Celebrating by Shooting

It's been a busy week, and a blast! The first pic is of Shayna and I at Knotts Berry Farm near Los Angeles. We were on the Ghost Rider, a wooden roller coaster, and a rough one at that as you can tell by the terror in Shayna's face! haha. It beat us up pretty bad, but overall a fantastic ride. We spent about six hours or so going from coaster to coaster, the Xcelerator being our favorite. You start out by sitting in the car waiting to be brought to the top of the coaster and it takes off all of the sudden, spinning you to the precipice of the hill. You go from 0-55? mph in under 2 seconds, what a rush! We hit that one a couple of times since there was no line. Shayna's favorite one was the Silver Bullet which is a suspension coaster, and equally fun. If you want to know what is the best time to hit a theme park, it's the week before Memorial Day weekend, no line and not too hot yet.

The next pics are from today when we celebrated Memorial Day by declaring a paintball war on the Dental Department. We played approximately 6 games or so of capture the flag. We burned a lot of calories, which we immediately replaced by having a cookout of teriyaki chicken, hamburgers and hot dogs! What a blast and it increased the morale of both departments ten-fold. We will be trying to put together a challenge every month, I believe the people that played today are on board and I'm sure the word will spread like wild fire throughout the hospital about how fun it was. I foresee many people wanting to take us on in the future, well I hope at least! That's about it for this week, should be a fun one next weekend also, I'll keep you updated.

Take care.

Dave

Getting Muddy!

Marine Corps Mud Run is done! It took our team 1.5 hours to finish a 5 mile run. It was really, really muddy and fun. The above pictures are the before and after shot, I'll be getting a lot more photos and will upload them hopefully by the end of this week. The morning temperature was 45 degrees F, that mixed with mud and water, not a good thing! During the run it was not that bad, we were working really hard to get through the course and burning a lot of calories, so the cold water/mud traps were very welcome at the time. Myself and one other in the group have had hernia surgeries within a couple of months of the race and we did fine. Thank goodness for the advancement of surgical procedures. All and all it was a great time and did wonders to build team morale.

Next weekend is the paintball war versus the Dental Department at the hospital. We drafted a declaration of war against dental and they responded with their own declaration. It has been a fun couple of weeks leading up to the fight, everyone talking trash to each other, should be a really good time. Afterward we are going to have a barbecue and some laughs I'm sure.

Shayna and I are off to Buena Park, CA to go to Knotts Berry Farm. It's an amusement park with some pretty wicked looking coasters. We are adrenaline junkies so it should be a blast. Well that's about it for this week. Look forward to a good post next weekend!

Dave

Just a Swingin'

What a good week! I'm finally back into running full bore again, completed approximately 26 miles this week and chasing the leader in my Nike+ competition, Sarah. So far I'm about 29 miles behind the lead. There are 4 of us that were deployed together and we decided to call the competition the "Kandahar Kup". The first one to complete 500 miles wins the trophy, a viking helmet complete with blonde locks and an Afghanistan campaign medal bumper sticker on it, it's been a lot of fun and really keeps you focused on running.

The pics show me driving the ball at the range, feel free to critique the swing! Golfing is much like riding a bike, once you get your swing down it comes back quick when you pick up the clubs after a while. We are going to go again today and then hopefully hit a course in the upcoming weeks.

Next week is the Marine Corps Lemoore Mud Run, we have a team of 5 called the NHL Mudslingers. I'm sure I'll have some interesting photos for next weeks post. The race is about 4-5 miles long through water, mud, hills, tubes to crawl through, walls to climb and ropes to swing on. Should be a blast and hopefully injury free.

I saw something really funny yesterday. Shayna and I were on the way to Target in Hanford, CA. At the light before turning in we saw a Hanford Sheriff and a Hanford Police car pull up like there was a robbery somewhere. They responded quickly to about 10 kids hanging out in front of McDonalds goofing off. What's funny about this is that there are homeless people hanging out in the median right next to McDonalds bugging the crap out of all the drivers coming out after finishing shopping! The police and sheriff don't even bat an eye at them. Is that ridiculous? I know that homeless people need money and I pray that I'm never in that situation, but come on. I think I'm going to write the local paper and see what kind of comments I get back, we'll see.

Well that's about it for this week, hopefully some good, muddy photos for the next post.

Dave

Cleaning the Sticks

I broke out the WalMart clubs, washed them up, ready for the season! I originally bought these around 6 years ago telling myself that if I enjoyed playing I was going to get a new set in a couple of years. I'm going to use these one more year and then pick up a set of Pings, that's going to be a good day! I really believe that a new set will improve the length of your drives, I'm hitting straight as an arrow a majority of the time, just not getting the distance I would like. The last time I played was in Qatar on our 4 day liberty from Afghanistan. We rented Ping clubs out there and it definitely helped my game. Tomorrow Shayna and I are going out to the driving range to see how bad I've gotten in the past year, I'll post pictures of the disaster next week!

We are officially the couple that is not going to get invited to any neighborhood parties. It was verified yesterday when everyone got together on the block except for us, no invite, oh well. I guess it's because I got on about 4 of the couples for them letting their kids play baseball in the 10 foot space between our house and our neighbors. It would have been okay except the ball kept smacking against our house and the parents were right there watching it, not saying anything. Every time the ball would hit the house I kept thinking there was a rocket attack! Not good! They really don't understand because they deploy on ships which equals no rocket attacks! It's the first time that I haven't been invited to a neighborhood get together and it's kind of nice, no feelings of responsibility to be anywhere, all we have to do is relax! Oh well, that's life.

That's about it for this week, take care and keep in touch.

Dave

Hello

Well the past week was a bad one. I was really sick for the entire week, didn't work a single day! It was nice being off for the first couple of days but after that you can only watch so much TV and play only so many video games! Shayna also received the virus from me, I guess it's the gift that keeps on giving. She is feeling much better also. Nothing much else happened, just a lot of crackers and Canada Dry Ginger Ale, it's amazing how much better that simple fix makes you feel. I'll write some more interesting stuff next weekend.

Dave