Swap Meet

Alright, today I have some picutes from our swap meet. Some of you may know that I am one of the points of contact for the donations to this installation. We accept the donations from the wonderful people that send them, and then we make sure they get to those that need them. We have a swap meet every other week, where we give out shampoo, conditioner, soap, and other little odds and ends. Then we also send some boxes of things out to guys that are outside the wire that can't come in for our swap meet. About a week ago my mother put a blog out about our little donations thing, and how we can always use more things for it. I just wanted to put out some pictures so that you could see some of the things getting used.


Sorry that one is a little dark.

I just wanted to let you guys know that we have also sent out three boxes of things to the guys that are outside the wire. To us they always get first priority, because they don't have a px. We have one is just isn't the best. :) All of the things that are sent are much appreciated by one and all. Thank you very much.

I got an award!

And Shay's Mom awarded me this:

I have never been awarded before so this is very special to me thanks Shay's mom.

I've been tagged

This is so exciting -I have been tagged! Tonjia has tagged me. I am going to be honest- I don’t know how to use a lot of the special features of blogger, so my mother is probably going to have to help me. Anyway let me think of 7 strange things about me…

7. I have very loud fingernails. Let me explain; I have very strong fingernails they don’t really break much, so when I clip them they make a loud sound. It drives Steve crazy. Also, because it drives Steve crazy, I am not allowed to clip them in the car or any other enclosed place he is in, such as the bathroom.

6. As some of you may know my regular job isn’t the army as I am a reservist. So I go away every month to drill, which is about 2 hours from where we live. I have a friend that I share a hotel with, and so I pack a lot. I have refined my packing to the point that I keep a whole separate bag of toiletries that I bring with me every month. Right now at home I have soap, shampoo and conditioner, and a poofy loofa in the shower waiting for me to come home.

5. I like to make up new things to cook. Perhaps many people do this, but when I make dinner I cannot follow a recipe, I have to add my own special touches, and I never make anything the exact same way twice. I often get some kind of meat out of the freezer in the morning with no clue what I am actually going to make for dinner, just something with this kind of meat.

4. My initials are in alphabetical order. LMN

3. I never press the snooze button on the alarm clock. I think when you set an alarm to wake you up, you should just get up when it goes off instead of setting it earlier and cheating yourself out of 20-30 minutes of sleep by pushing the snooze repeatedly. When we got married I had to break Steve of it, because I am also not going to let someone else cheat me out of sleep. :)

2. I take about the shortest showers of any female I know, and also shorter than many of the men I know. I don’t see why people should spend a lot of time in there, just get in clean yourself and get out so you can get on with your life. Ha ha

1. And the number one most odd thing about me… drum roll please. Let me just give one example of this strangeness: deluxe nuts. Let me explain. When I by a can of mixed nuts I can’t just reach in there and get a handful of them and eat them like a normal person. Nope, first I look in there and see which kind of nut there are the most of then I carefully eat those first. So say there are a lot of peanuts in there then almonds, then walnuts, then cashews and so on. I have to eat them in that order, saving the ones that there were the least of to begin with for last, because those must be the best. I know I am a weirdo.

I am tagging:
Ellyn
Weezee
My Mom
The Dong
Trisha
Ness
Let me know when you post yours so I can come and see! I hope everyone has a great day.

Some stuff from work

Today I decided to show some of the people that I work with. As you may notice in one of the pictures you see Jani. She is one of my roommates and she also works in the same section. We work opposite shifts, though, she works days and I work nights, and we hang out on our days off.

You may notice that in each of the pictures I have here there is the same little fellow. Well the truth of the matter is that on one particular night a week this poor guy has to hang out with the girls, because all the other enlisted guys are off. We think of various, some might say, mean things to do to him. One of them the other night was the mustache. The other night I was flipping through a magazine and I found a fake mustache that I decided would look great on him. By the way his name is Gustavo. One of the day nurses thought it made him look like Luigi from the Mario brothers game. You are thinking you cut a fake mustache out of a magazine? Yes that is right, it was in a beer ad it said adopt a new look or something like that, and the magazine enclosed a fake mustache in a little plastic bag. That was a real find let me tell ya. We asked him politely to put it on, and he did because he knew we weren’t really asking. He was a really good sport about it and he wore it until shift change in the morning. The girl in the picture with him is my partner in crime Kim.

At that time it was pointed out that this particular mustache didn’t meet army standards. The regulation on mustaches says that it can’t go past the corners of your mouth, or be faddish. So I cut off the corners of the mustache so that it would fit the reg’s and he was afraid I was going to cut him, imagine that. So untrusting. This last picture shows him with one of the other guys that work’s days, who was just a little bit too slow to save him, his name is David.

By the way normally at work I don’t call any of these people by their first name, it’s just for their confidentiality. I don’t want anyone reading this to think the army is going soft. :)

A brave new look

I think today I may take a more serious turn. Since we got here and I have been working in the hospital, I see all the good that the US Military is doing in this part of the world. Several of the patients that I have helped care for surely would have died if we hadn’t been here to give them the quality care that they would have been missing with a civilian hospital. I, for one, have questioned some of the actions taken by our government in recent years. But now that I am here and see how some of the people have to live, I am reminded to be thankful for what I have back home. It is easy to pass down judgment when you aren’t in the driver’s seat, but maybe it would help us all to remember that running the show isn’t always the easiest job. I am proud to be here, and proud to be able to help these people that need it so badly. I look into the faces of some of the injured and realize they are counting on me and that without that little bit of help all hope may be lost for them. I like to remember sometimes when I am getting down about being over here, that when I get home I will still have the greatest gift my country can give me, freedom. And that even though I am here right now, that freedom, and everything else that I love will be waiting for me when I get home. I also remember that even though I may not go home, that the freedom of others was protected, and the health of others, I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

before and after

In this particular place in the army we don't have to wash our own clothes. That’s right we get our things laundered for us by the civilians here. We turn it in one day and by the next day we get our things back freshly washed. You may think, well that is nice you never have to do your own laundry, it’s like having a maid. I am here to tell you, not really. I would rather do my own laundry for a number of reasons, the first being; when I do my laundry I always get back the exact same underwear and socks that I put in there. The second reason being; I know how to separate colors.

These two pairs used to be white in the not so distant past. Now, sadly, one is and off green. This is what happens when you put white undies and new green socks in the laundry together. In fact in this picture it really doesn't even show the stark difference in color. It’s like the difference between day and night, men and women, white and off green. Thanks to Julia for the supply of the before and after garments.

bored soldiers two

Well I know we have talked about how soldiers get bored sometimes. Well we had one of those last night. Julia came in last night while we were sitting around watching tv, and told us that we had to come outside and see this. Apparently one of our friends bought a bike from someone that is slightly unique.

I may have mentioned once before that we have to walk a lot here to get anywhere. So a bike is something that everyone is looking to buy. A lot people in the unit that was here before us had bikes that they wanted to sell, some of those bikes were obviously a little different.

The red circle indicates that there is no magazine in the weapon. While this particular vehicle isn't the most combat ready, it is one of the most amusing. Maybe we could put some armor on it or something. Well as far as its transportation capacities go, I think I might ask for a ride to work tonight. :)

back tracking

Alright I would like to start off by saying that I am sorry that I haven't been able to do as much blogging as I had been doing there for awhile. We have a lot of patients right now on our ward and when I get home I am a little sleepy. The patients mostly aren't wounded its stuff like appendix.
Anyway today I would like to go back a little bit to some of the blogs that I did while we were still in Kuwait. You remember I was talking about how when the units came through they painted something to represent their unit on one of the cement walls? Well we did one too, and one of my friends got a really good picture of it.

We have some very good artists in our unit, I think they did a really good job. Do you see the knight thing? Its supposed to represent a Caduceus, since we are a medical unit. The flag in the background really looks like its waving, to me. Then it has the little flags on both sides, those represent our different companies, since we went to different places. And then those little banner things had the 1st sargeant and commander on them, but I blacked them out because I didn't want to broadcast their names all over the internet. I thought they did a really good job with the whole thing, I am proud that all the other units going through there are going to see it. Hope you enjoy.

Some missing pieces

Well today I have little to nothing to say, and I felt guilty about not posting any pictures the other day so here you go.

This, as you can see, is a picture of me standing by a huge wall. Isn't that fun? I mean not everyone gets to have a huge wall in their back yard, so I wanted to get a picture of it to commemorate its presence. No seriously I took a picture of this wall with me in it so that it could be understood how tall it is. This wall goes all the way around where we live, its our security blanket.

Now it’s a little hard to see in the picture, but that build up right there behind the buildings is the outer wall. It’s an interesting thing, there is a little road up on top of it that you see people driving over sometimes. It seems close, but its actually far away. This is our protection, that and several thousand marines driving around out there.
Alright the last picture I have here is of Jani one of my roommates, and one of my friends. I have put pictures of her in before, but I never said who she was. Jani is just awesome and she has been keeping watch over all the rest of us, to make sure we stay out of trouble. So I will leave you with this picture of her and I hope you like it.

A ticket in Iraq

Well I'm sorry, but today I don't have any pictures. I would, however, like to share with you a few things that have happened in the last few days. First I would like to talk about where I live, it kind of looks like a huge trailer park, with all the trailers connected. The rooms are in groups of ten and they are labeled by letter for each group, so F1-f10. I live in the B's and the F's are the closest ones to the hospital, so every morning the trudge home seems endless. Well the other morning I was walking home and I was about next to the D's, and of course I look up at the doors all the time to see how much further I have to go. Well I was tired because it was after my 12 hour shift, and I started to think about the alphabet backwards. I realized that it would take me a long time to say the alphabet backwards out loud, because in my head I would be thinking it forward to the next letter and so on all the way down the alphabet. Well you know how cops always do the feild sobriety tests? I was thinking if they have me stand on one foot and saying the alphabet backwards I am going to be in big trouble because I have very little balance as well. So even though I would never drive while intoxicated, because I think its stupid and reckless, I would probably get dragged in for failing the field sobriety test.
Now I told you that little mind wandering story to tell you this one. We were headed toward chow last night and here on this installation we have rule that after dark we have to wear a reflective belt. Well some of the people that were with us had forgotten theirs and we got pulled over by a marine on foot! Yes we were talking about it later and were wondering what they would have done if we had run. Do you think they carry a little siren with them to run people down with? I will tell you what they did have, they had a little blinking light, just like a real cop with his flashing light. :)

flushing toilets

So as you may remember in previous posts I did talk about the novelty of flushing toilets and how wonderful they are. And even though these particular toilets don't flush the same as our toilets back home I am still happy with them.

I'm sure just about everyone reading this has used a porta-a-potty at least once in their life, but for the army it is a way of life. In almost every situation you can find one of these plastic toilet boxes. We all had our fingers crossed when we showed up here hoping for a flushing toilet, its not much, but it is something to hope for.


Now we also got some showers, not the best showers in the world, but it is better than bird bathing for a whole year. Something that is a little bit annoying about our daily self cleaning situation, it that we aren't allowed to brush our teeth with the water. The water is what the army likes to call non-potable, which means non drinkable, or that you might get sick if you swallow it. So we get to brush our teeth with a water bottle. You may think, "hey you can't rinse your tooth brush out right with a water bottle". And if you did think that you would be right. Well anyway as far as our living conditions we really lucked out, the barracks are good and we have flushing toilets and showers. What more can person ask for?

new front back

Well I finally got around to getting some new pictures of my front and back today, I hope you enjoy them.


You many notice the very tall walls that are all around us, aren't they nice. I was talking with my mother and she said that she usually waits until the middle of the month to post her front/back pictures. I said that I probably would only post them once because my view is never going to change. I guess the desert always looks the same.
The second pictures is my back picture, you may notice we don't have much of a back or even a door back there. But what we do have is our air conditioners and windows, and of course the huge wall, its very nice. There are four long rows of these trailer things and we live in the last one. Everything is very close to where we live, and its very convenient. Well anyway I will talk to you all when I get a chance. Hope you enjoy.

We don't know

As you may know if you got here from my mother's blog, I am a medic in the Army. We are covering a hospital here and I work nights in an intensive care ward. It is a pretty good job so far. What I have failed to mention is that this hospital, while run by the Army, isn't an Army hospital, but rather a Marine hospital. And, as we all know Marines are crazy - sorry to all you Marines that are normal out there. What I mean by crazy isn't really all that insulting with my definition. Crazy: They want to make sure that every regulation, and Marine code of whatever is followed to the "T" with no exceptions. We decided to look up their rank structure, so that we too and can do the right thing and call everyone by their proper rank. That way no one is annoyed or insulted during their stay in our hospital. We don't have a printer though, so Jen drew their ranks.If you know anything about Army ranks you may notice that the majority of these look much like ours. If you don't know anything about Army ranks I can tell you that the majority of these look much like Army ranks. Although they do call them something different for a lot of them. It also says on there that the officer ranks are the same; what that means is Marine officer ranks and Army officer ranks are identical.
As some of you may know Marines and Navy guys hang out a lot togethe - wherever the Marines go there are always a few Navy guys to go with them, because Marines don't have as many jobs as Navy guys. In other words not all the bases are covered by one branch. So we decided to go ahead and learn the Navy ranks too, so that we could be good soldiers. Little did we know the difficulty of undertaking learning Navy ranks. We thought it would be about like the Marines since they were all the same at one time...we were wrong.As you can see E-1 through E-3 is whatever man, that is Jen's creative way of saying that could be anything. They have different ranks for different jobs they are in, crazy isn't it? So we decided it would be easier to Just learn E-4 and above - after all not every soldier can be perfect.
Sorry to anyone that may be insulted by the fun little jabs I am throwing at other branches. And I missed some branches, I'm sure I will get them another time.