The Deal

You make this deal with yourself when you marry someone in the military, their career comes first. Usually it is because you don’t really have a choice, you got married really young, right out of high school, neither one of you really had an education or a skillset and the army guaranteed a life. It guaranteed housing, food, medical benefits, a pension if you lasted 20 years, and a salary that covered all your expenses if you lived modestly enough. If you are like me, you got married in your mid-twenties, you already had a pretty decent career going, and your husband was looking at making the military his career. You figured, 17 more years in the military would not be so bad and with your college degree and the skills you had already acquired working for nine years in the corporate world, getting a job anywhere would be a relatively easy process…that is until you got to your first military town, during a recession. The closest and best jobs are more than 50 miles away and while you get 1-2 job interview offers a day you can’t afford the gas, the commute or the time away from your marriage, even if you landed the job (and job title of your dreams). It comes down to sacrifice. You have to be willing to put it all on the line for your spouses career. As everyone keeps reminding you, you did sign up for this. You no longer live in Silicon Valley where there are job opportunities around every corner. You need to figure out how to make it work. Someone spent $150k on your education, they thought you were smart enough to invest that much money in you, prove them right and figure out how to make this work. Figure out how to “have it all”. The job, the husband, and the happiness you deserve.

Pushed Too Far

Cpl D and I have officially been pushed too far by our neighbors and we are moving. Unfortunately, we are not moving out of our complex, just out of our building and to a different building on the complete opposite end of the complex.

This blog is titled "Newlywed Adventures in the Army" and sometimes I feel as though I don't spend enough time talking about the army aspect of our newlywed adventures. Well, let me elaborate a little. The army doesn't tell us where to live, but they have this program called the "Rental Partnership Program (RPP)" where they are essentially "in bed" with Equity Residential Properties and they offer a 5% discount on rent, no deposit fees and if the person in the military is deployed you are offered the ability to easily break your lease. Equity also manages all of the on-post housing as well. As I said the Army and Equity truly are "in bed" with one another and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some form of kickbacks occurring on both sides.

We were led to believe that by becoming part of this program that the army would be our advocates if we had problems with the complex, especially if the problems involved other RPP residents. Boy were we wrong! Not only are they NOT our advocates, but they actually side with the rental property on everything, as though the fact that we have gone to both the rental property and the army on numerous occasions with complaints regarding noise violations and now property damage was not enough. Somehow we should have done more.

The worst part of all of this is that our lease isn't up until November 4, 2008 and we are stuck here until we get orders moving us somewhere else OR we are willing to pay 1.5 times our current rent to break our lease. The Army has proven that it isn't willing to go to bat for its soldiers and their families, and that they would rather protect their business partner. I feel totally violated, and the worst part is that there is nothing I can do about it. Come November we will be looking for a different rental property, not associated with the Army or Equity, and if we can manage we will be looking to rent a house so that we do not have to worry about sharing walls with rude, inconsiderate, childish neighbors.

I guess you could say...that I/we have been pushed too far!

Good weekend, gone bad...

Our Memorial Day Weekend started out kinda rocky...at least weather wise. We decided that we were going to head down to see Mt. St. Helen's, after all, we live in Washington, we figured we should see the Volcano that caused one of the largest natural disasters of our time. It poured rain the whole way down to the National Park, we were really hopeful that it would go away the further south we went, but no, it followed us all the way to the Monument. We finally got to Highway 504 and went to the 4 different visitor centers along the route ending at Johnston's Point. During a presentation by a very knowledgeable park ranger we learned that the mountain was only visible 140 days a year...go figure we visited on one of the 225 days per year when the mountain is not visible.

We went to bed trying to figure out what we would do on Saturday, we were thinking of heading back up to Olympia to go to the Farmers Market again or maybe heading up to Lacey to go to the spring fair. However, Saturday morning we woke up to a gorgeous sunny day, quite uncommon in Washington. We drove back up to Johnston's Ridge (skipping all the other visitor centers this time) and enjoyed the most beautiful view of the mountain. About an hour later, we headed down to the valley and went on the Hummocks Trail. A Hummock is a mound of earth caused by a debris avalanche, the ones we walked through used to be part of Mt. St. Helen's, now they are part of the valley floor. Our hike started out with beautiful sun, and by the end of the hike it had begun to trickle rain, as we got into the car it was a torrential downpour, and absolutely awesome to the weather turn so quickly.

Sunday was very relaxing. We celebrated the fact that one year ago on Memorial Day Weekend, Cpl D and I officially got engaged by going out to dinner. We what used to be one of our favorite restaurants, Sea Grill. We will not be going back. The food was wonderful, but the service left so much to be desired, that we feel next time we would rather spend our money and time elsewhere.

Monday is where the weekend all went downhill. We went grocery shopping and discovered that we had been the victims of a hit and run. My Rav4 had a bunch of paint damage to the passenger side rear panel and the best part was that it turned out that our next door neighbor is the person who hit us. I hit rock bottom with our complex. Cpl D and I just didn't feel safe living here anymore. Today though, we talked to our complex and they are offering to allow us to move to another apartment in a different building. Our rent will go up a little, but at least we will be away from the neighbors on both sides of us that have been nothing but nightmares since we moved in. I hope everyone else had a better weekend than we did.

Baking

I really do love to bake, don't get me wrong, I love to cook too, but baking makes other people happy and as I seldom eat what I bake, I love that what I bake makes other people happy. When I was down in California last month, my mom gave me a new book called Cookies, by Martha Stewart. Last week I made the Snicker Doodles from the book and as they didn't have chocolate in them I actually partook of a couple and they were quite delicious. Today I am making the chocolate chip cookies from the book, sadly I will not be trying any, as I do not want to tempt the migraine fates. I will have to wait until Cpl D gets home to find out if they are any good, but from the first batch to come out of the oven they are the right color and they smell divine :)

Since I haven't been working (one whole week now) I have baked cookies a total of four times. Once for Cpl D because he had duty and I always like to bake for him and the other soldiers he is on duty with. I figure it is the least I can do for the guys when they have to stay up for 36 hours straight. I baked peanut butter and chocolate cookie for a soldier friend of Cpl D's that is stationed in Korea and I also baked oatmeal cookies for a soldier friend of ours that is stationed in Iraq (I'm friends with his wife).

I swear if I could find a way to make money off of my baking and photography I would be a very happy woman. If you can figure out a way, let me know :)

Learning Photoshop

So for the first time since I bought a digital camera (2.5 years ago) I am finally bothering to learn Photoshop. I took a digital photography class last year, but I didn't actually learn photoshop, I have always relied on just being able to take a good picture. The book that was required for my class was Real World Digital Photography by Katrin Eismann, Sean Duggan, and Tim Grey, but to be honest I never actually opened it until now.


I spent about three hours yesterday learning how to insert layers and play around with the coloring, the hue & saturation, the color balance, the contrast and a million other things yesterday. Unfortunately, I am working with a really old version of Photoshop, version 7, but for now it will do.


I worked on two photos, one that I took back in 2006 at the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco, and the other that I took this past weekend at the Rhododendron Gardens in Federal Way, WA.

Here is the orignal photograph before any photoshopping:

Here is the photograph after I spent a couple hours playing with it:

Here is the original Fern Photograph:





Here is the finished Fern Photograph (this one I was able to do a lot quicker, b/c I was more familiar with Photoshop):

Washington State Capital

Today Cpl D and I went to Olympia, WA, the state Capital of Washington. It was another beautiful day and we just couldn't be couped up inside. We went down to the wharf and to the Farmers Market which is open May through September, Thursday thru Sunday. It was the perfect day for a farmers market.

After we went to the Farmers Market, and picked up a loaf of cinnamon bread (can't wait for breakfast tomorrow) we drove up to the state capital building where we discovered they were giving free tours of the capital building and joined in on one.

One thing that I personally found highly disappointing was the fact that there were several war memorials there, which was very nice to see, however, none of them had been well kept over the years. You could hardly read half of the inscriptions or any of the names. I found it to be really disrespectful, and it brought me back to Berkeley, CA. Everyone up here in Washington compares Olympia to Berkeley and for the first time it really felt true to life.

Oh yeah, and I just discovered a really lovely sunburn to go along with the beautiful weekend of sun that we had. It was well worth it though. Here is a picture to let you know what color my shoulders are right now :)

Rhododendron Gardens

Today it actually felt like summer in Washington. In fact we have had two summer like days in a row. It has been rather amazing. Cpl D and I decided to get out and enjoy some of this gorgeous weather and take some photographs, so we headed up to Federal Way, WA, which is located between Tacoma and Seattle to the Rhododendron Gardens. It was so gorgeous there, although, totally hot and a little uncomfortable due to the fact that there wasn't so much as even a little breeze, but beggars can't be choosers and I'm thrilled to death with the beautiful weather we are having.

I used our wonderful Nikon D80 in an effort to start working on building a true portfolio of the artwork that I love to do, Nature Scene, and Cpl D used our little PhD camera. Here are a couple of pics that I shot.

A view of the Ferns (looking down)

The most beautiful blue I've seen in nature...

More pics will be available on my Google Picasso account once I go through and work on somethings. I am really going to be working hard these next few weeks and months on getting together a marketable portfolio. Wish me luck!

Bad Blogger...

I seem to be suffering from a somewhat incurable case of Bad Blogger. I know it has been more than two weeks since my last post, and so much has happened since then. To start with, this past Tuesday I quit my job. I did this for a lot of reasons, the most important of which was that it really wasn't working out, the company I was working for just wasn't really ready for a full on Marketing program and all that entails. I thought that we would all be better off if I left, and I was right. I am now looking for work, and I will probably temp in the meantime, if anyone knows of any companies hiring in the Tacoma, WA area, let me know.

Other than that, Cpl D has finally selected the job that he wants to do in the Army and now we are filling out Top Secret clearance forms and waiting for everyone in our lives to be checked out so that he can find out if he can do this job. If he can, we may or may not be moving again. I am voting for the move. If nothing else, he will certainly be leaving for 5 months of training in Arizona if he does get the job, because that is where AIT is, I would personally love to get stationed in Arizona, right by Tucson.

I have decided that while I look for a job I am going to start re-focusing on my photography and really trying to figure out a way to sell it and make some sort of an income off of it. If anyone has any ideas or knows what I need to do, please let me know, as I am definitely new to this area.

I hope all my readers are well.

Here is a little something that I saw the other day in the town I live in and it should lift anyone's spirits and truly make you believe that there really are people out there willing to go the extra mile: