Talking about our soon to arrive puppy:
Rick – “I really don’t care what color he is… black, brown… doesn’t matter to me, as long as he’s healthy. Kind of like a baby.”
Eva – “What if I had a brown baby but it was healthy?”
Such a comedian. Excuse me. Comedienne.
The picture today is of the Washington Monument and the front of the mess hall at West Point.
There hasn’t been much going on here lately to write about. I’ve been reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand for about a year. I break up the verbose pro-capitalistic diatribes with easier reads. I’m on page 620 right now. Out of 1100 or so. And the print is small, small, small. I’ll lay down in bed and read two pages. It’s pathetic.
The war is coming along nicely. I hit the 6 month mark in 3 days. Eva and I go on leave together toward the end of November. The Army is flying us to Paris. People are jealous that I get to see my wife periodically over here. I tell them they could see their wife too. All she has to do is go to Officer Candidate School, then go to an Officer Basic Course, then work on getting to the same Brigade as her husband, then when the next deployment comes around they can deploy together and they’ll have an opportunity to see each other too. It’s easy! Usually they stop harassing me after that.
I was watching Man vs. Wild the other day and Bear Gryllz ate a camel spider.
Top: Seoul in 2008 with a Canon Rebel xSi DSLR
Bottom: West Point, NY in 2005 with a Canon Elph point and shoot
Does anyone else get spectacularly annoyed when they’re driving and see someone talking on their cell phone? It infuriates me. I also get mad at red lights, but they can’t see my scornful glances.
It was so weird. I flew to Ireland just to see this castle. Ballina, Ireland in fact, just north of Lough Conn. The gothic structure, built in the 1530’s by expatriated Lithuanian sharecroppers, housed Karl Marx’s estranged daughter from 1869 to 1882. She died March 14th, 1882 (exactly 0ne year before her father) when she was inadvertently killed by small pox transmitted by a supply package of contaminated food sent to her by a subversive Russian group which called itself simply ‘Roch’ and would eventually serve as the model for the KGB. Ironically the outbreak in her castle was simultaneously contained by the inherent secrecy of both her mere existence and location. The flags in this photo were preserved as discovered by the Nazi explorer (and arguable catalyst of two Indiana Jones films) Otto Rahn in 1936. It’s now known Marx’s daughter, (whose name is yet a mystery), was estranged for her refusal to accept the tenants of Communism as well as for her profound love of the faraway fledgling republic of the United States. She never visited the U.S. while alive. Her deathbed wish was granted, however, and she was buried in an unmarked grave under the “US Center Chapel” in Lebanon, Kansas–the geographic center of the United States of America.
This was taken at Lusk Reservoir on the campus of West Point in New York. I took this while Eva and I were there for our wedding in August 2008. There is some fact about the number of gallons which flow over the spillway every minute which plebes (freshmen) are supposed to memorize and spout off when and if they are asked about said interesting tidbit by an upperclassman. I do not remember this factoid; I am not a plebe. That being said, in the amount of time it took me to verbally and verbosely illustrate 1. what fact is associated with this particular reservoir, 2. under what circumstances said fact may come up in conversation, and 3. the fact that I do not recall what the gallon per minute flow is, it would have been very easy for me to Google “lusk reservoir plebe knowledge.” I didn’t do that though.