I post about canoing... I post about a strip club... and still I get no comments.

Hello?  Hello?  Is this thing on?!?!

Oh well.  You'll get a post on my boring life anyway.

I fixed a turbine compressor at work today.  It's not as impressive as it sounds--I just changed out the dead batteries.  They're each supposed to have 12 VDC minimum (volts direct current, ya know) connected in series to make 24 VDC to run the start circuit.  Well, one had 4 VDC and the other had 8 VDC.  So grand total for two batteries was less than what one battery should have had.

Changed them out, and it ran up  perfectly.

Then the alternator I had ordered for one of the 3 STILL broken diesel generators came in, so a coworkers and myself took the old one off, although I put the new one on as a Quality Assurance evaluation (basically an AGE guy who works in QA watches me do the work and makes sure I don't fuck it up.)  I passed the FIVE STEP PROCESS with flying colors.  Go me!  Then I was too short on time to run it up and see if that fixed the main problem, but I doubt it did.  I'll find out when I get to work (that is, if swing shift ran it up like he said he would.)

So last night a coworker was going out for a belated birthday get-together, and I invited Ian and myself along.  Cause that's what I do.  We went to Roma's, an Italian place in Speicher before Ian and Shane drove the group of us down to Trier.  We went to a strip club first, called 7th Heaven, which wasn't too bad.  They didn't get totally naked, so maybe it's more properly called a topless dancing bar.  The guys just called it a Gentleman's club.  Which is weird, because in German topless bars, they usually have at least one guy stripping.  This one had the standard token guy, who was good looking AND used those fire sticks that jugglers and sideshow performers use.  He didn't juggle them (low ceilings, and I don't know if he knows how to juggle) but did the usual tricks with putting them close to or touching the skin.  He tried to get another girl in our group to go up and help in the act, but she wouldn't.

So I did.  WOO!

I ended up going up there a couple times, one to help him get the jacket off and then get a rodeo ride, then to help hold the fire sticks while he did the tricks with them (they're hotter than you think, even with his arms between me and the fire) and then he took a stripper-dollar off me by sticking it in the collar of my shirt and crawling over me to get to it.  It was pretty cool.  Oh, and I joined in the big dance finale thing, which I'm assuming they just did as sort of a break between dancing sets.  Mostly there weren't many people in there when we got there, but it had started to fill up more when we were ready to leave.  Including some more coworkers who showed up at the dancing part.  One guy I don't even think saw us, as he made a beeline for the most aggressive of the female dancers to shake his groove thing.  I poked him in the side until he turned around and saw us.  That group looked pretty well shit-faced by the time they got there.

We left to see what else was going on, and ended up in a tiny dance floor/club area of a bar, but we were the ONLY PEOPLE IN THERE.  Also, there was over use of strobe lights, and once we were there they turned on the smoke machine.  That room was smaller than my living room and had only the one door to get out, and no windows.  Too much!  So Ian and I went outside and were sitting at a table, just chilling.  The birthday boy came out and made sure we knew they hadn't forgotten us (we knew that) and that we were cool.  We were.  A while later the other DD came out and said that if we wanted to go, he'd get everyone home.  I felt kinda bad leaving them all there to pile into a 5 seater BMW, but they seemed to like that club and wanted to stay, so we'd end up out there for who knows how long, and we were starting to be really tired.  We ended up leaving, and got home around 2am.  It was a lot of fin, and one of the guys said any time we want to go out, just give him a call.  Which is totally cool.

Just so you all know, I have the best hubby ever.  :)

Some kind soul at my shop arranged for a canoe trip to Luxembourg, to float down the Sauer river, back into Germany.

Several canoes tipped, much beer was consumed, several injuries happened (mostly to cowinthong,) some alcohol made a return appearance (including on the side of the Autobahn) but most of all, MUCH fun was had.

I've posted several pictures on MySpace, and am too lazy to crosspost them here, since that involves downloading them to photobucket.  Maybe later.

One guy wore a shirt that said "paddle faster--I think I hear banjos" which was pretty damn funny considering the group of rednecks we had there.

Bedtime.  Later!

cowinthong and I went to see The Incredible Hulk this past Sunday, (I've been pretty comatose since the weekend.  Sorry.) and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised.  I'm not entirely sure why I was the only one in the whole theatre laughing, but I know we both enjoyed it.  I never saw Hulk, but I think I'm OK with not seeing it, as no one seems to have liked it, and it hasn't any bearing on enjoying the new one.  I did have to do some reading on it, just to answer a few nagging questions, though.  But that's just me.

I also think I may finally understand why my sister-in-law and deleva have been going ga-ga over Edward Norton the past two weeks I was home.  He's pretty damn hot, and he spent most of the movie half naked.  Once you get a good shot of ass, too, which was nice.  Well, twice technically--but the second time he's buck naked so you have the whole side of his body to stare at.  ;)  I'm such a perv.

Anyway, works been... work.  I may finally be qualified to do the main part of my job, which is to sign off on other people's work, as soon as Monday of next week.  After all this hassle about getting signed off on fighter equipment, and then not being able to get to work on fighter equipment and having to do training records and stuff...  I'm quite happy about that.  I just need an eval and I'm good to go.

Starting Monday we go to a 4 team, rotational schedule.  I start out in Maintenance. which is always more exciting (and usually more frustrating--especially since I haven't troubleshot anything in about two years) to do than inspections.  The catch is that at some point in the next three months I have to go to swing shift, which I really can't do as cowinthong and I are still sharing the Liberty, AKA the Devil Jeep.  Well....  Not really sharing.  He drives it, I ride in the passenger seat. But you get the idea.  Today we went to look at a car, a Seat (rhymes with Fiat, actually) but the lady must have had something come up because she hadn't shown up by 5 mins to 6 and we had to go and let the poor dogs out.  I did get a glimpse of the car while the coworker who told me about it was driving me to his place to meet the hubby, but all I saw was the logo and that it was blue.  Not enough to go off to pay $1,500 for the car, but nice to see it at least for a second after waiting over an hour for the owner to show up.

I guess that's all.

Stupid BBC Prime!

We get up this morning in plenty of time to make some breakfast and settle in for three glorious hours of Top Gear silliness...

Only the damn show isn't on.  Some stupid fucking show about 50 things to eat before you die is on.  WTF?!  One guy even said "certain parts of a woman's anatomy" in the beginning promo thing.  Hopefully he didn't mean bits cut off a woman and fried or something.  STUPID.

Soooo.  Fucking.  Annoyed.

I need a slingbox.  So very much.  I hate the cable here.  HATE HATE HATE.

Plus I just finished a book where the ending pretty much sucked BALLS.  What a rotten Sunday.

Since McChord didn't have any flights to Germany, I had to buy a ticket to fly home commercially.  We scoured the internet and managed to find a ticket for just over $600 (which is WAY better than the $3,000 Lufthansa wanted, or the $1300-1500 everyone else wanted!) which I purchased this morning.

I leave tomorrow, the 3rd of July.  So I will be home in time to celebrate the 4th in a country where the 4th is just a Friday.  But they'll do something on base, I'm sure.

To all my Washington friends--it was great to see you again, and hopefully we'll BOTH get back for a visit soon!

D--

From my cousin, touchmedirty.

I've read 20... and several are series of books, not singles.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Yup, I made it out of Germany on Monday and stayed one night at deleva's house, and now I'm at Don and Mom's house, staying in Mom's trailer. Don just got the pickup insured, so I have wheels now. Woo! I had some tasty chowder for lunch, now I'm chatting with Ian on windows live messenger.

Not a bad day so far. Can't wait to hang out with people, though.

And for those who haven't gotten the email, myspace invite or whatever, there's a party scheduled for Saturday! It'll be at Troy and Kelly's at 8pm.

Hope to see you there!

PS add Ian as a friend--cowinthong

I can't believe it! When they told me they had on average one or two flights a week to McChord from Spangdahlem, I thought there'd be a good chance of getting there just in time for the wedding.

Imagine my surprise when I called the PAX terminal today and found out there are TWO scheduled flights on Monday! Whee!

That means there's a damn good chance that I'll get on a flight tomorrow! Yay!

Tomorrow begins my Adventures in Space A(vailable) Travel! I'm sure you guys are just as excited as I am!

And by "excited" I mean that you actually read this and though "Darla's coming back already? Jesus she just LEFT!"

Anyway, I'll be hoping to catch a C-17 heading back to McChord during the week. There aren't any scheduled for this weekend according to the nice PAX terminal guy I talked to today, but he said there might be one as soon as Monday. I'm not going to hold my breath, but that would be waaay beyond cool if there was one.

I'll be staying with Mom and her soon-to-be-husband Don until probably Friday night. Saturday we'll hopefully have some people over to Troy's place and drink some alcohol and soak in the hot tub. As usual, you're all invited. I think Sunday is the day I'm staying at Deleva and Aaron's place, then back to Troy and Kelly's because I think it'd be just too creepy to stay at Don's house when he and Mom won't be there. The wedding is on Sunday, which sort of makes the whole weekend kinda off-kilter. But that was the day they could get the Eagles.

I'll also be visiting my Grandmother, who's just been diagnosed with cancer. She had surgery, but it was more spread than they thought, so we're not sure what's going to happen now. I'll also be visiting my other grandparents at some point... I'll have to call and see when they're free. Between GrandmaLu, Granddad and my uncle and their various medical problems, they're often gone to appointments and such. Also I am a terrible granddaughter and haven't called them in ages. I suck.

Finally, I shall pass on some words of wisdom from a coworker, who shared them with me after I asked him to tell me a story to pass the time while we waited for fuel to drain out of an air compressor--

Never swim in the Dead Sea when your butthole is raw from rough toilet paper. Apparently it burns quite badly. Of course, being men none of them wanted to be the first one to say "ow my butthole hurts" so they stayed in until the biggest guy said "fuck this" and got out.

True story.