Santa Shoemaker

So I got to play Santa over here in Afghanistan. My dad and his office sent over lots of food and batteries and some socks and head-lamps. There were tons and tons of Snickers bars, and Twix, and Milkyway. And tons and tons of AA and AAA Batteries. And also assorted snacks from other candies to beef jerky to chicken salad packs.

It was surprisingly difficult to get started, figuring out how to mix and match so many items without an assembly line so to speak... and all the moving around made me feel hot, and then I started to sweat and then my head felt itchy; but I powered through, Santa doesn't let an itchy head keep him from rewarding the nice with gifts and embarrassing the naughty with coal. So I had to trek onward.

Eventually I got sort of a system going, keeping track of which bags had what items and got them separated into different piles. Then it was basically as simple as just going around in a circle distributing the goods to the bags. As you can see, there was plenty of stuff and it all took up a lot of space in my little living space. I'm glad my roomie had just left for leave because that would have been more stuff and 1 person too many walking around our little room.

I kept stepping on the bags, and almost tripping myself, and catching stuff on the wires around

the computer, etc. But eventually, the bed was cleared off, the floor was covered with full bags, I was sweaty and ready to begin delivering the presents. Let's face it, there was no room for me to hang on to the bags until Christmas...

I took 3-4 bags at a time to each room and dropped them off.

Each guy was glad for the bag of goods (speaking of which, I hope my roommate doesn't mind that I used all his extra shopping bags...) It was fun to watch the ones that got head-lamps walking around with little red lights on their heads... and wearing smart wool socks with their flip-flops... silly soldiers.

It felt really good to give the presents to the guys, even if I didn't buy them. And it is really neat to see joy, happiness, and excitement in the guys. Morale has been a bit low as of late, but it's wonderful to see how the Christmas season can make a difference for soldiers who see hard things, traumatic things, and stupid things regularly here and where they don't have family to help them deal with it.

Mountain-Scapes and Sky-Scapes

Well, we just went on another overnight mission recently to support one of our platoons first missions into 'dangerous territory'. The most dangerous part turned out to be the trip out there... we had to travel along a mountain pass that was bumpy and sometimes was only a hair wider than the truck's track.

The last picture was at the Motor Pool at FOB Salerno. We had just returned from the mission and were getting our trucks looked at and maintained. The sunset was just gorgeous with the swirling clouds and the orange tinted sky... so I figured I'd share that with everyone.

Night Rainbow

I'm sure glad God chose to not flood the Earth again; and I'm grateful that He's given us the rainbow as a sign of His promise. But now I'm so thankful for Him giving me the opportunity to witness his promise at NIGHTTIME!

A friend of mine, SGT Larmer, was telling me this is pretty rare, and I know it's a bit hard to see it in the pictures, but there is a rainbow in the night sky, given off by the light of the moon. In fact there is a complete ring around the moon. If I had a camera and a different lens I could have tried to capture it, but as it is I couldn't

back away far enough to get it; but you CAN see the faint light arc above the moon in what I did manage to snap! The middle picture is probably the best one, you can make out the color change from inside to out, infrared to indigo.

I felt a little dumb... it's the kind of 'happening' that normally I would have liked to tell Natalie, take her outside and hold her hand and sit out in the yard staring and talking. But she's not in Afghanistan with me, so I went and got SSG Baker (my squad

leader). We didn't hold hands...

Well, we're moved. We've been moved for around a week now. As you can see it's tight but it's not too bad. We built shelves and stuff so we have places for most all our gear. We even have a little space set aside for Christmas! (not that presents will fit under our tree, of course...) What you can't see in the pictures is that I took my big Wall-Locker shelving unit from Salerno to here... hey, it fit in the trailer, so I took it! And good thing! It has all my clothing and food items on it! Anyway, we're all glad that it's not near as bad as we thought it was going to be. Granted, we have to go back to FOB Salerno every few days for laundry and showers... but still, it's not so bad.

Moving...

Well we're moving. My company is being moved off of FOB Salerno out to a communications outpost where we will be intended to operate as normal and come back to do duties at FOB Salerno. No one is exactly sure of the purpose of the move and the logistics make it apparent just how close impractical and impossible really are. It will be difficult to do our jobs at all if we can even pull them off. We will have to take regular trips back to Salerno for laundry, fuel, and as I said before, duties on the FOB to include security and convoy escort and taxi missions.

Moving is stressful, but for some reason packing is the worst part for me. I hate it. I get jittery and irritable and really feel the stress as i try to fit all my crap into bags and boxes and contemplate getting it all set up comfortably somewhere else.

We're all hoping the company is able to get high speed internet set up out there for us since most of us use the internet as our primary (if not sole) source for connecting back home. I know it's a necessity for me personally. I'm pretty sure I will lose my mind without the internet; but at least now I have an Xbox360 to give me a chance to zone out and disconnect from Bravo Company and Afghanistan.

Also, please note that it may be a LONG time before I am able to update this page... it will entirely depend on whether or not the company is able to get something set up for us, internet-wise.

(My camera was already packed, so I borrowed a friends to get these pictures for you all.)