Moving On..

The family and I are now sitting in a hotel in downtown Waikiki, waiting for our flight to the east coast on Wednesday.  To catch people up, I was promoted to the next pay grade back on September 16th, and now I’m being put directly in charge of about 10 other guys in the operation and maintenance of all the electronics associated with running a Naval nuclear reactor on board a submarine.  To be specific, in February I’m reporting to the USS Georgia (SSGN 729) Blue Crew.  Our submarine is gone out to sea so often that we have two crews that split the deployment load, to make it more bearable on us and our families.

With moving, though, comes saying goodbye, which is always one of the hardest things to do.  About six months ago we said goodbye to close friends and neighbors as the Army took them back to Tennessee.  And now we’ve said goodbye to everyone I’ve worked with here, and the close friends we’ve made here.

These friends have had a great impact on our lives.  They’re the godparents of my son and daughter, and my friend T and I talked every off-going watch of our 6-month deployment.  I’m grateful to have friends like that, friends that I can always talk to about anything, no matter how long our separation has been. I’m going to miss them, but I’m sure we’ll see them again, and hopefully soon.

Social Networking – Too much?

Alright, so I consider myself to be pretty savvy when it comes to the Information Age. I mean, I used MySpace, I now use Facebook, I’ve used ICQ, Hotline, AIM, MSN, Windows Live! Messenger, Skype, Vonage, FaceTime…. yeah, pretty much everything there ever has been.

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My First Political Foray…

While I don’t normally venture into the realm of politics, I’ve been giving it more and more thought lately.  Tonight, while Skyping with my wife, she linked me this Youtube video, which absolutely disgusted me and led me to this post.

First, I’d like to express that my views are of a personal nature only, and do not express anything to do with the US Navy, however, my opinions might have been influenced by my experiences in the Navy itself.

The video below should be watched before I give my opinion.  Opinion after the break.

Continue reading ‘My First Political Foray…’

Wintry Weather

So here I am, upstate New York.. Saratoga Springs to be exact, helping my fellow Electronics Technicians learn about all the cool stuff getting installed in our submarine while she (yes, submarines are female) is in drydock.  We had 45 degree weather this weekend with rain, which was enough to melt most of the snow.. until this evening.

About 7pm it started snowing. And it hasn’t stopped.  We’ve got 5 inches in the last 3 1/2 hours, and The Weather Channel keeps lying to us. It says only 4-6 inches of snow expected… and it’s not letting up anytime soon at all.

I’ll post a picture later, but for now, just imagine a guy who has spent the last 3 years of his life in 70-80 degree weather (including at night), and just imagine what fun it must seem to be in freezing cold temps with 5-12 inches of snow headed his way.

The Blog

For a little bit of background on this blog and the software I’m using, I manually installed WordPress 3.1 on a GoDaddy Shared Linux hosting account, which is currently running 4.99/month.  I manually created the MySQL database for the backend and uploaded the WordPress software.

The theme I chose for WordPress came from a dear friend of mine, fellow blogger CyborGirl @ www.cyborgirl.com . Anyone who gets a chance should go check out her blog, it’s a great read.

Anyways, once the theme was chosen, I also enabled the WPTouch plugin for WordPress, allowing a mobile version of the site to be generated, as well as the Akismet plugin, guaranteed to reduce spam.  The result so far has made me very happy.

Until later, when I ponder why I still do my current Navy job, toodles.

The Beginning…

Well, first post of the new blog, and hopefully I can actually have the drive to stick with it, haha.  I’ve got a good theme set up, and I’m hoping my interests will lead me to blog more.  I urge you all to bookmark me in your phones as well, as the mobile version of http://tom.marslands.net is up and running.

For those of you that might know nothing about me, you can read more at the About Me link at the top, but to make it easy for you, I’m married with a beautiful little girl, and another child on the way, due in about 7 months.  My wife is an aspiring teacher, working on her Master’s degree, as I attempt to finish up my Bachelor’s.

I’m an ETN1 in the US Navy Submarine Force, supervising and operating nuclear reactors.  You’ll see tons of posts griping about that, I’m sure, so on with the show!