Busy, Busy

It's been a busy weekend. Shayna's dad, Larry, and soon to be step-mom, Karen, came in town to visit. Friday Larry and I started the day with a 4 mile run, came home to shower and then we were off to Hollywood for Shayna's show at the INBC. Shayna had the judging phase at 0900 on Saturday. After that phase we went to eat at a sushi restaurant on Melrose Ave. It sounds glamorous, but in my opinion Hollywood and LA are filled with a lot of people which equals a lot of traffic and bad attitudes. I got a parking ticket for not putting money in the meter, on a weekend. I assumed that Hollywood was like all other states in the country and parking was free on the weekend, wrong! After that we drove to the Hollywood sign and took a picture. The second part of the competition started at 3:30 pm and lasted until 7:30 pm. We hit the road for home and arrived at around 10:30 pm. We woke up at 0745 and took off for the paintball field. The picture above is of Larry, Karen and I in between some of the games. They had a good time and got a lot of exercise along the way. Now we are just relaxing and watching some football, go Bengals tomorrow night. If they lose I have to wear a Steelers scrub hat and post it as my profile picture on Facebook for a week, God I hope they win! Well that's about it for this week. Take care.
Dave

Another one down

A great week. I finally got some leave and took the opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. and compete in the Army 10-miler. What an awesome race. A lot of the Vets that have had various types of amputations and visual impairments also competed, talk about inspiration! I thought a lot about all the work we did in Iraq and Afghanistan and to see them out there competing was incredible. Look up the Army 10-miler website and read some of the stories, they're something else. The time spent in DC also allowed me to see some of my old friends from deployments and also family members. Pictured above is Carl and I, we were in Ramadi, Iraq together for 8 months. What a good friend and extremely smart guy. It was fun to reminisce about the deployment, I guess it was a warm up for when I'm very old, very retired and hanging out at the VFW! Sarah was another person that ran and hung out with us for a while, she and I were deployed to Afghanistan together, another fantastic person. A funny story to follow later. My brother Dan, who I haven't seen in a about a year and a half, and my cousin Dina, who I haven't seen in over 15 years, also were there. Dan participated in his first run in about 10 years and finished great, in the top half of 21,000 runners! Dina smoked the run with a 1 hour 28 minute time. We have all agreed to meet up next year somewhere to run together again, probably the Flying Pig 1/2 Marathon in Cincinnati in May. Now for the story. Myself, Dan and Jack (Dan's friend) decided to scope out a place to eat and watch football after the race, Sarah to join us later. We went to a sports pub first and it was packed, standing room only. The greeter said that the owner also owned the restaurant down the street and it was empty with plenty of televisions with football on. We headed down the street and went into the place. It was empty as advertised and we decided to order some food. The menus came with a naked lady on the front cover, that's when we realized we were sitting in a strip club, the neon lights and low lighting also clued us in! We stayed because we thought that the dancers were off on Sunday for the games, and we had to wait for Sarah. Everything went well until the 4:00 games started, that's when the dancers headed for the stage! We were gentlemen and walked out with Sarah, although the dancer was probably depressed when 3 guys walked out when she started doing her thing on stage! haha. We went to the original restaurant and there was now space for us. We'll be talking about that for a while. That's enough excitement for this entry. Over all a great weekend. Take care.
Dave

It's been a while

Hello,
It's been a while since I've posted. I've spent a majority of the last couple of weeks trying to get my back to feel better, not a fun time! The 'ol back started acting up after a workout at the gym, oddly enough the workout was supposed to be cross-training for running so I could fight off injuries, go figure. After 2 trips to a chiropractor and being treated to a massage by my awesome wife I'm feeling better, now I just have to get back to where I was in my training before the injury. My next race is the Army 10-miler in Washington, D.C. on the 24th of October, I should be ready but I'm pretty certain I won't be breaking any personal time records. Shayna has her second show this weekend and again due to scheduling conflicts I cannot go to cheer her on. She'll do great at the Sacramento show, I'm really proud of her. She also got hired on to work at the gym as a personal trainer, that's fantastic also. I guess I can never get fat now! haha. Work is still work, I'm sure like your jobs, not any different in the Navy. The last year, 350 days to be exact, in the Navy I'm going to try to keep my mouth shut and just get through the days. I have to admit it is getting to be much better since we are gaining a couple of OR nurses, that is a huge relief! I'm just waiting for the inevitable, which is pulling people out of the OR to do administration jobs, again leaving us short-handed! I've been in the Navy too long to believe otherwise. I hope everyone is doing good, things are great here. Take care and I'll have some better entries this weekend. Take care.
Dave

Great Weekend

Hello there! It was a great weekend, nice to blow off some built up steam. As I mentioned in the last post, this weekend was going to be about paintball and golf, I did both. My wife, Shayna, is the best wife on the planet to allow me to do that, she probably enjoys the quiet for the couple of hours that I'm gone! haha. In the above picture you can see everyone looking at me and laughing, I made a smart a#$% comment and they laughed. Imagine me making a comment like that! haha. Golf went really well today, I shot a 102. I would have broke the 100 stroke mark, but I ended up shooting a 10 on a par 5, it destroyed my chances of hitting the goal. Oh well, there are many more days of golf ahead of me, I'll eventually do it!
I want to thank Ms. Mcgovern for including me in her dissertation for her Master's Degree in London. She called me about a month ago and scheduled a phone interview with me about my blog. Specifically the parts when I was writing while deployed in Afghanistan. It was a great paper on how the news differs between "big media" and the information being passed on by "bloggers". Very interesting and well written, I wish her luck.
I've been looking at my hit list of what countries have been reading my entries and noticed that there have been some hits from Puerto Rico. I was stationed at Roosevelt Roads from 1992-1994. Just interested to hear from someone down there to see who you are and what it is like down there now that the base is closed. Drop me a line sometime at ltjgdave2003@yahoo.com. Well I think that's about it for this week. Take care.
Dave

Another Duty Weekend

Hello, well another duty weekend completed! It was a little busier than usual, called in at 1030 pm on Friday night and stayed until 2am Saturday, then called in at 0630am on Sunday until 1000 am or so. At least they were spread apart! While working I was thinking to myself when I'm a civilian I would be making at least $600 or so for coming in for those days, not going to be too bad at all! Have I said lately that I can't wait to retire and start working on a second career? haha. Shayna went to support one of her friends in a figure competition and enjoyed the heck out of La Jolla, CA. She said that it was absolutely beautiful, I'm glad she had the opportunity to go hang out with the girls for a weekend, we all need that every now and then. This upcoming weekend we are having another paintball war on Saturday and then I'm golfing on Sunday morning, hopefully I'll break 100 strokes this time! Well that's about it for this week, I'll write more next week.
Dave

Number 13

Hello, well it was a great weekend! Friday I drove down to Anaheim/Huntington Beach, CA for the Disney 1/2 Marathon. I met one of my good friends, Mike, for the race. It was nice to see him since we ran our first 1/2 Marathon exactly 4 years ago! I was worried checking into the Hilton and my room number was 313, I'm kind of superstitious and thought it was going to be a problem! I don't have any pictures from the race yet, they'll be on the next entry. Shayna didn't come down with me because it would be too much of a downer watching Mike and I happy after the race, she still isn't 100% for running yet, it'll come! We hit the Dodger-Giants game at Dodger Stadium on Friday night. The first picture was funny because that police command vehicle was parked out in front of the entrance to our section of the stadium, we called it the "Ghetto Section"! We sat on wooden benches and ate all the food we could, which was included in the price, so you could imagine the lines and smells by the bathrooms. Honestly I wouldn't have wanted to be in any other section, the people were really a lot of fun and really into the game, great experience. You can see in the second picture I'm wearing a Dodger hat, although I'm a die hard Reds fan. I called the wearing of the Dodger hat a form of life insurance! It worked, I'm alive! There were a couple of Giants fans sitting in front of us that went through absolute hell during the entire game, good on them though for coming out to support their team. The last picture is taken from the parking lot, LA is in the background. Saturday we went golfing at Meadowlark Golf Course in Huntington. Challenging course, beautiful, but it was the longest game of golf known to man, just short of 6 HOURS! It was packed. Mike and I did so bad that we stopped keeping score at hole 13 or so. We met some nice locals there also, great day. Sunday we woke up at 3:30 in the morning to head out to the race, yep 3:30 in the morning. We were lined up and ready to start at 5:15 when the race actually started at 6:00. Great weather, 60s with cloud cover. My personal best for 1/2 marathons is 1hr 43min, I finished this one in 1hr 46min, I felt great the entire race and afterwards. Mike started the race with an Achilles injury and it held him back the entire race, good for him for pushing through though. We went out and had some beers later that night and then laid out on the beach on Monday, where I got an impressive sunburn. Wind, cooler weather and cloud cover is a bad mixture, it was a ninja sunburn, didn't feel it happening at all. I'm really glad to be home with Shayna and am looking forward to the Army 10-miler in DC toward the end of October. My cousin from Pennsylvania and my brother from Florida will be coming to compete, should be a good weekend. Well that's about it for this entry, take care.

Dave

Lemoore or Afghanistan?

As you can see by the picture on the left I was pretty confused this past week. I couldn't figure out if I was in Afghanistan or Lemoore, CA? It was hella hot! Running during the day was definitely out, so I was getting up at 0445 to get a good run in, not good when I ended up staying late at work due to being on duty. Very long days. The strange thing is that today the high is 77 degrees, I was actually able to run at 2pm with no problems at all. Next Sunday is the Disneyland 1/2 marathon, really looking forward to that. My friend Mike is coming out from Virginia. We're going to see the Dodgers vs. the Giants on Friday at the stadium in Anaheim, CA, Saturday we are hitting the links somewhere to play the best golf of our lives (yeah right!), Sunday is the race and then Monday we are going to recover from the run and the hangover! This blog was part of a research project of a person in London. It was cool actually doing a phone interview with her. It's going to be nice to see her finished project, she had some interesting questions. I'll post some excerpts from the paper when I get a copy. Shayna's next competition is on 16 OCT. She'll be doing the bikini competition this time so she can work up to the figure competition again. I can officially say that I'm married to a bikini competitor! woohoo. Well that's about it for this week. I'll be posting the next article late next week due to being out of town. Take care.

Dave