Because Everyone Needs Something Somewhere on the Internet that Humbles Them

I'm just about to the point where I've done all the things.  Now that Star Wars isn't playing anymore and there's a lull in new movies I've been looking for more stuff to do.  There has been lots of Ping-pong, board games, cards, and Bingo played.  So when someone out here challenged me to learn a dance I could only hold out so long before it started looking like an untapped well of activity.  

Those that know me know that I never dance.  Ever.  So there is really limitless time I could spend trying to learn any kind of dance.  I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing as the video below is going to prove.  I cold have the best, most patient teacher in the world (which I kinda did seeing as they are still talking to me after trying to help me learn all this) and I'd still drive them up the wall with my incompetence.

So, now to preemptively ruin any chance I ever had of holding public office, here is a silly video of me trying to line dance for your amusement:

Some Xmas Pics

Despite how amazingly decorated our dorm hallway is (thanks Elizabeth!) it's hard to fracking believe that Christmas is almost here already.  Just 3 more days!

So to help get you all jammed out for the spirit of the season, here are a few photos of some flying Santa hats (courtesy of the best Sister-in-law in the world!), and a few more of our room decorations (thanks to JP, Dianne, and Jake for hooking me up):

Happy Star Wars Day!!!!

It's Episode VII release day!!!  And the word seems to be that it is NOT a repeat of the prequels :-D

I'm actually stupid excited, but I'm on a base full of stupid excited people too.  The theater is showing Star Wars 12 times in the next 4 days and plenty of times after that.  They also showed every movie leading up this this day so everyone is really pumped up.

Every branch has their own fair share of nerds and dorks, but if you were going to pick the nerdiest branch you really have to go with the Air Force.  We crush the competition in both per-capita nerdom and pure straight passion. (The Navy is a solid #2--until you take my brother out of the equation and then they drop way down)  I doubt I'll have much of a chance to see it the first few days it's out because I'm surrounded by a bunch of scruffy nerf herders who are just as excited a I am.  Still gonna try though.

My Sister-In-Law Thinks She is so Damn Funny....

Getting mail out here can be a pretty fun distraction.  This place is a geographic oddity, two weeks from anywhere so by the time you get something you've completely forgotten what the hell you were even looking forward to in the first place.  Although it is pretty cool/concerning that amazon can get stuff out here (and that they are shockingly accurate with their delivery date predictions).

So it was with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for x-mass morning that I tore into a falt rate box my Sister-in-Law sent out.  Sitting there right on top were three pairs of sweats!  I brought pants with me, but to wear them you have to put a belt on and nobody wants to lay in bed in jeans.  Such is the tyranny of wearing civvies everywhere I go.  People just don't understand the struggle.  It's real.  The sweats got here just in time, the summer abruptly ended (I blame the pool closure) and now it's downright chilly out.  I was super excited to get my hands on the sweats she was awesome enough to send me....until I got a closer look at them.



So from left to right:

• NAVY sweat pants?!!?!?  Ridicules.  Just crazy ridicules.  I no longer feel sorry for getting you that boogie bass for Christmas now.
• Rubber duckies!  So basically another pair of Navy sweat pants.
• Olaf!  Olaf stating his love of warm hugs!  If we get 'Let it Go' stuck in the locals heads they might never let us back again

Big huge thanks to my SIL for the care package and the sweats!  I will wear all of them proudly and without a hint of irony (well ok, maybe a little irony with the silly Navy ones)  She is the best, and her sense of humor is....fun if you're on the outside looking in ;)

But it wasn't just silly sweats in there.  Among a whole bunch of goodies and games there was also a hand made card from my niece's art studio :)

I hung it up right in the middle of the other cards we got!

Bunch of Creepers Out on the Web

You may have noticed that the title of this blog has changed from: Pellow's Luxourorious Sandbox Tour; to:  Pellow Talk.  If you did notice - what the hell is wrong with you??  Call your family! Read a book! Watch paint dry!  Any thing has to be a better use of your time.  Now if you're one of those that not only noticed the change, but also care enough to want to know why; the reason for the change is I found out recently that a bunch of people have read or found out about this dumb little blog.  That was an unexpected surprise.  Like, I figured other than the couple people I emailed the URL to I figured there wouldn't be anyone seeing this outside of search engine scans and spammers.  Now all of a sudden there are real people reading it, real as in I physically see them every damn day.

I mean it's my own fault, I put the address up on my facebook, thinking that nobody ever sees or notices my feed, much less clicks on things I post.  I was pretty much spot on, except for this one Curious George individual who must have run out of literally anything else to do and found this blog. He let a few other people know and it started spreading from there.  Next thing I know I have someone telling me they read my blog, hate the title, and have a way better one I should change it to. Naturally, I reacted how any fully matured, grown adult would and got stubbornly defensive.  Mostly because, in all honestly, I was super jealous I didn't come up with the name first.  Then I found out she didn't even come up with the name, it was a whole new person!  How deep does this rabbit hole go??!!  I wanna get off the internet's wild ride!

Some Random Sandbox Pics

It's been pretty quite around here the last week.  Though I throw in some random pictures I took while I was wondering around looking for ways to fill my day up.  You can only build so many sandcastles in a day before you get all sandcastled out.

So a few days ago I volunteered to be a driver and part of that was dong a familiarization drive to figure out how it all works over here.  In other words:  Road Trip!!  We went over to visit a near by army installation because the army gets all the cool stuff.  They have a Chilis, a Taco Bell and a Bazaar open every day.  Meanwhile the Air Force is slumming it with a Subway, Pizza John's, and only a monthly Bazaar.  It was kind of a hassle all in all, and the trip took all day and I was exhausted when we got back, but all the $8 virgin Margaritas I could drink!

So this is what everything looks like in every single direction:

Occasionally there are some tents:

And there are quite a few mosques:

There's a pink one!

They really are very nice, and you can hear the calls to prayer for miles

They really like these kinds of water towers.  I don't know why they don't put a big round thing up top to hold more water but whatever

They're all over the place

This is the entrance to the local private shooting club.  You'd think it was some UN HQ with all the flags out front.  I guess they really love shooting stuff here.

They also have their own Taj Mahal

More Taj

Gas city out there.  Stretches on forever

Took a wrong turn somewhere

You'd think each of those buildings are like apartments or condos or something, but no they are all giant houses.  They stick their whole extended families in there so they can get huge.

Look a blue one!

More water towers and families living on top of each there.  Also a playground off to the left.

And of course, Camels!

Also the Harlem Globetrotters came to town!  It's their 90th year of taking on the Washington Generals!


So good they had to add a 4pt shot

The Globetrotters know the importance of stretching

They can dunk like crazy, it's insane.  They are seriously like at least twice as good at dunking than I am

And of course being the flat dry desert you get some really nice sunsets

I was Warned

So I just finished up a mission a little while ago.  Everything went really well for the most part and we were back a little early, which was a nice surprise.  So, after we land we go to the flight equipment shop and turn our stuff back into them.  I am really horribly forgetful; every time I go and visit family I manage to leave something behind.  Sometimes it’s something small like a coffee cup or 1 pair of socks.  Other times its big stuff, like a chest of drawers or a popcorn maker.  It’s gotten to the point that any time I visit my family in San Diego I have to pile my stuff up and stick my wallet and keys on top so that it is literally impossible to leave without at least seeing the stuff before I leave it behind.

So that’s why in AFE (airborne flight equipment) I like to pat myself down to make sure I didn’t hide something in one of my many pockets that I need to turn back in.  It was during this pat down when I got to my left thigh pocket that I felt something soft, wet and squishy.  It was then that I realized that my leg had been….moist and rather sticky for a couple hours now.  It’s sort of like when you finally feel that rock in your shoe and you realize that you’ve been walking with it all day.

Earlier in the morning at breakfast, I was packing up a lunch in the dfac.  I made a sandwich and grabbed some chips and other stuff and stuffed it all in a to-go box.  Except it didn’t all fit so I shoved some things in my pockets to save space.  That’s when one of our grizzled old linguists was reminded of his last deployment when he went and put a banana in his ankle pocket and then proceeded to forget about it.  6 hours later he goes to sit on his foot, because after 6 hours a foot becomes more comfortable than a chair.  He squished that banana up real good without even thinking of it.  He had to run to the back and start scooping gross nasty mashed banana out of his leg pocket, like really deep down in there of some seriously messed up fruit.  Then had to sit there with it for the rest of the flight, let it really dry up and harden into his flight suit.

It was one those it-funny-when-it-happens-to-them stories that had me rolling.  I told myself I was going to learn from his mistake and take the moral of the story to hear, ‘Never forget about the banana in your pocket’.  Well we got on the plane and I instantly forgot about the banana in my pocket.  I put it in my thigh pocket so that way it would be super difficult to sit on it.  Well I found a way.  So there I was, in AFE, scooping gross, disgusting, smashed banana out of my pocket and into the trash.  Take it from me, you don’t ever want to forget about the banana in your pocket.

Deployed Life...

Some days are tougher than others.  Today was not one of those days.

Keeping up International Relations

It’s pretty cool seeing all the different nations out there doing their thing.  There are a bunch of Canadians with their own Camp Canada, which just sounds delightful.  You also have some Italians, Aussies, and Kiwis hanging about.   The Kiwis were having a whole discussion about giraffes and hobbits while we waited in line for popcorn before a movie. They found the very idea of getting a picture of those two things standing next to each other absolutely hysterical.  Must be a Southern Hemisphere thing.  Also they call fresh popcorn ‘freshies’ which of course they do.

It really does brighten your day seeing all the different countries and cultures come together for a common goal.  We obviously never talk to each other or sit together in the dfac because we all stay in our cliques like high school, but still, it’s cool to see them all here. 

Actually just today I saw my first Danish troops.  Hard to miss, they are all 8 feet tall and allowed to have beards and freaky haircuts.  So you see the giant bearded guy with the Mohawk and instantly know, he’s a Dane.

Day 0, 0.1, 0.2? 0.3 – The Longest Day (AKA The Germans are a bunch of lying, imprecise jerks)

So I know I’m pretty far behind already, but I finally got a breather today so maybe I can write some stuff out.

After finally making our way out of Baltimore we stopped off in Germany before heading on.  The system there makes no sense whatsoever.  Especially if you are proceeding on they let you off the place and as you exit they hand you this little plastic pass that acts as your boarding pass for the next leg.  Then as soon as you make it to the end to the skyway and into the terminal they take it back from you immediately.  So you only hold onto it for about 50 yards and then give it back again.  Then they tell you that you have one hour before they will 100% leave you behind if you’re not there.  It’s so strange, it’s like they make it their goal to leave you behind and not get you where you need to go. 

Before I left I was warned not to believe any time estimates that they give you, and I was totally ready to just ignore them and go explore around the airport and the base a little and see what Germany was all about.  Maybe drink one of their famous boots and have a little verylongsausagenamethatmakesnosence before I left.  But once there being told in an hour I would be ditched and forced to wait around for the next flight out; I disregarded all the advice given to me and decided to believe them.  They are German after all and there’s no way they could ever be late/not punctual.  I mean they weren’t literally German, still Airman, but you’d think they would have had some of that culture rub off on them.

Well two hours later, after a couple of the braver members of the crew got back for the outside world and said it was amazing we tried to go get our plastic passes back.  Well they would not give them to us.  Their reasoning was that once the crew showed they’d start boarding and we would get left behind.  They really love that threat and it is very effective.  So I asked when they expected the crew to show.  Some guy goes back to check, comes back about 15 minutes later and says he has no idea when they are going to show.  Reiterates again that we will get left the hell behind if we aren’t there for boarding.  Plus they make a huge deal of how hard it would be to go through security and all that stuff.  Which we are the only flight out so the security lines are totally empty, but whatever.  

So thinking that the crew is going to show any time now we go back defeated.  And wait for two more hours.  So our 1 hour delay turned into a 4 hour delay.  If I had known that from the beginning I would have been fine with it.  But being a sneaky deceitful German about it really sucked.  And I realized too late when we got to our next stop and the pilot announced that we were an hour early I could have just asked about our scheduled take off time and figured out when the crew would show.  On top of that how the hell do they not know when the crew is going to show??  That should be sometime they keep track of.  It felt like they were acting like this was the first time there’s ever been a plane passing through there, even though it probably happens 4 times a day.  Anyway, I learned my lesson and will not be listening to them on the way back if we pass through there again.

 

We eventually made it where we were going and got there around 0300 on Wednesday.  Keep in mind we left on Monday.  I have no clue where the hell Tuesday went, but it just up and disappeared.  Maybe we’ll find it again on the way back.  But then we had to go right into briefings and in processing and turning in paperwork.  And on zero sleep I’ll tell you I had no clue what the hell was going on.  We were all a bit delirious by the end of it, shouting things out at inappropriate times during briefings and finding the most mundane things absolutely hilarious for no reason.  So that day that started Monday evening didn’t end until Wednesday afternoon.  That’s about the longest day I’ll probably ever have.

But at least there was coffee in the library when we got there: