Tavern's Member Picture Gallery.

@Lemie Great pictures. I love taking photos, usually of my dad's classic cars, flowers and beautiful scenery. Your pictures are lovely

Samantha.

 

Thank you

I've always been into photography, but there was a few years where I didn't take any. I finally accepted what a smartphone can do when it comes to taking pictures, so I'm getting back to it now

 

Lost just gave me permission to post our first ever picture here. It was taken on his first night in Sweden. Love it so much.

 

It's my favorite picture of us, just kinda cute and cuddly and upside down. And, well, we waited a long time to get together in person so, yeah, good memories!

 

Aw, wow that's awesome! I've been in photography since I was a little girl, though recently I've really started to enjoy it. If I find any pics, I'll show you some of my better pictures I use my phone sometimes, but mostly stick with my camera. I love photographing myself usually when I have a new dress or hairstyle, but I keep those to myself as I'm shy.

Samantha.

 

You've seen this image already, Iain, but... It's the second time in just a few months that someone has sent me an image from long ago times. This is from some time in 1989 when I was at the DLIFLC, where Iain was also attending at the same time, but this was my second billeting, when a few lucky zoomies got to go live in the newer buildings the army had constructed. Bigger rooms, mildly divided into two seperate areas, one for each roomie. Photos like this are often strange because they've teleported through time. I've not had them in my personal collection, stringing memories along to the present. I don't even recall this day in the slightest, though the young woman in the photo was a person whom I remember well and who had made the unfortunate blunder of trying to engage me as a romantic partner, as fruitless a venture as one could describe.

 

Yep. Never did have a poker face.

 

And she might not have been able to tell when the shot was taken, but when she saw the look on your face (after the rest of the roll was shot, and the photographer remembered to take it out of the camera, then remembered to take it up to the PX for processing, and found the ticket in his/her wallet a week or so later and hiked up the hill to pick up the prints) that you were really not in the moment there....

Shoulda sent in the Marines, storming Zoomie Beach was a passion for us. (Do you remember Zoomie Beach? The volleyball pit by the USAF barracks?)

 

Sadly, I don't. I think I may have mentioned this before, but shortly after arriving I hooked up with a little crew of Army students and never looked back. Then moving to the billeting away from the regular USAF barracks sorta' sealed the deal that I knew next to no zoomies. On the plus side, the fellah I mentioned dating while I was there lived just the other side of the cul de sac where I was living and where the above picture was taken.

 

This is from last year, but it's a photograph of our Jaguar XJ40 Sovereign. It was a beautiful sunny day for a change in my country

 

Is this just for photos, btw?

I drew this to help advertise my brother on Instagram. It' a quick one, but I'm weirdly happy about it!

 

He's a luchador, which is the best kind of alive.

 

He's in a contest to win a trip to Mexico. The sugar skull is in the colors of his mask of his luchador alter ego, and skulls are just so much easier to draw over luchadores.

He was attacked by mummies in the movie he made, though, so I can't promise anything.

 

Someone prefers to hunt birds on the balcony over watching movies with me...

 

Shame on @LostThePlot for wanting to hunt birds on the balcony instead of watching movies with you! Oh wait...



Very cute cat, @Lemie !

 

*shrug*

The school curriculum was exceptionally rigorous and difficult. It was easy to hide inside the envelope of "I have 35 nouns with their respective genders, all their corresponding case declensions, 25 adjectives with all the same stuff, and 30 verbs with all their conjugations, aspects, moods, perfective, imperfective, that we just got today and have to have down pat come tomorrow-afternoon's test." In retrospect, it's easy to see why there was such a phenomenal attrition. The course was really hard, the school was really long (a full year for most), and there was endless opportunity for distraction, relationships being a prime source of distraction given how long we were there. People dated across service branches, got pregnant across service branches. At the time it fell under the umbrella of "I'm officially an adult now and no one can tell me what's what". Almost 30 years later, you look back and realize how idiotic a lot of the behavior was. Young people being young.

tl;dr

There genuinely wasn't a lot of time for relationships if you actually wanted to graduate and graduate well, so it was easy to hide behind that concept. I graduated magna cum laude, and I did have a relationship, but that relationship grew out of a friendship that grew out of tutoring a classmate that wasn't doing well. Most of the relationship really was just us studying together with an understanding and occasional kissing and some hands down the pants, but not really much more. He eventually washed out. Try as we did, he just didn't have a feel for it and he frustrated easily and it got the better of him.

 

Haha Yeah, the course. I remember being just devastated when he finally washed out. 18 year-old-first-real-boyfriend devastated. He got "recycled" first, which is when they drop you back to a class that's in an earlier phase of the training, hoping that a little remedial will give the student a chance to grasp what had been missed, and we buckled down, but it was no use.

As to the other entendre, we were 18/19. Most of what you bring to the table at that age is enthusiasm.

 

At DLI (as the other alumnus here) the ratio of male:female in the Air Force was nearly 1:1, as I recall. The army had a fairly high number of female soldiers, the Navy was... I dunno, they lived right next door to us Marines, but they were always kind of on their own thing. Don't recall seeing many female sailors, although I did catch a glimpse of one young lady's nametags and I shit you not, her last name was "Swallow." I doubt there has ever been a soldier (broadest meaning of the term) in any branch of any service so eager to get promoted out of her initial rank....

Oh, and the Marines had four women, out of maybe a hundred people.

The group dynamics were that Marine men got issued Air Force women on arrival (the Air Force women told the same joke, just reversed), the Army presence was so huge that relationships between soldiers wasn't necessarily incestuous, and the Navy did their own thing.

But as @Wreybies said, the course was intense. Every student there had spent their whole lives cruising through school and being the smartest person in the room, and suddenly they were studying four or more hours a night and half of them were being put on academic restriction (mandatory study hall, no liberty except for maybe Fridays) and half of those were failing out. Okay, those numbers are slightly inflated, but there were a lot of students sitting in the privacy of their own rooms, with someone attractive, saying "No, no, anyo means no. Neh means yes. Now let's go over that suggestion form again, I don't want to lose you."

Ah, true romance.