The beauty of this website is that it not only serves as a medium for me to share pictures of our young son, but it likewise simultaneously serves as an online backup. Don’t like seeing so many pictures/videos of George? Don’t come to the site anymore. It bothers me not at all.
Videos:
Pictures:
Eva at 37 weeks. Me practicing. One is more ridiculous than the other. I’ll let you decide.
Eva is at 36 weeks which, by my advanced math, makes her 9 months pregnant even though she’s due in a month. I still don’t fully understand the gestational math. Apparently the baby is due at 40 weeks which is the end of the 10th month. The first month must be month 0. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Eva is quite pregnant and will likely have our baby here in the not too distant future. We’re very, very excited.
Speaking of young George Richard Cook IV: below you can see a super awesome panorama of his room as well as individual detail shots of some items of interest. The panorama didn’t exactly stitch together flawlessly but it works. First of all, the theme of the room is sports. That might not be overwhelmingly apparent at first glance. Near the door is a framed Super Bowl poster of the Steelers from the 2005 season. That was one of their 6 victories which is, as you all undoubtedly know, the most of any team in the NFL. No big deal. Young George will be indoctrinated with a Steelers mentality from birth.
Immediately to the right of that magnificent poster is a pine primitive antique desk Eva and I picked up here in Augusta. It has ink well stains in the top drawers. I currently use the desk for my homework but George will use it in the future for his. The chair is an antique Heywood-Wakefield from an old Georgia courthouse. Above the Bahamian conch shell and small golf bag lamp is a sketch of my Dad’s jet from when he was a flight instructor in the Air Force. The changing table is a repurposed oak dresser made in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s by the Louisiana furniture company Crescent Line. Eva painted the “GRC” letters on the wall and I think they look great.
The picture on the left side of the crib is a collage of pictures of Eva and I from birth through age 13 which Eva’s Mom put together for us. The photo on the right of the crib is one which hung on my sisters Erin and Laura’s bedroom wall when they shared a room in Nebraska. The crib is walnut and colonial in style. The bedding is neutral so we can re-use it with other kids. The giant bear is from a family friend named Tae and we got it at George’s shower which my sister Erin graciously planned and orchestrated for us in Hilton Head at our Grandparent’s house. The basket at the bear’s feet (paws?) holds some toys and sports equipment which George will eventually play with. The cross over the window is a gift from my grandmother Mimi and is from Jerusalem.
The sports themed wall art is from a store in El Paso that sells everything for 90% off. This sounds great, but they likewise mark everything up 80 or 90% before reducing it. The square soccer art for example cost us 15 or 20 bucks. The sticker price was 120 or so. The store is actually quite comical; chock full of shoddily constructed “art” and “sculptures.” I digress. The leather chair is for Eva to nurse George in and for her to sit in while he plays and/or rolls around in his room before he’s mobile. We have an identical chair in our bedroom downstairs for when George initially sleeps in a travel crib in our room to make Eva’s many wake-ups and midnight nursing sessions as palatable as possible.
Below the photos of George’s room are some shots of Eva in her current pregnant state. Enjoy.
Yesterday on the 10 o’clock news, my favorite local reporter, the distinguished and ambiguously gay Kai Porter, highlighted a GED graduation ceremony here in El Paso. El Paso never ceases to amaze me.
The shot today is from the side of the tracks at the Bosan Train Station outside of Camp Casey in Korea.
As I lay in bed reading Atlas Shrugged the other night, I put the book on my chest and allowed my mind to wander. I thought of nothing in particular. This and that. The TV in our room was on and I glanced over. At the time, the Saints were losing and defeat seemed imminent. I never give Drew his due. I peered through my bug net, the room’s darkness compounded by the net absorbing the light from my bed-mounted reading lamp. My wandering gaze eventually reached the bunk-bed across the room. On the top bunk rested my roommate Lincoln, on his back with his laptop on his chest as he watched an episode of The Office. I looked at this and thought nothing in particular. Then I realized that what I was really looking at was a 30 year old, married, college graduate with an infant daughter. On a top bunk. He was laying there nary 2 feet above a 27 year old, married, college graduate with a 1 year old son. It was a very funny revelation. Then I turned off my light and went to sleep. On a bottom bunk.
We caught a camel spider in our office today. I saw it scurry out from under the table at which I sit. We put the disgusting little creature in a decapitated water bottle. We went outside and found a giant beetle and dropped it into the water bottle in hopes of providing the camel spider with sustenance and us with entertainment. It was very anticlimactic. The beetle couldn’t get off its back and the camel spider couldn’t bite through the beetle’s exoskeleton, try as he might. I lost interest in the bottom-of-the-food-chain-ballet and went outside in search of a specimen which the camel spider would find more appealing. Or at least more defenseless. I didn’t see a single bug. This is significant, people. I’m in Iraq–there are ALWAYS bugs. Not this time. We released the camel spider outside after I snapped the below photograph with one of my co-worker’s point and shoots. He seemed relieved. The camel spider that is. When it was all over I realized that there was very little reaction to the fact that this giant, hideous creature was in our office. I think reactions in a workplace in the US might have been slightly different.
My internet connection out here has been particularly terrible of late. I apologize for the infrequency of my updates. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to get us flawless and speedy internet out here in the middle of the desert with no infrastructure.
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
I found this shot buried in the depths of my external hard drive. I think it’s pretty funny. Many of you may have seen the fabled Army-Navy football game. Some of you may have even attended said game. Before the game, all the Army Cadets and Navy Midshipmen march onto the field. Separately of course. Army wouldn’t want to soil their impeccable marching abilities with the vile lack of marching abilities annually demonstrated by Navy. In standard Army fashion, however, before every Army-Navy game, the West Point cadets are forced to show up ridiculously early. Like, 4 to 5 hours before the march-on and therefore 5 to 6 hours before the game. Which, my mathematically challenged readers, is generally 6 or 7 AM. Not too early, but when you consider that everyone there that early is recovering from a night replete with compensatory drinking and partying, the pain is damn near palpable. So what happens? Exhausted and hung-over cadets, waiting in a parking lot hours earlier than necessary, curl up in snake-pit like balls of grey to catch up on much needed sleep before marching into a stadium to freeze and watch their alma mater get destroyed by Navy.
There’s always next year.
I ate Iraqi food for dinner tonight and I feel ill. It was a hodge-podge of hajj scrambled eggs, potatoes, copious amounts of oil, and a meat. It seemed like beef. That being said, I haven’t seen a cow anywhere near here, and, contrary to popular belief, there isn’t exactly a preponderance of WalMart Supercenters where these people can shop either. So there’s that.
I snapped this shot while I was at Ft. Benning in Columbus, GA for Airborne training. The Columbus which surrounds Ft. Benning is… how should I put this… a $#!thole. It’s like Oz, but instead of Kansas, Dorothy was blown away from Detroit accompanied by her abusive boyfriend and a dependence on plastic bottled vodka. You know, the kind with a molded plastic handle and a label featuring some kind of bird-of-prey with obvious Russian overtones. And her boyfriend has another kid with a stripper which he “swears he doesn’t talk to anymore,” referring to both the stripper as well as the kid. And also Dorothy gets drunk off her Russian-style vodka and gets in shouting matches with her trailer park neighbor; they shout at one another over a car tire fence and use the word “ain’t” a lot. But I digress. Columbus is crappy. I guess I could have just said that. Either way, I thought this sign was cool. The Candlelight Motel was, at the time at least, off-limits to Army personnel because of reported prostitution activity there. And the only candles there are the ones heating up spoons full of heroin.
Well I finally have a photo to post. It’s not so much that I finally took a photo I consider good enough to post, but rather I finally took a picture at all which would facilitate the posting of said picture. That was admittedly too many words. And I didn’t even take this picture… a friend of Eva’s named Tina took it for us. As though an explanation is necessary, this is Eva and I in Kuwait. If it doesn’t look hot then the picture is deceiving. We’re at Camp Buehring, and it could most certainly be a lot worse. There are plenty of facilities here to occupy the cornucopia of unoccupied time we currently have available. We spend about 4 hours in the DFAC (Dining Facility) every day, and whatever other time we have available is spent wandering about looking for minimally occupied common areas which have air conditioning. We’ve discovered that air condition is paramount. Not very Meriwether Lewis, but an important realization just the same.
Quick side note: if you would like a copy of the picture, click here to get to the large size on Flickr and then just click the ‘Download the Large size’ link right above the shot. Also, you can click the picture itself to see my photostream and some of my more recently posted photos. (“Recently” here is a relative term.)
What gainfully employed time we do have is spent in mandatory training; “checking the block,” so to speak, before we head up north into Iraq. We’ve learned about IEDs, Fratricide, Humvee and MRAP rollovers so far… real sunshine and rainbow stuff, let me tell ya. However, it is necessary and applicable so overall it was all probably good. Fortunately, almost all of the training Eva and I have had to do has coincided, so we’ve been hanging out more or less all day, every day for the last week. Not too shabby. People are jealous.
We’re both heading north here in a few days. We leave the same day, potentially on the same flight, and might be at the same base in Iraq for all of two days. We could just as easily part ways as soon as we hit the ground in Iraq. It’s not impossible to tell, but damn near.
We’ve actually seen a lot of people we know from West Point here in Kuwait. Most of them are aviators from the 1st Cavalry Division. People we’ve seen, in no particular order, are: Jason McCoy, Grant Cloaninger, Kevin Britt, Mike Hahn-Conti, Dave Park, Nick Fullmer, Tina Chong, and a dude I went to high school with named Marty Davis who’s a Specialist in the Wisconsin National Guard. Of all the people we’ve seen, seeing Marty Davis was the craziest. Seeing classmates from West Point is expected; seeing classmates from Horlick High School is decidedly not.
So that pretty much sums up the last week. Yes, it has been 4 short paragraphs worth of activity. I suppose I could describe the actual deployment out of Ft. Bliss too. Here it goes: we waited at the airport on Ft. Bliss, we got on a plane and flew to Bangor, Maine where we waited, we flew to Shannon, Ireland where we waited, we flew to Kuwait City, Kuwait which looked strikingly similar to El Paso and Ft. Bliss where we waited, then we got on a bus and drove to Camp Buehring where we disembarked and continue to wait. There ya’ go.
The “Stars and Stripes,” while likely sounding to you like a WWII anachronism, is in reality a wonderful resource here. It’s a great (albeit oftentimes the only) source of news and it’s free in deployed areas. As I’m new in theater, I’m still amused by the weather forecasts contained in the “Stars and Stripes” daily. Here is today’s forecast: “Hot today with sunshine and patchy clouds. High 100 to 106. Winds east-southeast 8-16 mph. Partly cloudy and very warm tonight. Low 80 to 86. Winds north-northeast 6-12 mph.” And it’s not even summer yet.
Well I hope that was enjoyable. Expect similarly long winded, somewhat disjointed descriptions of the happenings in Kuwait and Iraq as time goes on. Updates will continue to be sporadic for the foreseeable future, so keep checking back… you never know when I’ll bless this page again with my sharp wit and cunning logic, thereby quenching your thirst for quality commentary. If you’d like to send Eva and I an email, click the ‘About & Contact’ tab at the top of the page and use the email form there. Talk to you soon.
Surpise! Another photo! I posted this to see if any of you found it as novel as I did.
As I walked down Astor on the north side of Chicago, I happened to glance down in the gutter and found this shot of the Chicago skyline. It was absolutely filthy. Covered in dirt and soot. I wondered how old the image was… it couldn’t be too old what with the Sears Tower and all. I decided to take it to the Northwestern University School of Chemistry and Biological Science Research Institute of Science for carbon dating of the soot. Just about everyone with a brain knows the half life of the elemental base of soot (Li3O2) has a half life similar to that of peanut shells so it was fortunate that a peanut shell was stuck to the photo as well, serving as a rubric for the dating. Dr. Patrick O’Flannery-McDougall ran the carbon dating, (ironically he’s actually a North Korean refugee that escaped to Ireland in 1953, changed his name to better fit in, and married an Irish gal who insisted on hyphenating their married surname). He determined the photo dates back to 1974. During the testing Dr. O’Flannery-McDougall also found an index finger fingerprint. As of yet we’ve been unable to determine who the fingerprint belongs to. If you look closely you can see the print just above the skyline on the far right side of the photo–click here to find the fingerprint on the large size of the photo. I apologize for the clarity; this was the best I could clean it up before I scanned it.
Went to Chicago, went to Maryland, went to Vegas. Twas great. A lot of fun; a lot of everything. I took a ton of pictures over the course of our trip, but they all need processed. I shoot in raw (which is admittedly meaningless to most of you) which means I have to process every shot in order to turn it into an image which you can see here and on Flickr. Be patient… tomorrow I’ll post a new shot from either Chicago or Vegas. For now, I need to rest. Vegas is too much.
This is a shot of a restaurant on a boat in the Sydney Harbor. The boat is named the “South Steyne” pronounced ‘south stain.’ I think it sounds disgusting.
Check out my Flickr photostream if you’re so inclined.
Eva and I are going to Vegas on Friday night for 3 nights with our friends Arch and Tiff. We’ll be staying at the Venetian and to echo the thought going through your head right now, yes it will be spectacular. Not ‘spectacular’ like a guy wearing tight jeans, an Armani Exchange shirt a size too small, a thick leather band Diesel watch that snaps AND buckles closed, shiny pointed toe ankle high boots, a solid all over tan with “frosted tips” and a propensity for kissing boys would say it though… more like someone with a vocabulary beyond “sweet” and “awesome” would say without sounding precocious.
We went to the Smithsonian today. I saw (not in this order) the original Oscar the Grouch, the top hat Abe Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater, George Washington’s epaulets from the Revolution, the flag Francis Scott Key saw which inspired our national anthem, a Stradivari violin, the scarf Robert E. Lee surrendered with at Appomattox, a Nazi flag, and the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. I saw other stuff too but those things stood out in my head in that order at the time I wrote this. A stream of consciousness of sorts. Or maybe exactly.
This is the Sydney skyline near the Opera House. Contrary to what most Americans and Hollywood Australian montages lead you to believe, there is more to see in Australia than the Opera house… namely New Zealand.
This is a shot from inside a UN building at the DMZ in Korea. The cement line outside the window is the border between North and South Korea. As is evident, at the time I took this particular picture, I was in North Korea. Rather the UN building in North Korea. North Korea… UN… same difference. They both think they possess more international influence and garner more legitimate international attention than they do. Eva and I went there with our friend Eugene; it was very cool. At one point I had my back to the window pictured here and a North Korean soldier looked in at me menacingly. I calmly opened the window, raised the screen, and struck him open-hand Kung Fu style in the throat. He collapsed in a heap with his left hand just over the South Korean border. South Korean soldiers on the DMZ saw him over the border and arrested him. He’s been incarcerated ever since. Apparently he was a high level North Korean military leader disguised as a foot soldier and his capture will likely lead to the fall of North Korea. Just another day’s work.
I learned today that the only thing more awkward than someone dancing poorly in front of 200 or so people is someone dancing poorly in front of 200 or so people and mistakenly believing they’re good at dancing when in fact they are evidently not. That, ye seekers of truth and awe, is/was terrible. Andrew would have covered his ears even though he still would have been able to see the gyrating personification of a train wreck. Thank you Mr. Lamb for bestowing this disease upon me.
This is a shot of a bunch of boats in Vernazza. Paul Tanghe would say they are “moored” or some other malarcky, and then he would say something about “starboard” or “schooner” which I’d “listen” to.
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.
New York circa 2004. Circa. What a preposterous thing to say.
Snagged this at an Atmosphere concert in NYC. On the way, I found what appeared to be the luckiest parking spot of all time. “Oh man, look at this exceptionally handy and almost unbelievably available parking spot right here on the road nary a block away from the concert! This day luck is truly mine!” The car I parked there was a rental, and the next day said rental was gone. Stolen perhaps? Nay, twas towed. The awesomely lucky and oh so miraculous spot was a No Parking zone. I had to go to the NYPD towed car impound which was teeming with the most disturbing, disturbed and unshaven examples of humanity ever seen. It was spectacular.
This photo is from, as is evident from the title, Hyde Park in Sydney, Australia. There is much dispute in the Cook household as to who actually took this photo. Eva believes she took it. I believe I took it. The mystery remains.
This Hyde Park, contrary to the park in London with the same name, had no visible discarded syringes. This, I believe, was a plus.
This is Wanaka, New Zealand. Eva and I went there in August 2007 while we were living in Korea. New Zealand is, hands down, the most spectacularly scenic and unabashedly naturally beautiful places I’ve ever been to. I highly recommend it. I don’t recommend whacking your shin on an inch thick 100lb glass coffee table thereby devoting your shin bone and bleeding through the jeans you have on. I’ve done both. New Zealand is better.
I took this shot in Italy when Eva and I went to Europe after we graduated in May ’08. We went to Germany very briefly, then rented a car and drove to Italy. The drive was spectacular. In Italy we spent 3 days in Vernazza, a small coastal town on the Italian riviera. Vernazza is one of five towns that make up Cinque Terre, a string of five similar coastal towns along Italy’s western coast. I highly recommend it. Don’t, however, eat the sardine “delicacy” they push at the restaurants there. It’s only a delicacy if you think delicacy is synonymous with heinous disgusting putrid foul fish-dish disaster.
I’ve decided to post, in conjunction with my other standard and more recent SLR photographs, shots I’ve taken with a standard Point & Shoot over the years. I used a Canon Digital Elph before upgrading to a Canon Rebel XSi. I wanted more flexibility with exposure, interchangeable lenses, the ability to shoot in RAW, and exposure bracketing for HDR composition. And it looks cooler.
On a side note, everyone is up in arms that Michael Phelps might have smoked weed. I’m not one to give him the benefit of the doubt–there’s a picture of him holding and lighting a bong at a college party; he did it. However, Mr. Phelps won 14 Olympic Gold Medals (9 individual, 5 team), broke 7 world records, won the World Swimmer of the Year award 5 times, and keeps his teeth like that just to prove you can have a f***ed up grill and be an international superstar/Subway spokesperson. Oh, and he did it as an American for America. Oh, and he’s 23. A 23 year old American hero that smoked weed? You mean like Jimi Hendrix or Cheech & Chong or Barney Frank or Arnold Schwarzenegger or the entire 1975 cast of Saturday Night Live? Yea, that’s what I thought.
This is a photo of Eva beside Lake Pukaki in New Zealand outside of Wanaka. The lake was a surreal tealish blue which we were told was such a color because of magical mystery enzymes living in the lake water which flowed from glacial runoff. The enzymes are magical and mystery because I don’t know what they are or what they do. I don’t even know if they’re enzymes. Hence: magical and mysterious.
