thought this was intresting

Your Values Profile

Loyalty: You value loyalty highly. You're completely devoted to your friends and family. Even if they totally screw up, you're still there for them. Just make sure they're equally loyal to you! Honesty: You value honesty a fair amount. You're honest when you can be, but you aren't a stickler for it. If a little white lie will make a situation more comfortable, you'll go for it. In the end, you mostly care about "situational integrity." Generosity: You value generosity highly. So much so that you often put your own needs last. There's nothing wrong with having a caring heart... But you may want to rethink your "open wallet" policy. Humility: You value humility highly. You have the self-confidence to be happy with who you are. And you don't need to seek praise to make yourself feel better. You're very modest, and you're keep the drama factor low. Tolerance: You value tolerance a fair amount. You are open to new cultures, beliefs, and ideas. You have very few prejudices that you're aware of. And while you are tolerant, you do stand true to what you believe.

The Five Factor Values Test

Time to kill

The past week I've been not quite stressed out but definately feeling quite a bit of it. Undergoing new hire orientation, at my expense and it's uncompensated, although I did find out that the state would have paid for my travel to this training, would have been nice before that came out of pocket as well. Spend hours each day filling out seemingly redundant paperwork for all the various entities I would fall under if I accept this job with the state not to mention training that is greared more towards someone who's never worked on boats then towards someone like me who's fairly experienced. So sitting there all week under going training I've already been through, but i have to complete their training model to qualify to work for them.

So I finish jumping through all the state's hoops and go to find out about a ship assignment and they have no record of me being hired. This is in the same office where I did my interview back the first part of march and they practically put me on a ship right then and there. Something felt fishy about the whole thing from the get go, I show up to the training center first thing monday and there isn't any record of a class being scheduled there. After many frantic phone calls, found out it's been moved to a University class room about 10 miles away and class had already started by the time I got ahold of someone.

I guess the paperwork telling me about this change is still in the mail somewhere, it supposedly went out 2 weeks ago but there's no sign of it showing up. Occasionally my mail will get put in my father's box since I'm named after him and most places neglect to put the Jr. on my name, but that wasn't the case.

So, getting things together, I stop off at the local U.S.C.G. Marine Safety Office to begin the process of upgrading my license and having endorsements added. Only I find out some of my training certificates have expired and now can no longer be used on my license. To boot, they were going to reject my physical because it wasn't on their form, even though the physical I had done was above and beyond what they require.

I started to get really pissed about the expired certificates, the company that paid for me to get this training fought me tooth and nail while I was arranging the classes, so instead of things being smooth as I had planned I'd spend months arguing with them that they'd promised me these courses and if they'd follow my planning it'd save them a lot of expenses. No, they couldn't accept what I'd planned and had to dabble with it and drug it out far longer then it needed to be, which is why the certificates expired since some of the classes ended up being piece meal here and there over the course of a year and a half. One of the courses I don't think I had the seatime at the time I completed it to qualify for the upgrade.

I'd be a whole lot angrier if it was my dime but it wasn't, so it turns out them weeks in Seattle, while I got good training, the only thing I really have to show for it is frequent flies miles from the flight, frequent guest points from the hotel, and more airmiles since I paid upfront with my air miles card and the company reimbursed me :D

So, I'm gonna have to spend part of tomorrow in D.O.T office trying to figure out what happened to my paperwork. I figure by the time I get this all straightened out I'll be getting the phone call from CivMar telling me to report back east for their orientation.

Oh, too top it all off, I managed to pick up whatever bug's been going around town. Ordinarily I don't get sick, well the sniffles mostly but rarely will i get laid up trying to recooperate.

This is me, not a very intresting life, but I do try to keep off everyone's respective radars and lead a low key life.

It's Snowing!

Woke up to everything covered in a blanket of white. It's also raining so it's not going to last long. Latest I've ever seen snow on the ground around here was may 15th but that was years and years ago when I was knee high to a grass hopper.

Well, it's probably a good thing you've decided to go to Spain/Portugal this year, EE, I think it's going to be a cool summer with lots of rain here. I'm a still a little out of touch with reading nature like I once did, but we're about due for a rainy summer.

Skippy's List additions

I'd sent this out some time ago, so long ago that I'd forgotten I'd done it. These were my additions to Skippy's List that's been going around the internet for some years, entitled 213 Things Skippy Can't Do In The Army...

These were things that I'd done personally so I figured someone else might get a chuckle out of them. Recounting these stories, I get a lot of questions about how I was able to get an honorable discharge, think it was the army's way of quietly getting rid of me ;)

1) must not make voodoo dolls of the chain of command out of c-4 when on the demo range. (c4 is like a cross between playdough and paper mache')

2) must not make a shaped charge out of 18 kilos of c-4 even if the engineers keep handing you the blocks to use up. (they come in 1 kilo blocks, 35 blocks per crate)

3) just because the the cows wander onto the live fire range doesn't mean it's ok to fire claymore mines at them. (ft. hood is grazing land leased from cattle ranchers, very often steak was served just after such incidents)

4) must not send the new private around the motor pool looking for a BA-1100-November. (if you write it down it comes out to be BA1100N)

5) must not send same private to the armoror for a blank adapter for the 25mm Bushmaster Cannon. (it's a dust plug not a blank adapter, fire training rounds not blanks)

6) must not send the same private to ask a SFC about the new commo unit called the "prick e-7" (the commo unit they think it is, is called an AN/PRC-77 "prick-77" for short and a SFC's rank is an E-7)

7) must not have the newbies test the shocks on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, even if they are an especially large soldier they will not budge a 23 ton track. (although you can get him jumping up and down on various parts of the track as long as he's using 3 points of contact)

8) must not pretend to get drunk and confess that you're C.I.D and was sent through basic training again for a good cover. (C.I.D is Criminal Investigation Division, kind of like Internal Affairs meets Vice Squad)

9) Infared Chem lights aren't defective nor do they need their batteries replaced. (most people are use to seeing the green snap and shake lights, when they don't light up, they get puzzled.)

10) must not pass gas next to the vehicle air filter intake when the turret crew has their pro-mask on and hooked up to the said system. (I don't get mad, I get even, at dinner time if the other crews saw me loading up on chocolate milk, they knew something bad was gonna happen especially since i'm lactose intolerant)

11) must not have the new privates test for soft spots in the the armor with a 5lb ball pin hammer, mark the spot with an X in white chalk so the mechanics can come down to fix 'em. especially right before a brigade inspection. (was a good excuse to get out of the b.s. activities associated with the inspection having to take it to the wash rack to clean off all the x's)

12) must not tell your Lt. the reason you can move through the woods quietly is because you're hunting again, only the prey has changed. (it may have been true but kind of unnerved the rest of my squad)

13) must not soak the pro-mask filter in water of someone you don't like right before you go into the gas chamber. (they work on a positive pressuse system, since a wet filter blocks all air, no breathing, the mask comes off pretty quick and tear gas is rather uncomfortable)

14) must not procede to demonstrate that c-4 makes a good fuel to cook with in the field, makes the engineers edgy when you put a flame next to c-4. (burns clean just don't stamp out the fire, c4 takes both heat and pressure to go off)

Oh, if I think about it some more, there are a whole lot more stories I could come up with that'd make you wonder how I survived my enlistment without undergoing a psychological evaluation.

Powers of the mind

Ok, I know I promised EE that I would go into a bit of detail about why I am like the way I am, or rather, how I managed to acquired this kind of knowledge at a relatively young age.

Let's see, all my life, I've always done what I could to learn what I could from everyone I came into contact with on a daily basis. Up until the 2nd year in the Army, as I would lay in bed readying my mind of sleep, I would review what I did that day and ask myself what three things I was able to learn. For some odd reason, that always calmed my mind, that I was reassuring myself that I was still learning and progressing.

As to the inner peace thing, well, I'm not quite like that all the time, but it's hard to tell what exactly I am other then quiet most times. I keep to myself a lot, just observing what's going on around me, learning what I can from the natural world. Some interpret that quietness as being shy, others intelligence and still others the creepy loner. Everyone's entitled to their opinion and they'll always see what they want to see. Of course, doesn't help matters any that I can usually guess what people are expecting to see and I magnify those traits.

I guess you could say that's part of my defense mechanism, show people what they expect to see and they'll leave me alone. I like to have fun, sort of like the telephone game, show different extreme sides of my personality to different people and watch 'em talk to each other about me and get confused that they're talking about the same person but yet they aren't. I can tell this comes from growing up in a tiny town where everyone knew everyone else's business.

As for how I did attain that "inner peace", I did a quite a bit of self study on philosophy at the age where impressions take hold very readily. I've always been on a quest to not necessarily know myself as to understand myself. I'll probably have to check out my mother's library now to find my copies of the I Ching, Tao Te Ching, Art of Peace and a great deal of my other philosophy books. All these little fable stories I usually leave in various blog comments I picked up reading Bits and Pieces published by the Economic Press.

I also began to self teach myself meditation, although I wish I had proper training and/or a master to learn from, for I began to attain levels that began to frighten myself. I could slow my respiration and heart rate to the point that would have medical personnel panicking, astral projection in dreams I could visit places I'd never been to before and when I get there I know the area already. With a very calm mind, I've seen glimpses of my future, some say deja' vu is just a trick of the mind but not when you've read passages in books that are first published months after. In college I experimented with manipulating the air around me into a thermal shield that wouldn't let scalding hot nor freezing cold reach my skin, being able stand under a steady stream of either without feeling heat or cold.

I've never explored all this with greater depth. Most times I just wondered about my sanity or the fact that great power comes with great responsibility. All I know is, I'm here on this earth for a reason, where I go or what I do is for a purpose that I won't always know why until many years later.

Publishing problems?

anyone having problems pusblishing? everytime I try to publish the simpilest of posts this thing just hangs up like it's not talking with the server.

Country Bumpkin

Ok, now to try this again, seems got a hang while trying to publish this the first time.

I may be from a small town in southeast alaska, but I'm far from a country bumpkin, I've done enough traveling and experienced enough to have most of the moisture dried from behind the ears.

So that leads me to tonight. Let me back track a moment, I get a message out of the blue on yahoo from a supposed woman from maryland. We've chatted casually over the past week, but I always had my doubts about the whole thing, the profile I have set up on yahoo isn't exactly one you'd look twice at nor take seriously.

I get a message tonight as I log in at my aunt's home network with my laptop. Says she has a little problem, but nothing big. Didn't think too much of it, moral support is something I do well, so I asked what the problem is so that I could figure out what I can do to help.

"she" procedes to tell me that she's traveling aboad for her work and had to surrender her passport in order to get a hotel room. Now she's suppose to be returning home but got stiffed by her client, a modeling agency, and is now facing a $800 bill and is there anything I can do to help.

Now, I will admit that I haven't had sex in a while but no way in hell I'd let that lead me to give a relative stranger money to help out, even if "she" has promised me "anything" I wanted to do when she would meet up to pay me back. If anything, that set off more alarms that something wasn't right with this whole picture.

My training from the army kicks in and I reveal nothing and being vague about stuff is something I'm irritating good at being. So the angles changed quite a bit once this other person realized that the promise of sex wouldn't budge me, pleas toward my patriotism in "help out a fellow american" didn't work, guilt trip didn't even phase me (I dated a devout catholic and she always tried to guild trip me but that's something for another blog) and when I mentioned that my mother is a retired judge, the peanut gallery got quiet.

I'm curious to know how many fall for this scam if people will continue to try it. I'll help people when I can, but I've only lent money to one person and this person earned my trust while serving together in the Infantry. I figure if I could trust this person with my life, a trifle amount of money wouldn't bother me too much.

Ho, hum

Ok, I know I've said I stuff I've been working on for a while, and it's still true. In the process of reorganizing and repacking my stuff I came across some old 3.5" floppies from high school that had copies of everything I'd written on the computer for classes. In a lot of the essays I have some really intresting trains of thought, but I never finished 'em. Even to this day, in the process of figuring out what to say, I resolve the matter in my head and it fails to get written down, so I have great beginings just not so well closures.

Still not quite pleased with my recent trains of thought so i've heavily edited what i've written and it'll probably be rewritten before it's all over.

A little disappointed

Ok, for those who don't know, I have a Canon Digital Rebel, forget which model exactly, so a pretty high speed digital. Now, I know I'm not real well versed in what all this thing can do but I can point and shoot fairly well.

Now, this leads up to tonight, probably THE most spectacular display of the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) I've ever seen and the damn camera kept cycling through the auto focus and wouldn't let me snap a frame. I scrambled to a total manual setting but the results don't look good, don't think it's quite light sensitive enough to pick up those displays dispite being quite bright.

The northern mountain side looks like it's back lit with a huge spot light and we're treated to Nature's own laser show. Looks to be dancing clouds in shades of green, white, red and combinations in between. Just a little too frustrated at the moment to describe what I saw that would do it any kind of justice.

Just ticks me off, the two things I wanted good shots of my own with that thing was a humpback whale breaching (which I have some ok shots) and some Northern Lights. What I'm thinking is it'll still take a film camera to get one of those and I gifted my 35mm Rebel to my oldest sister since her old fashioned Canon E-2 sprouted legs and walked off while she was on vacation.

What people would envy about me.

I have some posts I'm working on in responce to some of EE's questions, but this should give an idea the time of mind frame I'm usualy in on a day to day basis.

People Envy Your Inner Peace

You understand your place in the world and accept life as it is. For you, "it's all good." People envy how grounded and level headed you are. But you're too at peace to even notice.

What Do People Envy About You?