Tired

Man I'm tired...

In other news I found a sack with some cash in it today. Oddly enough the sack contained almost the exact amount I had just spent on a new Samsung P2. At first I was like "Sweeet! God's looking out for me!" but about half a second after that I was like "wow this is a lot of cash, someone's probably going to be missing it." Short story long, I inventoried the bag and it's contents and put up a found sign telling people to email me with a description of the bag and it's contents if they wished to claim it.

man I could have made a car payment with that much cash.

O well, they way I figure it only junior enlisted are foolish enough to carry that much cash money out here, so whoever lost it is probably really feeling the pinch. Hope they email me soon.

All quiet on the Middle Eastern Front

As my title implies, there's not a whole lot going on out here today.

I ran into my friend Webster yesterday and have made plans to stop by and see him in the next few days. I've been doing a bit of research into Sony's new Video player and it looks pretty sweet. In fact, I think I just might buy one. Also, I think I may be leaving Oklahoma sooner than expected. As it turns out, if my cross-rating gets approved then they'll cut me a new set of orders right there and ship me out to school as soon as possible. By this time next year I could be out of OKC and off to wherever their school is.

At any rate, things are going pretty good.

A good day

Today was a good day. They had an issue of Mental Floss at the store so I snapped it up with a quickness. Also I watched this great kung-fu movie called "The Royal Tramp" which was done by the same guy's who did kung-fu hustle and Shaolin Soccer. At any rate, it's a great comedy and well worth watching if you get the chance.

Other than that things are going pretty well. I've started mentoring a few youngsters at work and they seem to be responding pretty well.

My gym time has been getting a little slack lately. I've started using The body sculpting bible for men. At first I thought it was a bit of an easy workout, but my buddy swears by it so I kept up with the program and now I'm in into a bit more advanced stuff and it's kicking my heiny every day. It's one of those six day a week dumbbell workouts, with every third day being mostly calisthenics and running. The problem is that if I go to the gym it takes time away from homework and even though I'm doing a self paced class it's still aggravating to take two weeks for a one week segment.

Good new/Bad News

Well, I have some good news and bad news.

The good news, Quotas came out for advancement and it looks pretty good.
The bad news, God help them they might actually advance me to E-6.

I'm hoping I didn't make it because that would make my conversion out of the MA rate a bit hard, but if I do get it I guess it'll be a bit of extra cashola so I can't complain too much.

-Ace

I had the opportunity to get a shawarma a few days ago and man was it good. You can get them in a variety of ways and I always preferred the hot (spicy) way so I told the guy to make it spicy.
"Ok ok my friend" He waved me off.
"Naw brother, I want it really really hot!"
"No problem spicy hot."
"No you don't understand, I want it so spicy it makes me cry."
He just sort of looked at me, "Cry?"
"Cry."
He smiled and said something in another language to the guy who was actually preparing the sandwiches. It wasn't in Arabic, and I have no idea what he said except for the final word, "suffering".
The cook looked up "suffering"?
He said it again "SUFFERING".
The way he said it made me cringe in anticipation. It wasn't the two syllable "suf-ring" that you might have expected, but the fully articulated three syllable variety that he slowly and painfully rolled off his tongue. In case the point was missed, he accentuated it with a pinch of the air between his thumb, index and middle finger as a he shook his hand at the cook. "Suf-Er-Ing..."

Needless to say the shawarma was Delicious, with a capital D, but after a buildup like that it was not all that spicy and turned out to be rather unimpressively sufferable.

Lots of stuff has happened not much I can talk about.

I weighted in at 188 the other day, which is about 20 lbs less than when I was on leave. I've been talking to one of the Sergeants I work with who also works in govt and he has explained in detail the govt hiring process and how to tweak my resume to increase my chances of getting a civilian job in case I decide to get out.

My Cantonese is getting a bit better, I can now tell the difference between the Cantonese language track on a kung fu film and the language track in Mandarin.

It's getting steadily hotter here every day and they say it'll reach 115 this weekend. Thank God I work nights...

Mom, I've always thought of you when I hear this song and since I couldn't be there in person to wish you a happy Mother's Day I thought I'd let this video do it in my place.

Love ya lots,
Asa

We had the weigh-ins for our PRT yesterday morning and everyone was a bit anxious to get the results. For the most part we've all been PTing out here and although I've been checking my progress weekly, some of the guy's hadn't been on a scale since they started working out in January...

I'm now down to 192, and a lot of the other guy's had lost some as well. Short story long I was talking to one of the guy's about my goal to hit 185 before we left and he said he wanted to hit it as well then drop another ten. A bit of O-Yeah!ing ensued and you can about imagine the rest of the story. It's a prorated race to see which of us can lose 17 lbs within the next three months. We picked 17 because that's what I have to lose to hit 175 and since he's got a bit on me it's only fair to hold him to losing the same poundage. I guess we could have calculated loss based on body weight percentage, but it was 3am at the time and the very idea of anything more than basic mathematics gave me a headache.


So anyway, that's what I'm doing for fun.

Bored bored bored bored bored.

So I'm learning Chinese from this online course and I guess it's going ok. My problem is that it's self paced so I want to do everything perfectly before moving on to the next lesson. Of course nobodies perfect, so I now find myself a month into the course and just starting week three. On the other hand, I've self prescribed homework in the form of watching Kung Fu movies at least once a week so at least there's a bit of pleasure with the pain.

The last movie I watched was called "Fatal Contact" and was about this naive farmboy from the mainland who finds work doing a Kung Fu act in the circus. Mobsters see his act and offer him lots of money to fight. Kid says no but his friend overhears how much they offer him and talks him into it. A whole lot of 18 fingers of death later, the mobsters turn him into a mindless killing machine and his friend into a prostitute. When they both come to the realization of what they've stooped to doing for money it makes for an interesting ending...

The bottom line is that I guess this class must be working because I could actually pick out individual words in the film, and see how I had been mispronouncing others.

Next on the list "Infernal Affairs" the trilogy that Scorsese ripped off as the basis for his own movie "The Departed".