The Traveling Pine

As Ross promised, we're back to our regularly scheduled and happier posts! Since all our major adventuring is complete, I thought I'd compile a few short stories! Duel in the Pool How do you know if someone graduated from the Air Force Academy? Don't worry, they'll tell you. Actually, they'll just talk about the Academy with each other, but you'll be there to hear all about it. Lucky for me, all the Academy grads that work around me are pretty alright people. What does the Air Force Academy have to do with a duel in a pool? Glad you asked! My budget officer, Lt Miller, is (shockingly) an Academy grad. The SARC (Sexual Assault Response Coordinator), Capt McGuire, is also an Academy grad, just from one year earlier. She swam for the Academy, while Lt Miller played football. He's super competitive. One day they get to talking about who would win in a swimming race. You'd think it'd be obvious, wouldn't you? But Lt Miller wouldn't let it g...

Warning: This post details Ross' magnificent struggle to return home, and being the disaster that it was, contains many negative vibes. Our regularly scheduled fun and positive blog will return shortly. This is a long and poorly written post but I'm not going to waste my, or anyone else's time to edit or improve it, so just skim through it, or skip it entirely, and consider it my way of venting. My counselor would be proud. Thank you! Bottom line up front: I was supposed to be home by afternoon on Sunday the 7th. After being rescheduled, then straight up abandoned by my airline, I snuck onto an Air Force C-5 headed to Delware, and caught commercial air from there. Got home on Thursday the 11th, to find that our dishwasher sprung a leak while I was away, a puddle of resting water across half of our (newly remodeled) kitchen, dealing great damage to our (newly installed) floors, and down through the subfloor, and annihilated everything in that side of the basement - wash...

Ross striking his best Kingly aka "Jarl" pose! Day 0: Housekeeping! (Leah speaking)  Before Ross and I started on our final long weekend together, I had to take care of one small task: The building I was in was to undergo renovations, so we got kicked out and had to move to a new room in a new building. I'm happy that Ross was here to help, it made it a lot easier and quicker! When we went to the lodging office for the new room key, they thought I was staying in the old room until the 15th and didn't want to give us a new room. They mustn't have noticed the flyer on the counter that said everything in that building would be for sale on the 12th and 13th! Hard to sleep on a bed two days after it's sold! We eventually got it all straightened out, packed up, and settled into the new room fairly quickly. It's a nice room, some things are better, some not so much. The biggest thing I'm missing is a small kitchen sink. I cook as much as I ...

Night 0: Snow fun and manwich soup (Cheeky speaking) It snowed enough to accumulate the night before we left for Paris, which is a rare thing around here! In what must've been a sudden loss of sanity, the humans left the warm apartment and went outside. They rolled around in the snow, and built what they kept calling "snowmen" ... though the creations were neither bipedal nor gender specific. Hmm. Ross started off with a giant snow ball which collapsed under its own weight, sending him into a snow-crushing frenzy. Eventually he put a second, moderately sized snowball together, and seemed content. Leah's version came together without problems, though was slightly crooked. Decorated with sticks and nuts for eyes, the humans seemed content and went inside to warm up with some manwich soup (when all you have is a slow cooker, some things are hard to make!) Note: The "snowmen" collapsed about 30 minutes later... it was very wet snow and about 34 degrees ou...