Wednesday, January 14, 2009

On The Road Again

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the question that you're all asking yourselves right about now: "What happened to 'On The Brink Of Homelessness Part Dieux'?" I promise that I'll get back to discussing more trials and tribulations of packing up house in a future post. But due to the pack out, the drive across country (read: completely off-line), and a bought of some sort of nasty flu bug, I'm already light years behind everything that happened over the last week. Just indulge me here folks and think of my out of sequence writings as the artistic dissonance inspired by being back in Louisiana - the land of the not-quite-coherent. "Mon Che're done taught you dat!"

Last Saturday morning Charlotte and I woke up, put Mom and Reese on a plane, said our last goodbyes to San Diego, turned in our cable receiver and then hit the road mid-afternoon, bound for Louisiane. I mention the cable receiver here only because it took the longest of all of the above tasks, and lends a note of finality to our reluctant departure. (Man cannot live without cable, ...or so I'm told). We hadn't planned on a hectic pace. Our goal was to make it a leisurely drive across country making it home on Monday or Tuesday. That still didn't leave time for a lot of diversions and byways, though. We knew that the biggest obstacle after a rapid succession of AZ & NM state lines was the insufferable drive across Texas. Nothing wrong with TX mind you, but you just never seem to make any headway when you're not clearing a state line every 4-6 hours or so, and we probably took the longest possible route - El Paso to Longview - totalling nearly 800 miles across!


When Charlotte & I were stationed in Monterey, we had a friend from Sweden who had seen twice the number of US states than we had (combined). Over 4 cross country drives in the last 11 years, and until this past September, neither of us had ever seen the Grand Canyon, owing to time constraints, blizzards or myriad other misfortunes. The point of this diatribe being that once again, we had to haul ass across the "fly-over" states and didn't really get to dedicate the kind of time we would like to truly seeing America. ...Well, there' always a future PCS somewhere down the road where maybe we'll have the time. But all whining aside, we love being out in America ...and it just keeps getting better every time we see it!




Wednesday, January 7, 2009

On The Brink Of Homelessness (...once again) Part 1






Well, moving day has come once again for us and as the packers box up the last few items of our wayward homestead I'm trying to recount all of the different moves that we've made over the years. And by and large, (with the remarkable exception of our last moving experience from Germany), we've fared pretty well: no lost or damaged items and almost everything arrived either on or ahead of schedule. Amazing results considering some of the other moving horror stories that a few of our friends have experienced.
On the average, a typical Navy family will experience a PCS (Permanent Change of Station) move about every 4-6 years. This average accounts for service members taking follow-on jobs in the same area as the last. There are a lot of Navy people who have served their entire careers in San Diego, never once having PCS'd, which has prompted my recent slogan with which I've been taunting these 'fixtures': "Join the Navy. See San Diego County". These type of folks seem to have an absolute aversion to moving anywhere, much less over-seas. I don't bear any particular resentment towards these folks, mind you. It's a really tough time to try and sell your house and move away. ...But you're in the Navy for Christ's sake! This ain't no hometown militia! (This subject broaches my other pet peeve which is the overwhelming number of people in the Navy who cannot swim. But I'll save that grievance for another forum somewhere else further down the road).
...But if they won't go, then who will? Enter: my little nuclear family of flying Gypsies. It's seemingly a different job on a different continent every I time I roll the dice, as it were. Like a pack migrant workers following the cucumber harvest, we go where the flyin' is. We've actually bagged some very good jobs in the Navy on the pure merit of the fact that we will (hold on to you hats folks) actually move to where the cool jobs are! 11 years in the Navy so far and - (let me count 'em) - 8 moves under our belt. That's an average of one move every 16 months for the last 11 years. 6 of those moves were inter-continental. (That average doesn't even include our piddly little initial move down to Pensacola, nor an intermediate move we made there in order to be closer to the base. Those were both amateur moves. I'm only considering PAR, no shit, full-on, pack-it-all up, complete household moves in these figures!). ...So it goes without saying that we have become somewhat "mobile". (Although "nomadic" is probably the more correct term. Or should I maybe create a word like "Bedouinian" here?).

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Food

I guess it depends if you know me or not but like most people I have many loves and a few obsessions. One of my obsessions is Crossfit but I'll talk more about that later. Running a close second is Food...eating, tasting, buying and especially cooking...I suppose it comes from my mother who had to feed 6 very athletic kids on a teacher's salary. And she did it well. So I grew up knowing that food was important but best of all I learned how to love food. Luckily, I learned how to run, lift and play games but I digressing towards Crossfit.

To this day, if you were to hear the conversation between my mom and me you would think we both managed kitchens. We talk about food, the prices, what's in season, and best of all "whatcha cook'en". So, I hope to share with all of you (right now it's just one friend -April- reading my blog) what I'm cooking.

Put this one anything and my daughter will lap it up.

Creole-style Hummus
1 15oz can garbanzo beans (rinsed)
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup tahini
1/4 cup water
1/8 cup fresh lemon juice
2 garlic cloves
2 tsp Creole seasoning
1 tsp ground cumin

Puree all ingredients in a food processor until smooth!!
We eat them with slices of bell pepper. Enjoy.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Planet CCRP

I was inspired by my friend April to share our planet with everyone else.