The summer feter has come and gone, and thanks to the miracle of digital cameras you can see it on your computer screen today! I've added a change to the way pictures are displayed here; if you click on a photo to enlarge it, you'll get another browser window with the bigger photo. This page with all the photos won't go away, so when you're done looking at the big photo you can get rid of it and just click back to this page instead of downloading it all over again. I regard computers software as magic, though, so this can all go horribly wrong and I offer no guarantees.

I'll use this photo to introduce The Mighty Men of Det One, even though you can't see their faces very well here. If you blow up the leftmost photo, from left to right you'll see Brian Day, me, Steve Elliott, Sonny Brown, John Holsonback (who everybody calls Steve), and Mike LeBlanc. In the second photo, Mike's in front, then Brian, then Steve, then me, John Holsonback, and finally Sonny Brown. The order's the same in the final photo. The opposing team beat the pants off us, by the way. Sonny figures it was because we were pulling uphill. I think it's because they had a girl on the team. Nobody said I was wrong.

The centerpiece of the day was the Pie In The Face competition. The Brits had never heard of this, so they weren't sure what to expect, I think. A bunch of people from the military units on post are nominated for the competition, usually commanders and sergeants and people you'd generally want to see get a pie in the face. Then people vote for each nominee, and since this is an event to raise money for charity, they vote with money. On USAF bases this is normally done with a cup under each person's photo; people passing by put pocket change in the cup of their choice. Three winners emerge: The one with the most money, the one with the least, and the one in the middle.

For our Pie In The Face, we did that and we added a twist: You could nominate anybody on the day of the event. They could buy their way out of it, but you could just nominate them again if you wanted, which is exactly what happend to Sean. A gaggle of his 'friends' pooled their money to make sure he got a pie in the face. The pie was made with anchovies, chunky tomatoes, beans, honey, mustard, spinach, corn, catsup, turnup greens, pumpkin, chocolate syrup, cream, and cherries on top, and Stevie Herrin got the honor of throwing the pie (yup, there're three Steves in my unit).

We had a lot of team sports that day, if you call jumping around on inflatable mattresses 'sport.' Poor Sonny had to dress up in a heavy plastic outfit that only a couple hundred other sweaty people had worn before him and sumo wrestle; Mike had to wear boxing gloves that were bigger than his opponent and looked like they weighed about fifty pounds apiece. The event I volunteered for, because it sounded pretty simple at the time, was the Fancy Dress Fun Run. The idea was that one person from each team would run from a start line to a table and eat a piece of cake, then run back and don an article of clothing, run back and eat another piece of cake, put on another article of clothing, and so on. Just try stuffing a pound of chocolate cake in your face as you're running relays. I think my face says it all.

Tim placed in the kid's 3km fun run, and here he is with his medal. Quite a fetching little athlete, wouldn't you say?