Lucky Sixes

Well, 6/6/6 has come and gone without the world coming to an end. On this side of the globe, at least. There's no telling what will happen elsewhere in the world as I sleep. As a matter of sheer coincidence, this post is the 66th entry I've made on my blog. And yes, it has been 66 days since I left home. And I have 333 (that's half of 666) days left in my deployment. That's lots of numerical fun! I'm told that in Malaysia the word for 6 is the same as the word for "luck" and it's supposed to be an extremely lucky day. In that vein, I've given my wife instructions to do some gambling in Vegas today. Sixes. Sevens. Whatever works. She always seems to do well when it's my money she's feeding the machines. It was mostly a plain old normal day here otherwise. The highlight of my day was locating some online Excel spreadsheets with data that I wanted. Now I just need to figure out how to get the data into the format that I want. It should be fun. Excel is fun. Powerpoint is evil. Since I gave you the teaser about American Idol, I should confess what happened about 10 days ago. The American Idol finale was playing three times here, and I had happened to miss the first two showings. The last showing was at midnight on Saturday night/Sunday morning. I went to bed about midnight, having given up on staying up to watch it. Well, this was still in my old room, and sure enough, my next-door neighbor had his TV on loudly. I was getting ready to complain when I recognized Simon Cowell's voice and realized what show it was. So I ended up going to knock on his door, not to complain, but to say that since I was listening through my wall, might as well listen in his room. Turns out he wasn't even there! That's right, he leaves his TV on loud after midnight and goes somewhere else! Bah! So I went around back to his window and slid it open and was back there listening to the show through the screen. He came back with about 20 minutes to go and gave me a funny look... and invited me in to view the final songs. As a final note, the other Navy guy who works with me got a care package today, which included a large bag of gummy bears. Or, more accurately what used to be gummy bears. It's now a very large bag of a big gummy blob. It's actually pretty amusing to look at. But not a good idea for a care package in the summer.