A day in the life

Well, I decided to create a blog, so here goes... My life here is rather boring, but still, it'll be nice to have some record of what I've been up to. June is already half way gone, which seems incredible. Time has been moving quickly, considering that I'm in Afghanistan. This first entry will try to give you an idea of what it is that I do every day. I start off most mornings around 6:30 (this is by choice, I don't have any set times or schedule that I have to meet). I don my body armor and wonder over to the sprinkler pipe sticking out of the ground that we call a urinal. There aren't any females on this base, so privacy isn't much of an issue. There also aren't any showers, either, which makes it difficult to start your day off right. I am very fortunate to have a satellite phone, which will work anywhere in the world, so I call home to Deeanna every morning and again at night. After talking with Deeanna I eat breakfast, which is a steady routine of bacon, eggs, poptarts, juice and grits. Unfortunately, the bacon is never hot off the griddle, and warm bacon just isn't the same. After breakfast I write in my journal, which is coming along nicely. After a nice breakfast I hit the weight room, which has been very good for me. If there was a scale I could tell you if I've gained any weight. I then head back to my hootch, where I spend the rest of my day. As far as work goes, I will be busy in stretches, and then have long periods of sitting around waiting. The waiting can drive a person crazy, but I guess that just goes with the territory. While I am waiting to have work to do I busy myself with various things. I have read several books, including Rough Stone Rolling, Catch-22, The Subtle Knife, Ghost Wars (A history of the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan from the 1970's until September 10, 2001- it won a pulitzer prize and was an EXCELLENT read) and Taliban (lots of good information, but the author is not a native English speaker, and it just doesn't flow as well). I also have some time to study Arabic, and I have gone through about 150 pages of a textbook I have on Arabic grammar that is on my computer. Most evenings I watch a movie before calling Deeanna and going to bed. That is pretty much my day. It is very groundhogdayesque, minus the cowboy getup and driving a groundhog into a gravel pit. I have a roommate, who is a pretty cool guy. His Name is Brian (I'll ask if he wants me to post his last name later...) He was in the IRR (In-active ready reserve) and was called up for this deployment. What that means is that he was in the active duty army, got out after 4 years, and then was called back through a stipulation in his contract that says the army can call him back up to 4 years after he got out. He has a pretty good attitude about it though. His 1 year anniversary was last week.

As far as the work I'm doing, I'll just say that it is going quite well. The army strongly discourages us from posting too many details on operations, so I won't.

I'll try and post some pictures when I can-these computers won't allow us to upload photos from our digital cameras...

Well, I'm going to publish this, and I'll see where it goes from there.

Tom