Pictures

I finally got around to adding a picture to my blogger profile. (Actually, I had picked one out several months ago, but it promptly disappeared before I could give it to my wife so she could scan it into her computer at work.)

That's not really the complete picture, though. It was clipped from this picture of my wife and me, taken at the Navy and Marine Corps Birthday Ball, at NAB Little Creek VA, back in '97.



The US Navy's official birthday is 13 October, and most Navy bases hold a ball or some other celebration around that time. (Except for submarine bases, that is; we tend to celebrate 11 April, the birthday of the submarine force, instead.) The official birthday of the US Marine Corps is 10 November, and again, most Jarhead bases hold some sort of event near that date. Little Creek being an amphib base, it has not only lots of sailors, but also lots of jarheads, so rather than hold two balls a month apart, they hold one combined ball somewhere in between the two birthdays.

Usually active-duty personnel are required to wear uniform (dress blue or better) to these events, but in '97 they forgot to specify that in the event announcement. So I broke out the kilt, and my mother-in-law made a new dress for my wife, and off we went. We attracted a bit of intention, of course - I even had a Jarhead bird colonel come up and introduce himself, saying he wished he could have gotten away with wearing his kilt instead of his evening dress "B" uniform.