Warrant Officer Candidate School (WOCS)

As most of you know, KR has been down in Ft. Rucker, Alabama for about the last 2 months. He will graduate from Warrant Officer Candidate School on April 1st! He will then be home for about 10 days and then head back to Alabama to start Survival School (SERE) and then Flight School. I found 2 videos that shed a little more light on what he has been "going through" at WOCS. Check them out:

(This first one is about 3/4 down the page where it says "Becoming a Warrant Officer Video")

http://www.iowahawkeyewoa.org/WOCS.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45RbU2qCwDo&feature=related

FOOD!

This post is going to be all about the food we ate on our vacation. Weird, I know, but isn't that one of the most important parts of a vacation? I think so! Don't worry, it's not like I'm going to write about every meal! Overall we felt the food we had was just mediocre and way overpriced! We did have some good stuff, but nothing too memorable.

The first night we went to one of the restaurants at the hotel. It was called Sea and Stones and was right on the beach. It was a place where you have a sizzling hot stone on your plate so you can cook whatever raw meat you ordered and then dip it in different sauces. It was interesting (and $50 later, we were barely full). Funny thing was that we were the only ones in the place at first. They dimmed the lights for us, lit a candle at our table, and turned on some sappy music. It was nice, but we tried not to laugh. We found this to be the theme at a lot of the places we ate. We kind of preferred, and were looking forward to the more laid back, happy-go-lucky, Mexican Fiesta attitude we encountered at most restaurants in PV. In Cancun, every place tried to be real fancy and romantic. Oh well.

We did find another great Thai restaurant to go to! (We found one in PV last time.) It was one of the coolest restaurants too. It was like half outdoors/half indoors, and each table was in its own separate bungalow type thing. Some of them were out over the water and some were over land. There were different colored lanterns all around which had an awesome effect, though not many of our pictures turned out in the dim light. And yes, I look a little scared or something in this picture for some reason. Maybe it was because practically the whole time we ate, our server was stationed in the darkness behind the table waiting for us to need something. They were trying to be all fancy, but we found it a little uncomfortable and creepy. Even still, the curry was worth it! YUM!

Wherever we ate, we had to have some Limonada to drink! It is just the best down there. Too bad it was usually around $3 for one small glass of it, and when you're hot and thirsty you need more than one. You really learn not to take free safe water for granted here in American restaurants, or even free refills!

For the first couple of days, we hadn't had any real authentic Mexican food yet and I was craving some chips and salsa at least! We had plenty throughout the rest of the week, and some were pretty good, but mostly, I realized that my homemade salsa is just plain better!
Does it sound like I'm bragging? OOOPS!


One thing we love about Mexican restaurants in Mexico is the Mariachi Bands! We ate at one particular restaurant called, Sisal. It was a huge place with a Flamenco dancer show (you had to pay extra for that of course) and a Mariachi Band. Here is KR trying to serenade me!

I also took some video of the band playing. Sorry, the picture quality is terrible and dark, but you can hear it at least!

Like true Americans, we flocked to Wal-Mart not long after we arrived in Mexico. We were able to stock up on bottled water and some snacks for the week. They had an incredible bakery there. Rows and rows of pastries for very cheap! I'm not just talking about donuts, but yummy fruit tarts, muffins, breads, danishes, etc. I know, it was pretty corny to take a picture here, but I was living up the tourist thing.
To wrap up my food post, one of the last places we went to was a place called La Mission in Cozumel. We had walked past it in the days before and were pretty excited to eat there because the menu looked good and the place looked fun I guess.


When the time came, however, it just didn't live up to our expectations (by then we should have learned not to get our hopes up). I ordered coconut shrimp. They brought out some huge coconut shrimp served in a half coconut shell on my plate amongst other food. The shrimp was real tasty, but when I went in for a closer look, the coconut shell was crawling with tiny bugs. I had to do some major damage control on my plate, but somehow was able to eat most of my dinner. I'm sure I consumed some extra protein. BLEK.

Mexican Vacation 2008

Well, I've put this off long enough, so before I forget all of the details of our trip to Mexico, I better get them blogged! I had about 750 pictures to weed through and it's been overwhelming. I'm going to attempt to share just the highlights so you don't get too bored, however, with the way the narration is already developing in my head - it's going to be more like a journal of play-by-plays. Sorry! I also reserve the right to embellish my stories to make it sound like we had the "funnest" vacation ever! -All of which will probably cover several entries over the next few weeks with lots of pictures - so deal with it! :)

In January, KR and I went on vacation to Mexico-this time to Cancun and Cozumel. We wanted one last trip before he went to Alabama and also to celebrate our anniversary and his graduation. As a graduation present, his dad gave us 4 free nights in a hotel in Cancun with one of those deals where we had to attend an infamous timeshare presentation. We had been through one of these before and felt it was still worth the free stay. (And yes, when the time came, it took us 2 hours to make it through the gauntlet of sales sharks. And even though we did get a free breakfast with the best fresh squeezed juices we had ever tasted, we vowed not to put ourselves through such a thing again!) We were a bit worried about the "free" room but it turned out to be a very nice hotel! We stayed here at the Westin for those first 4 days.

We loved our room and the hotel staff was great. Our room's view of the Caribbean was gorgeous as you can see!

Our hotel was the last one along the hotel strip and was the only one which had the ocean on one side and the lagoon on the other side. Here are a bunch of pictures around the hotel.

We were really impressed with the beach around the property too. It was a public beach, but they groomed it every morning and it was far from crowded. Unlike Puerto Vallarta, we didn't have vendors trying to sell us stuff every 5 minutes either. Looking back, we wish we had just spent more time relaxing and enjoying that beach! This was one of the nicest days. Unfortunately, it was at least partly cloudy for the rest of the week and even rained a little.

More Funny Cat Videos

The other day I had a school assignment to watch some YouTube videos. One of them happened to show experiments with mice and I noticed the cats were paying attention to the screen.

After the mice, I got an idea to look up cat videos. They were intrigued by these too although it wasn't so much the cat's image on the screen but the cat noises. They couldn't figure out where they were coming from. This video was of a really angry cat! Simon knocked over the speakers trying to get to the cat. I felt bad afterwards though , because as you can see it got them pretty riled up and Simon's tail was all puffed out! For the next half hour they were on the prowl outside for these cats and on edge around the house.