guys from my gaming group knocked at the door. "Borman's going-away party. See you at the duty desk in five." So I put my shoes on, and we all headed off to the Dragon Restraunt, which is a chinese place not far from base. We were the only Americans there on a Thursday night, but there were three or four Japanese groups there. It's a family style place, meaning you order an entree and it comes with enough food for three people. Last time, the gang didn't know that, so everyone ordered a seperate entree, and there was a huge mountain of food. This time we kept it a little more restrained, and no one had to gorge himself for the honor of the Corps.

After dinner, people headed to a place called Cocktails for, well, you know. Myself and Brom don't do much drinking, so we called it a night and went back home. There I go, not upholding the fine of Marine traditions of inebriation.

UPDATE: Weather forecast says it'll be T-storms all weekend. So I really should have gone to the caste earlier in the week. Woe is me.

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I bought a pile of sushi yesterday with the intention of sharing it with my roommate. I didn't know that he was going to a colleague's farewell dinner, and thus stuffed himself at the buffet somewhere else, and had no room for my offerings

Sushi (with raw meat)* will keep for a couple of hours when refrigerated, but overnight is kind of pushing it. So I was forced to gorge myself. I mean, ordinarily I wouldn't have, but I remembered all the times my mother told me about the starving orphans in Ireland, so I had to.** I'm sushi'd out now. Tomorrow is another day, though- and I'm planing on going to go see Shuri Castle, and local restaurant will be the plan for chow.

All that fish reminds me of a recent from-work story. We got a new Maintenance Chief a few days ago, and the guys in my shop can't stop bragging about me. So within a day of his arrival he heard that I was "The smartest Marine in the squadron." Upon meeting him myself, he demanded proof: "How many blades of grass are there in an acre?".

I was back in five minutes with an answer- my experiment showed that there were 160,000,000 blades of grass in an acre. The Maintenance Chief's source*** said "Two hundred million," but be agreed that the difference was within expectations considering different types of grass, lawn care philosophies, etc.

Then at the meeting after the maintenance audit results were announced, the Chief declared that the program manager of any off-track or "needs more attention" program would be writing him an essay about how it went wrong, and what they would do to set it right. Then he said "And since the smartest Marine in the squadron is sitting right over there, he can help you edit them to readability."

That's what I got for being the most junior guy in the room.

* Sushi refers to the rice, so while lots of sushi has raw fish on it, some sushis are other. In fact, I had some very nice omelet sushi.
** My mother never pushed me to eat foods based on that kind of argument, which is fortunate, as even as a six-year-old I think I would have seen through it.
*** An Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

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Went downtown to the local camera shop today. I want a better tripod, but they didn't have any that suited my needs. Still, I needed another camera lens cover retaining string, so I did spend 368 yen. Yes, 368. That's not a post-tax calculation, that was exactly what they charged. The Japanese are not all about the rounding of prices.

And since I was nearby, I hit a San-A, which is the major on-island grocery store chain. Got me a huge pile of sushi. More than I can eat, but hey- sushi here is (a) really good, and (b) really cheap. Even grocery-store sushi is very fine.

I thought about stopping by the Futenma Cave Shrine to make an offering for my aunt's house in Montana to not get burned down, but it started raining heavily, which suggests that the rain gods were already busy. Plus, I remembered that I had to get my sushi home into the fridge before it became evil. 

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Sorry for the lack of posts recently. But the inspection is over, and we survived, barely. Right now I'm on leave. I've only got a few days off, so I decided not to go to Tokyo. Maybe in February, after we're no longer part of the MEU.

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At mail call today, there was an Amazon.com package for me. I was confused- the books I'd ordered had arrived on Monday, so this must be a surprise present from someone! Yay! Material Things=Love!

So I popped it open, and discovered six CDs and a book. I'd ordered them a good two months ago, but they'd been on backorder. So this was all stuff I bought and paid for. But hey, it was a surprise anyway, because my mind is getting fried from excessive stress and lack of sleep!

I unplugged Sgt R_'s iPod from the stereo and dropped in what I figured would be the two most "normal" CDs from the order. Reaction was poor. No one liked Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by the Pogues, and then a near riot broke out from Prairie Home Invasion by Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon. I can't complain I guess, because with Biafra and Nixon, riots are part of the charm.

Anyway, my part of the inspection is done. Other shops and programs are still under the microscope, but my program and my shop were done as of close of business yesterday. The shop took some hits, but I understand that we're good enough to stay in business, we just have to correct some things before the followup re-inspection in a couple of weeks.

The squadron as a whole might be in trouble, though. An inspector caught a new guy from flightline working with a toolbox that was not properly checked out. That will probably put the squadron's tool control program off-track, which will shut down all maintenance and flight until the inspectors are satisfied that we've corrected our collective case of idiocy.

The poor officer in charge of the tool control program has spent all day looking like someone shot his dog. There's not much he could have done to prevent that problem; the new guy had just arrived here, so his bad habits come from the schoolhouse, and correcting them was the responsibility of the flightline shop NCOs. But being an officer means being responsible for problems that you couldn't reasonably forsee. He's been joking that since he's about to get fired, he's got an interview lined up with with the Soylent Green Corporation Human Resources Department.

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I've been kind of quiet recently, because I'm working way too many hours. Last week we went through a Functional Area Inspection, in which our squadron is inspected to ensure that we are following procedures and programs that apply to all Marine Corps units. So there were uniform inspections, weigh-ins, checking our service record books, I got to do a gas mask inspection, all that kind of stuff. We worked crazy hours to make sure we passed.

Then we worked the weekend, getting ready for this week's fun, the Aviation Logistics Inspection. These inspectors are making sure that our aviation program is following all the directives, procedures, rules, and orders that we should be. So while last week was long and annoying, this week is hell. All of our paperwork is being combed through my a team of very senior Staff NCOs, the kind of guys that know exactly which closets tend to have skeletons.

I've been working so long because I personally run one of the programs being inspected. It's my first inspection, so I didn't know what to get right for it, so all I could do was put in stupid hours and try to make everything perfect.

Well, this afternoon the gunny inspecting my program finished. He said it was outstanding. No discrepencies of any kind found. And instead of just blandly putting "No discrepencies" in the report, he told me that he'd specifically mention my program as being outstandingly managed, and recommend me for an award.

Woo hoo! I am so happy, I'm almost not bitter anymore about giving up a week of leave for this!

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