The great PCS roadtrip 2007

So Thursday morning I got up hella early and drove north to Virginia Beach, VA. I had almost no sleep and was exhausted before I hit Columbia, SC.

Goodbye GEORGIA!!!!

Goodbye SOUTH CAROLINA!!!

Goodbye NORTH CAROLINA!!!!

I pulled through, it was uneventful and the pups and I got to the beach. The hotel was one step above crack whore hotel but they didnt hassle us about the dogs and it was cheap. Friday they once again tried to keep hubbs from continuing on our journey but I had copies of the "missing"

paperwork. I finally got to meet my friend Sharon, whom I have talked to online for over 3 years as well as her husband. She tried to kidnap my doggies but it wasn't happening. Weather in VB SUCKED and we just wanted to hit the road. We did go see some lighthouses though at Fort Story.

The drive out of VA was rather pleasant. The leaves were damn pretty.

We also saw a fairly large cross on the side of the road but it was nothing compared with what was to come.
We also passed a sign for Blacksburg and Christiansburg, VA. It made us ask the question, do black people live in Blacksburg and must they be removed from the Christians in Christiansburg? Yes that is the sick twisted humor we have but at the same time when in the South we often found ourselves wondering if that had ever been true.
There was also a Waynesboro, VA whic made us scream in terror because we are not headed back to GA for quite some time.

Monday evening we arrived in Bristol, TN.

It was damn cold there. We had dinner with the husband and wife I grew up next to back home. She practically raised me. It was great seeing them again and friggin hysterical to find out that they aren't fans of the east either.

Here are some signs that made me giggle.

Algood

BuckSnort

THIS IS SPARTA!!!!!!

I Liked the factory


Welcome to Graceland!!!

Tuesday we headed off to Memphis, TN. Unfortunately my girlfriend who lives there was out of town but it was cool, we saw Graceland (the outside) and cruised Beale Street. I loved Memphis and would love to go back and spend more time.

Wednesday night found us in Oklahoma City. Man that was a painful drive, it just felt hella long. We ate at a yummy chinese buffett and saw my friend Amanda and her family. I havent seen her daughter since she was a week old and I had never met her husband. It was great and alot of fun. OKC is where the architecture style changed to a style more like what I am used to seeing, it was comforting.



Gaven liked Amanda and her family. In fact he spent the night waiting for them to come back.

Here is a slideshow of OK, it is not much

Thursday (my goodness I have been on the road a week) we headed to Albuquerque. My not-so-cousin gave me a good place to get some real Mexican to try and it was YUMMY! We thought we had finally gotten west of the Waffle House Empire, had not seen one since Amarillo. Well there is one at the hotel in Albuequerque. It was our longest day on the road but not as dull as the day before. Somewhere in Texas, Hardee's changed into Carl's Jr, which made me smile. We stopped at the Largest Cross in the Northern Hemisphere and the Cadillac Ranch.

We finally got near the end of our trip. Hubbs I learned loves to take pictures of rocks. We stayed in Williams, AZ which is an awesome little town outside the Grand Canyon. We spent a day at the Canyon. I got food poisoning but thankfully we were on the way back to the hotel. The next morning I still felt like crap but I wanted to get on the road, to get home. So after 11 days on the road we made it to my mother's house. I recovered after a few days and then we headed south to San Diego. So now that is where we are until December. Here are the pictures and the story so people can quit their whinin. :P

Miscellaneous in Arizona, including one of the few living animals we saw. We saw lots of wildlife but little of it was breathing.

Here is the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest. It was BEAUTIFUL and something well worth the detour.

And finally the Grand Canyon

Friends and Augusta

Tonight as I realized I was bored and had a TV without a tuner and a DVD player without cables to hook it up I started making calls at 8pm, which is major taboo in my world. I made my calls in order of proximity to my house and after 2 calls had procured a set I could get tonight. It made me realize how awesome the people I have met here are.

I have experienced a lot of neat things since I moved here, things that I am just not accustomed too. I think I learned more about friendship in the last three years than I have in my 25 years prior.

I have had friends drive 3 hours to tow a friend of mine they didn't even know who was broken down on the side of the road, just because I asked. They have helped us fix furniture, put in a fence, plant trees and bushes, sent their teenagers to do my yardwork when hubbs was gone and countless other seemingly small things that were huge to me and hubbs. In just the last week, people have stopped by to dig holes and plant shrubs, fix my mini blinds (cos I am lame), fix my driveway, fix my closet doors, hang out in my attic with me cos it scares me, move a TV for me 10 feet cos I cant lift it, find AV cables for me at 8oclock at night cos mine got packed and I am bored, and shown up totally unexpected (even had to ask for directions) just because they wanted to see me one last time before I leave and I have been too busy to get together. It just means alot to me. I hop I am half as lucky to find such great people in Japan.

so yeah I thought I would tell the world.

In the next week I have to finish painting (but I have no stuff) and clean the house (again no stuff) but I am not worried as I know I will be taken care of, the Lord will provide all I have to do is ask. It is a wonderful feeling

revisited by my favorite word

Renege. Just have to say page 517 of the last Harry Potter. Racial slur my ass, that is all

too damn early again

So yeah I am having a very unusual form of insomnia for me. I get bored at night so I go to bed decently early, 10 or 11. Then I wake up around 6 and can't get back to sleep. I guess this is better than being up until 4 and sleeping until noon but damn it confusing me and it makes my days feel so long. So I dont have to be at church for 2 hours, so I am off to study. ummmm yay! I guess

Oh what a day

So this morning my friend Tom came over to help me tame my back yard. I have been feeing bad about not doing too much to get the physical house ready for the move and hubbs has been doing ALL the outside work. I am still working on getting off all the meds I was given erroneously so was sick most of the week but come this morning I was feeling decently enough. Which is good 'cos I have almost no way of easily contacting Tom, at least not to say, "don't come." Well it was wet at 8 am but he was here right on time and away we went. We moved quick and got alot of shit cleared out of the yard. In 2 hours we had what I thought would take us all day, finished. Now I can plant some shrubs to hide the monolith that has appeared behind my house.

Oh and now for the part that my friedns who new me forever ago (yes I am feeling old lately) will find fucking hilarious. Me + machete = I suck. Yes I cannot do any damage when swinging a machete at weeds. Oh wait it gets better. It rained on and off until about noon. By dinner time I was going try and get a fire going in the pit. Me + hatchet = I suck. Yes I could not swing the hatchet hard enough or accurately enough to splinter up a piece of dry wood to make dry kindling. So yeah I suck and the strong me that once was has become a weak lil bitch. I can't think of what else to call myself. I mean I used to be tough and strong and now, well I get pampered too much or something because I swear I bet if anyone would have seen me with that hatchet they would have died laughing. So there you go I am pathetic and I am putting it out there for the world to see, but no one saw it and I can delete this later. Oh the power I wield :P

but the Jack Daniels Roast I made kicked serious buttocks. I will have to use that marinade recipe again and figure out what else I can drown in it. I am going to miss my grill when it leaves me in a couple months

River of Life

The run down

5 days
over 100 12-17 yearolds
not nearly enough adults
1 hotel

Oh yeah can you feel the fun yet?

16 work teams
like 6 porches built
9 houses painted
16 yards cleaned up
some really awesome food, they made me fat
One guy who could end up being on my list of favorite people, but then again maybe not
Just all around a ton of fun for a good cause and purpose.

The part people care about:
meeting random people to avoid the same people I have been eating and sleeping with for 3 days.
Deciding walking into a church service through the front 30 minutes late with a guy who is not my husband would be a bad idea. Then again if it had been my husband people would have fallen over dead as he has only been in church twice in the last 3 years (one my baptism and the other was on the way to the lake, we weren't backtracking for him). It was a good choice. I had more fun shootin the shit with him anyhow.
Anyone who did not know me thinking I had a thing for him, made me giggle. Yeah maybe if I was younger and not married but otherwise it didnt cross my mind but it was a lil flattering.
The world found out that I only love Mitchell for his tools. But oh what tools they are :)

Now the best part:
Different woman in my bed every night.
Being in a bath tub with 2 guys
Being in a bathroom with 6 guys and another chick
hiding under the stairs with 5 guys.
shoulder rubs
Almost pitching a guy off the balcony.
Waking up to different rays of sunshine every morning

I am sure I will come up with more but that is all at the moment. I am still tired and I feel like ass but it is all good. Did it change me? It takes alot to change me. I did like however for once staying local. I do not like the idea of going to other countries to do mission work when there is so much that can be done right here.

I had ENTIRELY way too much fun and some of it I am sure was inappropriate for a church retreat but it was good times all around. And get that DAMN SONG OUT OF MY HEAD!!

My Ordeal

Ok back in May hubbs was denied orders because I am supposedly sick. A lot of phonecalls, faxes, doctors appointments and scrambling later we managed to get me cleared by the hospital in Japan. This was all due to a misdiagnosis. On May 21st I was cleared and hubbs applied for orders. At the end of June/beginning of July he received orders to Japan. WOOHOOO!!! Now that is the back story. Here is where it gets fun.

We went on vacation in the middle of June. He did not have “hard” orders when we left but I made the docs appointment anyway for overseas screening. When we got back my screening was the next Wednesday, June 27th and we had until Friday July 13th to get everything complete. And so it begins.

Go in on the 27th and this lady who has been a pain to me for months acts like she is God as far as my screening is concerned and then proceeds to tell me she can’t do anything because we are Navy. This lady is the EFMP coordinator at a JOINT command yet she acts like she does not have reason to help Navy family members. No big deal, the doc signs and coordinator gives the almighty stamp. I argue with both about tests I KNOW I need done and they tell me no. Thursday I learn an important paper was left out. I call the EFMP coordinator. She is not in, she does not work on Fridays and screenings are only on Wednesday which is July 4th. I schedule the screening for Wednesday July 11th, just in case. I also scheduled my own tests because no one would listen. I continue calling Friday, Monday and Tuesday and got nowhere. I talked to the coordinator’s supervisor a few times and that did not help either. Thursday, I got frustrated and went down to the hospital. The nurses there had seen me quite a bit since May when all this started. I told them my latest issue. One of them helped set me up with my tests and the shots I needed to get. They could not get anything done about the screening; it was just one headache after another. Friday they had me get one test. Monday I went back and had it read. Tuesday I had a health exam. Wednesday I had the screening. Now mind you the hospital in Japan has accepted me so this is mostly a formality. The doctor does not feel comfortable signing off on some things and I think “ok I can respect that.” He was confused by the wording as he had never seen the form before. This was at 8 or 9AM. He did not however tell me that he had not checked whether or not I am suitable for overseas. I found that on my own at 6PM! If I had not looked at it, I would have sent in the paperwork incomplete. I took it back to the hospital, first thing in the morning with some further supporting evidence, most importantly documentation that the gaining hospital had accepted me. That was not enough so I went back later with further documentation that afternoon. I was told come back in the morning for the paperwork. Friday morning I returned around 10:30AM. My paperwork still was not completed and I was asked to not return until I had been called. I guess my camping out for the last 9 business days was not appreciated by him, the nurses and I got along fine. At this point I had also contacted Navy Personnel in Charleston, SC and Tennessee and had been given the distinct impression that this was the doctor being overcautious or overzealous. At 2PM on Friday I received a call that it had been completed. I picked it up and we now believe it is all complete, hopefully the sage will not continue.