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Schools about to start

Well, the end of the summer is fast approaching! The boys go back to school this Wednesday. This summer has flown by. It has been one of my most enjoyable summers as a parent. Andrew and Jonathan are really maturing into a couple of great young men. I enjoyed spending the summer with them skateboarding, spearfishing, playing video games, and just being dad. We spent a lot of time on the water and the boys are both becoming expert watermen. I threw together a quick group of pictures from the summer. You can view them here.

Gun rack for the boat

My dive buddy Tim recently made a gun rack for my boat out of a Rubbermaid trash can and some pvc pipe. It turned out really nice and is way cool, so I thought that I would throw up a pic of what it looks like. It holds at least 8 guns and a lot of our other gear and really keeps the deck of the boat neat and tidy. No more tripping over floats and float lines. My favorite touch, is the gatorade container that is used to hold our spear tips and our mask defog.

Finally cleaned out the garage!

Our garage has been jam packed full of crap since we moved into Navy Housing last November. I have been meaning to clean it out and reorganize it for quite some time. Well, since I'm starting a new job soon, I thought I'd better get it taken care of sooner rather than later. I spent all day Sunday moving things around, vacuuming up shrew poop, and spraying bug spray. I made a trip to the landfill with some junk today, and also brought a load of stuff to the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society. So the garage is looking pretty good. I can actually walk around in it and the only thing left to do is to build a small workbench so that I have a place to work on things. I know its not too exciting, but thats the news from Guam.

Xbox 360 crapped out again!

Our Xbox 360 has been acting up the last few days. Lots of screen freezes. Then tonight, I got the three red lights on the ring of death. So it looks like the Xbox 360 has had a hardware failure. This is the second one that I have had this happen to. Luckily for me the three red lights popped up tonight, because the unit is out of its warranty, but because of the three red lights issue, it will be repaired for free. The last time this happened Microsoft would not do warranty exchanges here in Guam and the Navy Exchange exchanged the defective Xbox 360 and gave me a new one. But now, Microsoft will do a warranty exchange here in Guam. So I will have to mail the unit off to Microsoft to get it repaired or replaced. The timing on this sort of sucks, because our friends here in Guam just got their kids and Xbox Live account and our boys had been having fun playing online together. Oh well, schools about to start anyways, and we don't do any video games on school days. So I don't think that the boys will miss it too much.
On a similar note, our 52 inch Toshiba rear-projection television is crapping out. It has a really fuzzy picture and is barely tolerable to watch. I think that I need to have one of the bulbs replaced or something like that. I have been having trouble finding a TV repair place here in Guam that can fix a rear-projection television. I'm going to call a few more places tomorrow to see If I can't find someone who can fix it.

Tropical Storm Forming West of Guam

There is a tropical storm forming West of Guam right now, according to the NWS. It is not supposed to affect Guam though. Good thing, cause that would really foul my week up if we had a typhoon. We'll keep our fingers crossed, but I think that the odds are against us making through a whole tour on Guam without living through a big tropical storm or typhoon.

Andrew speared his first fish!!

Andrew has been watching me spear fish for the last few months with a considerable amount of envy. He has been working on his swimming and diving, so a couple weeks ago I bought him a six foot long pole spear. We had the very serious safety conversation and then I told him that he could spear any fish that he could get close enough to for his first fish. The fish here in Guam are very skittish, so getting close enough for pole spear range is pretty tough. He swan around chasing fish for almost two hours, and then it happened. I heard him surface from the depths chanting, oh yeah, oh yeah.....He was so stoked on his first fish. I was really proud of him. The fish probably weighed less than 1/8 pound, but ya gotta start somewhere!

I got a job!!

Last month, I sort of serendipitously bumped into this guy named Forest at the Sumay Marina on base, who after a lengthy discussion asked me if I would be interested in a Government Service job. It peaked my interest, so I went through the process of applying via USAjobs.com. I submitted the online resume, and after a couple weeks, I got an official offer via email this morning.
So it looks like that I will be starting sometime in the next few weeks at the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) as a Supply Specialist. It is a GS 11 step 1 position (not bad for my first GS job), and I will be overseeing the quality assurance program for the local DLA operation.
The job is pretty sweet, its on base, 2 minutes from the house, 7am-4pm hours, gov job, sick pay, annual leave, etc... For Guam, its a great job!!
I'll let you know how it goes.

MacBook Pro bit the dust...new iMac

Well my MacBook Pro had been acting up again, and for the third time in less than six months, the hard drive failed and I was forced to try to restore from a backup. Unfortunately, I can't even format the hard drive, it is totally kaput! So, after two days of messing with the laptop, I decided to get another new mac to use as a backup/primary/complement to the MacBook Pro. I purchased a 24" iMac at the Navy exchange. It took me all day yesterday to set it up, but now that I have it up and running, things are going smoothly. Next week my MacBook Pro will be taken to the local Apple authorized service center here in Guam for another warranty repair. Hopefully this will be the last time it needs to go into the shop.