Me

Okay, at long last a few pictures. There are only a few but here they are.

First of all as the Post title says is Me. Never had facial hair for this long.



Next is a Picture of my team just after we got in country. Obviously early as all our beards are little more than a couple days worth of stubble.





Next are a couple pictures for Da of the Olive grove behind our barracks buildings.



A small tree that I could get into the frame from up close.



And Finally a Sunset.

The dust gets so bad that sometimes the sun will set into the dust in the air a couple hours before it reaches the actual horizon. About five minutes after I took this picture the sun was gone for the day.

Disregard the dark line just above the sun that is an error from the camera or something.


So not many pictures. None of us on my team are really taking many. We can't take pictures inside our office tent, and we stagger our shifts throughout the day so we really don't spend much time hanging out. And try as I might, even though I always have my camera with me. I have yet to get a picture of the Monitor Lizards that live around our work tent. These things are huge. The smallest one I've seen was about four feet long. But they don't bother us, and they compete for food with the local poisonous snakes so where there are lizards there are no snakes. So they help keep us safe that way as well.

I will try to find more stuff to take pictures of. I promise.

Hope you enjoyed these ones.

Umm, I'm supposed to blog about how life sucked here.

I didn't really want to post these, because I was afraid they might cause dad nightmares or flashbacks. :)

So here is the bay I've been living in the last two months. This was taken the first day, before we really moved in.



Yes, they are World War Two era Wooden Barracks, intended to be used for only a few years, yet still in use today.





If you notice the little hill peaking above the rooftops in the last picture, I zoomed in on it on one of the few clear days we had.

Mt Rainier


Inside the Barracks

My Rack, I have the bottom bunk.


Looking towards the next rack over.


The neighboring rack again.


Me and one of the officers on my team.


The team minus our other officer.



Then after weeks of training somebody had the great idea that we needed to know what it was like to live in tents. This was to prepare us for living conditions in country. Great idea, except for the minor detail of the tent city being far from ready and thus the conditions were much worse than they will be "in country".

At first it looks okay. Except the first night there was no light, electricity or heat in the tents. They scrambled and got us electricity during the night. But still no heat the next night. Then they got smart and took the heaters from the working tents we used during the day and hooked those up to the sleeping tents. So now we could be warm at night and in the mornings when we got up (unless the heater ran out of fuel during the night.) But those of us who worked in the tents froze all day.



The Shower Trailers which were only available for a few hours each night, assuming the water wasn't all used up too quickly, which of course would close them down sooner.


Inside the Tents




And the Heaters, except for the really cold nights they really put out too much heat. And luckily ours only ran out of fuel once and that was just shortly before time to get up so the tent wasn't too cold.



And finally, on April 1st, the First Sergeant came back from his nightly meetings to find his bed moved out of his room, and hanging about two feet off the ground in the middle of the bay.

He said it was very comfortable there.