Hee hee hee, Bunnies.

Thanksgiving was a lot of fun...
I drove up to South Dakota, ok that part wasn't much fun, but anyway... Everyone was gathering at my paternal Grandma's house and spent a few days just hanging out and playing cards with cousins and uncles and aunts. Now when I say everyone, you have to realize that my dad had 10 brothers and sisters, who in turn have spouses and children, and some grandchildren. In short, a small family get together for them is when only six or seven families can make it. Six or seven families may sound small, but when you extrapolate out to spouses and grandkids that's easily thirty people.

I swear Grandma should teach seminars on effective time management. With that many relatives around you would think things would get super crazy and disorganized, however they've all been doing this so long that everyone seemed to know what to do, when to do it, and how long to do it for in order to make sure everything worked out great. From apple pies and turkey to Black Friday shopping and all night board games this vacation was really a lot of laid back fun and I can't wait for the next time I'm up there.

An email I received:
Hi Asa, How are you? Are you finding things to love about the dusty OK?
Is your job gonna be as boring as you thought or are they shipping you around for special tasks?
What's in your fridge? What's the latest best thing you've eaten?
What's the most fun you've had there so far? What's the crummiest thing to have happened?
What's your favorite room in your apartment and why?
What's the prettiest thing you've seen lately? What's the ugliest?
What's your most outrageous impulse these days? Inquiring minds want to know!

My (mostly unedited) response:
Thanks for the email, things are going pretty well... Or at least they aren't threatening my existence on a daily basis, which in my book is almost as good. I've come to the conclusion that Oklahoma isn't as bad as I thought it was, but rather that limiting myself to hanging out with people on base is what was giving it such a one dimensional feel.

This job is going to be as boring as I thought it would be, although I will probably be doing a six month tour overseas within the next year or so. My fridge currently has juice, water, apples, three types of cheese and some sliced turkey for sandwiches.

I can't really say what the latest best thing I've eaten is, although I did have a spinach salad the other day that was pretty tasty.

By far the best thing that's happened in a while occurred last weekend while I was volunteering to do security for a football game. I noticed this girl assigned to my post who constantly had her nose in a book whenever she wasn't actively working. "At last" I thought, "A kindred spirit!" Eventually she came to relieve me for a break and I asked what she was reading. As it turns out she is in the Air Force, has been here for three years and is taking masters classes at night.
The book she was currently ravaging happened to be just one of several she had to get through for the semester. Seizing the opportunity I grilled here for the first third of my break on where to go in OKC to find theater and the arts. She admitted to having the same issues I was
having when she first came here and pointed me in several promising directions with regard to the performing arts...

The crummiest thing that happened was when my boss called to tell me I was being shipped to Iraq for 18 to 22 months. Don't worry, it fell through and I'm staying around here a bit longer....

The prettiest thing I've seen lately happened a few hours ago when I missed my exit on the highway and had to drive out of the city before I could turn around and come back. I was rolling up to the stop sign on the off ramp when the angle of my approach aligned almost perfectly
with the surrounding darkness to reveal this gorgeous, star-filled, sky.

So I was screwing around and made up a few new ring tones. The first is from Govt Mule's Lay your burden down and another is James Brown's It's a Man's world. Other than that, I think I'm going to file for a divorce from my cable company. What can I say, I've been dreaming of cable for the last two years, and now that it's been at my beck and call for a few weeks the blush is off the apple and we just don't get along like I thought we would. I find myself watching less and less T.V. and have come to the point where I'm just not sure the relationship is going to work. Minx that she is, the cable company struck first with lawyers retained for just such an event and is threatening to take me to the cleaners unless I capitulate and agree to live out this farce of a relationship for five more months.

What can I say, at least I get the discovery channel.

I finally took the plunge and bought a cell phone with a local company in order to get a local number. I had a phone with Version, but OKC is about the only place in the country where they don't have a service contract. Normally this wouldn't have bothered me and I would have just lived with an out of state number, but it became a necessity to have a local number for too many reasons and I finally succumbed to the pressure. At any rate, it's nothing fancy but I guess it'll do the job.

So I'm in an apartment and planning to buy a house in a few months. I just got back to the states and have had to buy all new (to me anyway) furniture. All I can say is thank God for craigslist... At this point I have held off on buying a bedroom set because 1) I don't want to shell out that kind of dough and then not have it fit in my bedroom when I buy the house, and 2) I'm trying to keep the amount of big stuff I have to move from here to there to a minimum.

Long story short, I'm tired of living out of luggage so I broke down and bought a ratty old chest of drawers for $50. Now I probably could have left it to it's spider-infested, nicotine-stained, rattyness, but I figured it would be a good learning experience to give those spiders the what old for, sand off at least the top few coats of primer, then finish it up nice and fancy like. In theory, the end product will have a pattern a bit like this one, but with a lighter base coat.