My National Guard unit is going through a transition right now, and as part of the changes, my job was changed from M1A1 Abrams Crewman to Cavalry Scout. So I had to spend the last couple of weeks going to a school about my new job. There are actually two branches to the Scout job, the Humvee side and the Bradley side. I did the Humvee course a few months ago, and this month I took the Bradley course. For those who are not militarily inclined, here is a Bradley:

The training was fairly typical military fare, with long hours and lot of boredom punctuated with a few fun activities. I got to play with some plastic explosive, a grenade launcher, several machine guns, and fire a bunch of rounds from the main gun of the Bradley itself. The Bradley gun is fun to fire, but it's a little different sort of fun than firing a tank. The cannon on the M1A1 makes a big boom that is hard to top as far as thrill factor.

The Bradley gun is more like a machine gun on steroids. It's fun to shoot because you can fire five rounds off in a matter of seconds and watch them all follow each other into the target. They're not huge rounds (a box of 30 probably weigh the same as one round for the Abrams, give or take 20 pounds), but they're still fun to shoot. So that's what I've been doing the last couple of weeks.

Today at work part of the dock smelled like Barbecue-flavored chips, so every time I drove past that area I got hungry. I actually got to a point where I was salivating and having hunger pangs because I needed to be eating some chips. At lunch time I ran out to my car and went to the gas station to buy some chips. It wasn't the healthiest lunch, but I needed to have some chips right then or I was going to go nuts.

The Fantasy Baseball season is going okay. I have three teams in the top 3 or so spots and one team that is slowly making it's way up from 9th place. With a couple of good weeks I could get that team into playoff contention. The Fantasy Football magazines have started coming out, so I'm pretty excited about that. Fantasy Football is fun, but I find it more difficult than Fantasy Baseball or Fantasy Basketball. I think it's because each player only gets one chance during the week to produce stats. In the other sports, a couple bad outings in a week can be balanced out by some good outings. Players have more chances to achieve what you've projected for them. In Fantasy Football, whatever your player gets on that day is what you get for the week, good or bad.

I recently discovered that there is going to be a new MMORPG coming out called Pirates of the Burning Sea, and I'm cautiously excited about it. I want to be head-over-heels exploding with joy about it, but there is the off chance that it could not be very fun for a variety of reasons. I think the thing that worries me the most is that a historically-based Pirate MMO will be limited by the geography and timeline of the real 1700s. I'm not sure how the game will be able to grow beyond its original release and still stay "in character." But I'll probably buy it and pony up my subscription fee every month until it stops being fun.