A quick lesson...

Lesson #1.
Things melt. Things I never thought could or would melt in a package melt...melt with a frenzy. These are what sour gummy worms look like after a journey to a desert in a package. Who woulda thunk? But no worries to the package sender...I still ate it...well at least all I could reach. haha. Harder than it looks.
Lesson #2.
Melted gummy worms would make a killing as an adhesive. Really really good sticky stuff.

Lesson #3.
Fact. Malted milk balls WILL show up in Iraq as a solid brick of chocolate with a big hunk of malt sitting at the bottom of package. Amazingly enough, still delicious


And THAT concludes my lesson for the day

Irritations

Harumph
So blogs are meant for writing, right?
I just feel like venting right now...
I'm sure happy that the law was put in place that prohibits employers from firing soldier-employees who have returned from Iraq. Sure, you're in a bind because you HAVE to let the returning soldier have his job back...and now you have to fire someone you once hired to fill that spot of the newly deployed soldier. Wow, that is rough. I just think it's funny how some employers chomp at the bit to get rid of soldiers so they don't have to be 'inconvenienced.' No matter that your employee just spent a year of life deployed in Iraq to help you keep your nice cozy comfy freedom. No matter. You just keep on a livin' in your closed-off world of convenience. I just hope at some point these money-hungry employers realize just how many soldiers sacrificed to bring them their convenient freedom. You just never know what you have till it's gone, do ya? Unfortunately not.
Irritating.

Another thing, the internet is so slow here that it lit-trally takes over 45 minutes to load and partially watch ONE E-card. ONE! I just want to find and send an E-card to my dad...and nothing, nada, not happin. Internet said, screw you, I'm taking the day off. I had to coax it to load my email. Wow, really internet? Really? Haha BUT irritating.

I'm tryin for the brighter note...
Well today just happens to be my dad's birthday. Happy Birthday DAD! Sorry you didn't get a card! haha
Also, one more day marked off of the calendar. I can't wait to get back to my room every day after work and take my blue marker to cross off the day and bring me one day closer to home.
OO I forgot to show you the camel spider! Check THIS out!

It actually died in a fountain pond thingy we have next to our housing. HUGE!

So I stole a car...what of it

But don't worry! I put it back!
The good ole trusty Humvee truck lets me down again. Because we are such a small base, we are not self-sufficient. We have to have all of our goods and services brought in from bigger bases around us. If we need to have maintenance done on a vehicle or piece of machinery, or if we need to turn equipment in, we have to load it on a convoy and send it to a bigger base. That being said, recently we had to send in some humvees for updates. These particular humvees had not been driven in quite a while...probably a month or so and humvees...if in the 'not been driven for fricken ever' state have a hard time starting up. Well when it came time to stage these vehicles today, they were dead dead...D-E-D dead. I had to borrow a humvee from another company JUST to get MY vehicles started. HAH! THEN...I let them run for a good while...ya know, to charge that good ole battery up. I shut one off...just as a test...and TRIED to start it back up. GEEZE LOUISE! that thing was STILL dead. The other one passed the test so I thought I was good.

Weeeeeeeellll...right before the convoy showed up to pick up our humvees I went to start them like normal humvees. would they start? of course not. It was late too...late enough for the other company (the one i borrowed the humvee from earlier) to be fast asleep in their nice comfy beds...and ALL their humvees were locked. hm. Well, one minor detail. They can padlock up the doors all they want, but they have a back hatch that doesn't lock :D That's right, I walked my happy self down to the company's humvee, opened that back hatch, crawled in the trunk, crawled through the little tiny space to the drivers seat and stole that humvee RIGHT from their parking lot. HAH. The hookups to jump it are underneath the front passenger seat...so because the doors were padlocked, i had to run the slave cable through the tiny open window. haha it was quite an ordeal...but we got those trucks a running! It was so dead that when i turned the lights on, they flickered for about a minute before they stayed on solid....I THINK that poor little trusty humvee needs a new battry...and QUICK! We drove them onto the flatbed semi (that's a scary business too! Not a lot of fudge room!) and shut them off...and I giggled a little bit when I thought of what they're going to have to do to get those poor humvees off the trailer when they get there! haha
And then...when it was all said and done we returned the humvee like it had never been moved in the first place :)

The Crunchiest day of my LIFE!

I had a hot day.
It was super hot. A day that my friend Morgan would call 'Crunchy.' We've come up with three (3) categories of hot here in 'raq.
1. Blowdryer hot-this hot requires a nice strong wind. Much like walking through a field of blowdryers, on high, and all pointed at your FACE
2. Oven hot-this type of hot doesn't require the wind. This is like sticking your face in an oven to smell the baking cookies...but there are no baking cookies...and instead of just sticking your face in it, you have to crawl inside and someone locks the door and you're just stuck inside...and as some might say, "it feels like there's a fire in my pants."
3. Crunchy hot-Now this is the mother of all hots. Crunchy hot is like when you leave the cookies in the oven for too long and they loose every bit of moisture they once had. This hot you feel in your eyeballs and nose and mouth because they all kinda feel like they stick when you go out on a crunchy hot day. Now one thing to remember is, on crunchy hot days it is not rude for someone to stare...really, you can't help it where your eyes get stuck. On crunchy days it sounds like everything around you crunches whether it's supposed to or not. Your uniform, your hair, your food, milk that you drank while you were inside...but when you go outside you realize that "milk was a bad choice."
Well on this one particular crunchy day I just happened to have all of my tasks take place outside. Cleaning the landing zone where helicopters land for incoming visitors, cleaning vehicles for those same visitors, inventorying a storage connex, and un-installing rusted-on antennas from Hummvees!
I tell ya, I didn't know sweating that much was possible. My back and t-shirt felt crunchy with all the salt residue. My sunglasses were crunchy with all the salt. Everything on me felt crunchy...and thus I found out that there are 'crunchy' days in Iraq.

Another Time Change

Today I start my first night shift. I'm still working in supply, but a need came up for someone to stay overnight...so that became MY job. Plus: I get to probably be on the internet a good majority of the night, I will be close to by myself the whole time! woot woot! It's supposed to be short term...so we'll see how long I get this shift.
Speaking of being on the internet...I am at work right now! :D I get a list of stuff to do, and I just can't help it if I get it done within the first 4 1/2 hours of the shift! haha It sounds like a frickin rave in here with my music boomin as I brush up on my dance moves :o) and I do all this dancin of course while I'm cleaning! No better time to dance then when you're cleanin.

Ya know, I was looking through my pictures and you know those pictures you take that are so funny...but sometimes you just never get around to showing them to anyone? Well, the pictures you see here may slightly embarrass few...or offend others :) bUT I just can't help it. These pictures are too priceless to keep all to myself

First off...Mother like daughter pointing at flowers :)

This is how me and my girls hang. We ALMOst fit. Ya know, they should have more adult-sized things such as this here thing. Whoever said only kids like to sit on make-believe animals? hehe


This day was shit...literally shit. Supposedly 40% of the dust that day was fecal matter. I honestly couldn't see past 20 feet. It was early afternoon when I took this picture. So nasty! ACK

How nice! Someone carved a label on my chair so I wouldn't get confused...I HAVE been known to put my face on my chair if someone doesn't specify "ass-here...put your ass here" haha oh sometimes defacement of government property is a bit funny

And, last but DEFINITELY not least... (I'm so sorry, Drew...but I just HAD to. I mean, who doesn't wake up when they get silly-stringed on their FACE? Just doesn't make sense. You didn't even MOVE!) My dearest Drew passed out and I was trying to wake him up by assaulting him with silly string. But I got this far and he didn't budge so I decided to stop while I was ahead...and get pictures! haha! I got him so good! ...poor thing :D

Big Sarg

Sa-weet...
It happened. I'm a big 'Sarg' now...aka SGT Davis. It's got a nice ring to it, eh? It also came with a nice advancement in pay. I'm alright with that.
One thing I'm NOT alright with is being away from my amazing boyfriend, Drew, aka Larry, Andrew, Drewbert, Ogre, Yeti...he's pretty neat. BUT, he couldn't get extended to stay in Iraq with my unit like he was trying...so he made his way to the states. I realize now, a lot of what I liked about Iraq was him.