The Trouble With New People

As I've mentioned I have trouble adjusting to new things, especially new people and places. After living in the same town for 17 years, and the same state for pretty much my entire life (not counting 2 years in Oregon as a child) I'm faced with a lot of social challenges. I can't just sit at home all the time, that's unhealthy. And I need some independence, so I should probably get out without Michael once in a while.
When I'm around new people a lot goes through my mind. They're completely unpredictable, I know nothing about them, and I admit I'm quick to judge and analyze the first things I see and hear. In Phoenix I found one or two people from school I could focus on and get to know, but here there's at least twenty new people I see here and there. It's a whole new crowd. I can't just run home at anytime. I have to stay here and make something out of this situation.
So far I'm discovering some interesting truths. First of all, anyone who isn't from Arizona seems to think it never snows and is made of sand and cactus. The other day, a girl said I looked like I was from Arizona because I had my hair braided a certain way. Because I looked indian, and apparently Arizona is made of indians. Wow. I had to laugh and calmly correct her. Losing my shit this early on would result in months of awkwardness, so I'm doing my best to behave, despite my impulses to call people on their ignorance and freak out at what I'm about to talk about.
One or two of the wives do seem nice. Although one has a tendency to be a bitch even by my standards, but we get along. The rest are a medley of girls under 23 who seem like they shouldn't be here. I hear a lot of complaints, mostly about husbands and annoying housewife things. There's an 18 year old who's married, and has been married, and wouldn't shut up about what an asshole her husband is. On the other hand, I hear it's the same guy who did something that by all rights should've gotten him kicked out of the army.
You see where I'm going with this? Everyone is so gossipy and they talk about other guys who aren't their husbands and it all makes me really uncomfortable. Supposedly I've been inducted into a "family," but you can't just up and act like you've known someone for years based solely on the fact that both of you followed your husbands to a boring town and left real family and friends behind. If I were to make friends with someone, it's going to take time, and I don't know who it's going to be at this point. So far I'm still convinced that my real friends are in Arizona. They know too much about me and they still want to hang out with me.
Over half of this town is made up of military families. Some of the best couples are in their early twenties without kids, because it feels the most normal. I'd really like to meet individuals outside of the military though. It just seems almost impossible at this point. School and a job are in order, that's for sure.

Epic Meal Time Recreation

First, watch this video:

So most of my friends watch these videos. They're disgustingly memorizing and I can't imagine how much those guys have to work out to stay in shape after all the greasy calorie packed food they make. Naturally I'd never considered attempting any of the recipes myself, but a few of my guy friends definitely had. They decided since Moosen was turning 21 they'd make this breakfast of booze. They said so, but I wasn't sure if they'd go through with it.
But they fucking did. I took a shit ton of pictures and put them all together in one big greasy collage to explain one at a time:

1. Bacon. A fuckton of it. Packages and packages. You've never seen this much fucking bacon in your life. Candied bacon is as delicious as they say it is.
2. Beer batter made from a southern wheat beer. Not trashy or overpowering, just right.
3. Ham wrapped in bacon deep fried in said beer batter. The most delicious porktastic thing your mouth will ever experience.
4. Deep fried hashbrown balls. Best fresh, which we didn't quite get to experience since they were made too early on in the greasy adventure. Next time, amigos. Next time.
5. Cheese sticks deep fried in doritos crumbs. Cheesetastic and guilt inducing. Worth it.
6. Everything started to look like one big pile of fried. Makes you wanna die and chop down a tree at the same time.
7. More fried shit. The cream cheese and sausage with jalepeno stuffed pancake deep fried in beer batter was actually pretty tasty, and I don't even like cream cheese.
8. That greasy smell was all up in that place. You stand too close and your eyes started burning. I had to open the front door just to get some fresh air.
9. Fried shit fried shit and more fried shit. We stored it all on plates in the microwave till everything was ready.
10. Alcoholic whipped cream with bacon bits. The most alcoholic thing created that night. Also fucking delicious. Instead of jack daniels, Moose used a turkey honey whiskey for the syrup. Awesome, and you couldn't taste the alcohol.
11. Bacon cream cheese french toast dumpling. Fuckin' smart. And tasty.
12. Epic everything big ass omelette. This I didn't get to try, since by the time we finally started eating I already wanted to die from samples and feeling covered in the grease filled air. It was said to also be good.
13. Everything was loaded onto a platter and brought to the table. Those beer battered chocolate chip bacon waffles combined with the whiskey syrup were my second favorite.
14/15. Towards the end of the meal Chris hollowed out a giant version of the cheese battered in doritos and deep fried, and proceeded to shove a waffle in it, cover it in syrup, and kept eating it.
16. By the end of it most of us looked like this. Hunched over and hating ourselves.

I thought it was pretty impressive overall. I did not get drunk, sadly, because I didn't eat enough. After watching it all being made I didn't want to. Disgusting but somehow still awesome, since Moose is a great cook and his friends love to help him. This night and others, however, probably account for all the weight I gained over winter break. Now that I'm not eating like a gluttonous whore every day I feel like I've dropped a few pounds. I'm not where I want to be but I definitely don't feel as terrible as I did after all that holiday feasting.
Here's a video of some of the process. It's a little boring at times and it's obvious we're all freaks, but it makes me homesick and I love it anyway. 

A Very Long Drive

The drive from Arizona to Oklahoma is hundreds of miles, and when you're in a moving truck with a car in tow it takes a good 18 hours. While the interior of the truck was fairly comfortable it was still a really boring, cramping drive, but we saw some interesting things here and there.
You basically take three or four highways to get there, and the first part of the trip is the more exciting half. We stopped every few hours, give or take, for food and bathroom breaks. We drove through Flagstaff saw the snow and pretty trees, drank lots of coffee and consumed lots of sugar, and pushed our awakeness until we got to our halfway mark: Albuquerque.
It took some time to find a place to stay. We didn't know exactly where we were going to stay, since we didn't know when we'd get into town, and therefore did not make reservations anywhere. We were tired and hungry and downtown Albuquerque was confusing as fuck; much like Tuscon's downtown area it was littered with one way streets and wandering pedestrians. In a giant moving truck we couldn't just park anywhere, and turning around was serious business.
But we finally found this adorable south western bed and breakfast called Casas de Sueno (houses of sleep). Turns out it was made of casitas: small separate houses complete with living rooms and kitchens. It was cute and cozy and the best accident all trip. We wanted to stay longer. The food was fresh, there was a "neighborhood" cat and everyone was friendly.
We had some trouble finding dinner, however. By the time we got settled in to this place, it was late and most places were closed. We took a chilly walk back to the crazy downtown area and found a very satisfying pizza place with decent calzones, but not before dodging lots of late night people who were surrounding a random club blasting terrible music.
The roads got really boring after that. New Mexico has lots of pretty mountains and there was more snow there, but once we got into Texas things started getting very flat. 
We stopped a lot of gas stations and odd middle-of-nowhere places. At one point we were in desperate need of something a little more entertaining and stopped at a Toys R Us...because we're giant children like that. That's where we bought our Kinect.
The arrival was pretty rough. We got there late after driving in and out of a very scary red neck looking town and finally to our town, and realized in all the wedding/packing craziness the utilities weren't on and ready for us. We got some flashlights and some people to help us unload, and ended up crashing at the Stockmans' apartment for the next few days, and then the Vaghari's after that. It was funny, because there was a power outage on New Years anyway, so even if we had been able to be at home we still would've lost our lights.

It looked like this for quite a while.

So I got a crash course intro to the town and some of the people Michael knows those few days, which wasn't bad, but could've been better. I think I just don't know what to do with myself around this many new people. The main activity is getting together and drinking on the weekends; since I haven't seen any big interesting things to do around here it makes sense.
Getting here was definitely really stressful and overwhelming, which could be why I've essentially curled up into a ball and hardly left the house now that we're more comfortable. I honestly thought something terrible would happen on the drive here, but aside from some serious crankiness we weren't pulled over and we didn't crash, so...that's fantastic.
Unfortunately after all of that we were basically broke by Michael's 21st birthday, and so we didn't do much, but went to a party the next weekend for his friends' birthday (since winter is the season of birthdays apparently). He has yet to go to a bar or anything like that, but I enjoy sending him to the store for the occasional bottle of wine or six pack of whatever.
There are still a few piles of things here and there like I mentioned before; we're not quite finished. But it's great having our own kitchen and space. It's terribly quiet sometimes, though. Sometimes we expect to be greeted by lots of dogs or people already there like in Arizona. I want a puppy so so bad but we have to get used to this and make sure we can take care of it first.
It's way past my bed time! Having the internet back tonight has sucked out my soul and I need to sleep it off. I'll more than likely be writing more tomorrow.

More Wedding Favorites

They're on Facebook but I felt like bragging to more people.

Maid of Honor and Best Man

Just a few from our families.

The boys.

Stewbie.

Deroy Jenkins.

Had to be cool and try it on.

Hello Internet!

...We're the Cooks...get it? A ha. ha ha.

On base going to the Exchange--the mini mall mart.

We got our internet all set up today! Finally, it only took us a month being here and a week after getting the router. (We had to have a scheduled date to have it turned on). I can finally upload pictures and videos and do things at a better pace than from Michael's android. I don't even know where to start, and I want to be organized, so I'll probably make a few separate blogs with different topics.

We've been here almost a month now but time passes in a strange way here and it feels like so much longer. Honestly I haven't been doing much but emotionally adjusting to where I am. I did get my military ID (posted on Facebook so you'll have to see it there, felt like TMI here) and we got all that crazy paperwork stuff done, but that feels like forever ago. Since then I'm slowly turning into a hermit and the urge to get off my ass to do something about it is getting a little bit stronger every day. I will, I promise; I'm here for like ten more months I'll figure something out.

This place is fucking awesome.

I'm just really enjoying being lazy at my own house, even though it still doesn't exactly feel like I live here. The streets sort of remind me of how my old neighborhood was before they redid the roads. It's all patchy cracked concrete everywhere, and at certain times it sort of resembles Prescott. It's like being in some warped version of it. It's not too hard to get around, but having a GPS makes it even easier. However, I usually let Michael have the car since for now I don't have too many reasons to use it.
So I've basically been on a video game binge. We bought Kinect for the Xbox on the way here and that's entertaining, though we only have a few games relevant to it, obviously. So....my biggest accomplishment has been improving my gamerscore. Kind of sad but you know what? I don't care. I'm enjoying it because I won't do this forever, that's for sure. And I'm kind of glad I'm not taking care of a child wishing I had more me time. So many people have kids here and it really takes away from their personal time to enjoy things around them, but I guess that's a necessary sacrifice. I'm not ready for it at all.

Most of our (and my) down time is spent in the living room.

The house is mostly together, but we're still missing some things, like dining room chairs and a microwave. We're also really wanting a coffee table and filing cabinets and things like that. As you can imagine, the whole place looks like all of our stuff got together and had babies. It's all mixed in and exploded. I'd really like it if our friends could visit since we can't go home when we want.
This weekend we entertained some of Michael's buddies. I like most people he knows but there's a few that I find questionable as well, and I'm still pretty hesitant to get out there and make friends. You can't throw a rock out the door without hitting someone in the military here, and I'd like to eventually make some friends outside of it. Maybe it'll happen once I get a job and go to school.

Next I think I'll write about the drive here and and some of the things I have to do here. It's all still pretty weird to me that everyone around me is married and in the military, so I'll be talking a lot about things I wouldn't normally do if it weren't for that.
See you soon!

Homesick

It feels like I've been away from the internet for so long! In internet time I've been away forever, seeing as I went from blogging, facebooking, lurking and Tumblring everyday to hardly touching base every few days if possible.
I'm currently leeching off of Michael's phone's internet, so it's therefore painfully slow and uploading anything (like pictures or videos) is pretty much impossible. I'd love to, and I tried, but I can't till we have real internet that doesn't take over an hour to upload a less-than-two-minute video tour of the house.
It's the strangest thing having a house, being married, and living in a new state all of the sudden. I still sort of feel like we're just on some weird house sitting vacation, or that I can drive down the road to see my mom or to PV to see Serra. It's taking a while to get adjusted and even though we've only been here officially for a week it feels like much much longer. Last night it all kind of hit me how far away I was and the reality of my situation, and I got a little upset (it may have had something to do with the fact that it was Mikey's 21st and I was drinking, just maybe). It's not like I'm not really happy to be moving forward in my life and it's exciting having a house and finally being close to Mikey after half a year of hardly ever seeing him. It's awesome. I just wish our friends and family were around to share it with us. I get this empty feeling where I feel like Serra and Chris should be here with us, helping unpack and playing games and making dinner. Or that our parents should come over and see our progress. I just hope I can go home soon.
We're pretty much broke from all the expenses during moving and feeding ourselves while we had no power, gas, or water for the first five days we were here. I still have to get my military ID, which is difficult with Michael back in class. He has to get his pay adjusted now that he's married, which will take another week most likely. I've met a few people here but so far really only like one of the wives, which I figured would happen. You can always tell a military couple because it tends to be made up of a baldish guy, a chunky to obese woman and one to four children. It's made me ten times more hesitant to procreate, since none of them look too happy.

Some quick facts about Lawton and the life here:
♠It's flat as fuck; there's no mountains or pretty trees and therefore nothing to stop the harsh ass wind from knocking out the power.
♠There are really only three main roads to navigate, plus a highway. Most neighborhood roads are in need of serious reconstruction.
♠The main boasted asians here are Koreans. I don't know why. But we found a delicious Korean barbeque restaurant right away.
♠Even the nicer parts of town are kind of ghetto.
♠For the most part people have terrible tastes in food here.
♠It's a lot more diverse here than in Prescott for sure people wise.

I suddenly have all these responsibilities, some I expected and some I didn't. I definitely feel like a wife after being at home for a week cleaning, doing laundry, and running errands like paying rent. I'm woken up twice by Michael getting up to go to PT and coming back for breakfast and going to class. He comes back for lunch and if I need the car I drive him back to base and pick him up after formation. We made our first dinner at home last night and our new friends gave us a little hookah so it's starting to feel more like our house.
The first room we have mostly set up is the living room, since we need our games and movies. We got a nice leather futon couch and have a few chairs from Mikey's house so it's a cozy set up. I'd post a picture if I could but this internet just does not cooperate.
I traded missing Michael and feeling like he should be there when I did something important to missing friends and family and feeling like they should be there at certain moments. I expected it but it's hard to get used to. Michael graduates training sometime in October and then we'll get stationed somewhere else and we do this moving stuff all over again, something I don't even want to imagine right now. We have so much stuff and it's probably going to take another week or two to get most of it out of the way. The bedroom is still a disaster and so is the spare bedroom. Without Michael around most of the day it's hard to get it all done. I also get distracted (or give up for a while) and end up playing games.
We're hoping to have real internet by next weekend when Michael's pay is adjusted and such. 'Till then the internet won't see much more of me and vice versa. It's a little inconvenient but also kind of nice at the same time. I spent so much time on it while Michael and I were apart.
So, until next time!