Goddamn, the last couple of days have been exhausting. The good news is that the light at the end of the tunnel doesn't appear to be a train. We just finished up yet another fucking major inspection. Well, almost anyway, we still have a couple of checks to knock out with the inspectors tomorrow, but then we'll be done. I'm not sure how the ship did over all, but as far as my end went, it went well. Just a couple of minor, easily corrected discrepancies and most of them were issues we had already identified long before the inspectors walked onboard Monday morning. Of course there's a catch though, we still deploy in 2 1/2 weeks. Which means that yet again I'll be out of the country and away from SGland until sometime in December. Oh well, sometimes you get the joke and sometimes the joke gets you.

I finally got around to resizing a few of the pics I took while I was on deployment. So here they are.
First off, this is me chilling in front of one of the many marinas in malta:


Yours truly pretending to work:


Yours truly again, this time lighting up while we were all getting trashed on the pier in Jebel Ali. The guy in the foreground is Casey, one of the guys that works for me.


Another shot of us drinking in Jebel Ali. Casey is on the left, the guy on the right is another one of my guys, Jeff.


This is Jeff. Hard at work trying to fly away from the Oil Lab (our shop). For some reason he never quite managed to achieve lift off.


Here is everyone chillin' in the lab after returning from a night out on the town in Malta. From left to right: Jeff, Chris, Cab, and Kal.


Everyone is hard at work. I don't remember when this one was taken.


Steph also works for me. She's still learning how Uncle Sam's canoe club works but she's coming along quite nicely.


The end of Wog Day. Everyone is quite happy that they're no longer wogs and are now trusty shellbacks. I went through the ceremony myself on my first ship back in '95.


Rog here is another one of my guys. He's definitely got a great career ahead of him if he chooses to stay in. I had to fight like hell with my chief to get him back from the forward pit. We had sent him down to get some experience and he did so well down there that chief didn't want to give him back up.


This is my buddy Alex fucking off on the smoke deck. He works down in the forward pit.


Speaking of the pit, this is an example of how warm it gets down there. Bear in mind that this pic was taken in January while we were on our way home. While we were in the Persian Gulf the temperature was routinely 10-20 degrees higher.


This is just a random pic down in the pit. It's one of the two turbines in each space that drive the ship. It's heavily insulated because the steam that runs it is around 700 psi and 900 deg.


This is one of the ship's distilling units. We use it make drinking water while we're out to sea. Each one can crank out 100,000 gals. of fresh water a day.


My department head, CDR Evans. He's the ship's Chief Engineer. He's one of the few guys in my chain of command that actually makes it bearable to work there. He's a hell of an engineer and and definitely a good leader.


This is Jeff snowboarding in Dubai. They actually have an indoor ski slope in one of the malls there. It maybe 120 deg. outside but it's always -1 on the slope.


Finally these two shots are of freighter taken over by pirates off of the coast of Somalia and the destroyer that shot the shit out of the pirates as they tried to make it back to their camp on shore. Later on that night the destroyer's boarding team captured the remaining pirates. The burned out hulk in the background of the destroyer was one of the pirates' previous captures.

I'm home.

Well, today is the day. I'm heading to the ship here in about an hour or so. Don't be surprised if you don't see anything here from me for the next six months or so. I can still be contacted at hutchesc@lhd3.navy.mil though. I'll definitely miss everyone here and I'll see you when I get back!

Well, after 3 weeks and 3,700 miles, I've finally arrived safe and sound in Virginia. Now all I have to do is find an apartment to live in and hopefully find some kind soul willing to look after Gir, for a small fee of course, while I'm out to sea cutting holes in the ocean. The search begins tomorrow.

After taking a break for a couple of months from the site I return and find that PSW has gone straight into the shitter under new management and I find that I choose not to continue as a part of the group under the new rules that have been promulgated. I will miss chatting with all of the wonder people I met there in PSW chat. The old set up under the wingnut was more palatable than the current regime, which is saying a lot given the utter contempt and scorn I hold for wingnuts. Such is life though.
In other news I will begin my move to Virginia on the 10th with a 2 week stop in Florida to visit family on the way. After that I will be deploying to the Persian Gulf region later this summer and am not expecting to return until sometime early in 2008.

It would appear that I finally have everything loaded back on my computer after upgrading a couple things. New specs are as follows:
ASUS Crosshair Motherboard
Athlon 64 X2 4200+ CPU
2Gb DDR2 800Mhz RAM
ATI X1800XT 512Mb DDR2
2x250Gb Western Digital Caviar SATA II drives
Unfortunately it took me longer than expected to put everything together because apparently new ATX Moboards require a 24 pin and an 8 pin power connector and my old power supply only had a 4 pin. So I had to run back to the store to pick up a new 650 Watt power supply with the correct connections. But, finally, everything is running the way it's supposed to and it is extremely fast now.

I was bored when I woke up from an unexpected nap this afternoon so I took some pics of Gir kicking it on his cat tree:



I also took a pic of my, by now infamous, freckle:

The weekend is almost upon us, hopefully all of you have the opportunity to spend it with someone close to you. Remember kids, don't do anything your parents would approve of!

Welcome to the world in which I live in:






Obviously I've been trying out the new camera. Here's hoping everyone has a wonderful weekend!

On a sad note:

I suck at updating this thing but I suppose I should at least make an attempt at doing so. I finally received my new roomba this weekend and it kicks much ass. I do need to get another electronic wall for it though because it got stuck under the elliptical in my room so I need to block that area off so that doesn't happen again. Gir still isn't very sure about the roomba though. I finally got off of my ass at work today and knocked out the six online general military training courses that we had to have done by the 15th. Our new CO is coming to San Diego from Norfolk for his first visit since he took command so that means that we will actually be working late for the next three days. Oh well, such is life. At least I have watch on Wednesday from 0630 to 1830 so I'd be working late then anyway.

Speaking of Gir, here's the only pussy my bed's seen in a month of Sundays: