Merry Christmas!

To all of you back in the US, Merry Christmas! I kicked off my day by running down to the office to complete the daily personnel reports and troop task assignments, which took a whole 15 minutes because I completed most of the reports yesterday so I didn't have to spend so much time in the office. After that, I drove back to the LA (Living Area) and planned on going to sleep...until my next door neighbor, nick-named Rockstar, came and pounded on my door just as I was starting to get settled down. After he bugged me, I went back and played on the computer for a bit and tried out the new Visual Studio 2005, which is really sweet for those of you IT types who might be reading this!

I finally got a little bit of a nap in, but then woke up and decided to clean my area. It was starting to get pretty unorganized. By the time I was done with that, my roommate arrived. He had to work down at the operations center in the morning, only a half day off for him since the op center needs to be manned 24x7. I fell asleep for a bit and woke up at about 1400 (2pm). Since I didn't go to lunch and really didn't have much of a desire to drive down to the chow hall since it was pouring rain outside (No white Christmas here, just a Wet Christmas) I instead made some Ramen noodles and drank some hot chocolate.

Later that evening, my roommate and I went to the ops center to see what was going on there, not much... watched the classic 'Frosty the Snowman' on the plasma TV while he called his wife on the phone. After he was done we went to eat down at the chow hall. I had turkey, stuffing, green beans, and mashed potatoes. The green beans were good, everything else isn't even worth writing about. Maybe I've just been spoiled by past Christmas dinners!

After dinner, I ran back to the operations center and called home to talk to Mom, Dad, Spencer and Tara. It took a while because we only have so many lines that connect back to the US for the base so it takes about 15-20 minutes of redialing to get an open line. Luckily I was able to get through.

That's about it for my Christmas, nothing too exciting. I wanted to get a picture of me with our Christmas tree to post but since it has been raining non-stop I couldn't. But hopefully the rain will quit and I'll get a picture and post it soon. UPDATE - Above is me with our Christmas Tree, I know its nothing special but there isn't a big selection in the desert! You might be wondering how we even got it, well the story is that we asked one of the Iraqis and he just showed up with it one day, not sure where he got it... We had to trade him 2 boxes of MREs (Meal Ready to Eat) and 3 cases of bottled water for it.

Once again, to all my family, friends and co-workers

MERRY CHRISTMAS!