Back to the Grind - 5 August 2009 - 1200

I’ve been back in Leatherneck a few days now. The remainder of my stay in Ali Al Salem and Kandahar were remarkably uneventful. KAF sucked as it is insanely hot over here now and there was virtually no where to go with air conditioning that had the ability to keep up with the size of building it was cooling, or if there was somewhere it was packed to the brim with others trying to beat the heat. When I got back to Leatherneck I found my things moved into a new tent, as I knew prior that they would be. While I was gone they consolidated from 12 per tent to 20. I only had to move one tent down, which was no big deal but now there were two people living in the same area previously occupied by one. The benefit of carrying the rank that I do however allowed me to get locked into a bottom bunk even though I wasn’t there to claim it on moving day. Over the past few days one thing I have come to learn about being here is that you should expect a gradual increase at an ever compounding rate of ridiculousness. Every time someone says “Get this…” or “You will never believe…” I’m almost never surprised no matter how outlandish the news. They could be telling outlandish blatant lies and I would probably be inclined to believe them. Even though in my last entry I said the the Army Physical Fitness test was “outlawed” over here, I arrived to find out that not only was one scheduled now, but that I had to take it in 2 days. Needless to say, with no prior warning and me just coming off of a one month hiatus of sitting on my couch eating Amigos, I didn’t fare so well. I passed my push-ups and sit-ups without a problem, but failed my two mile run by 9 seconds, which wasn’t horrible considering I’ve been a bum the last month. Not to mention that in one week I finally bump up to my next age bracket, giving me an extra 24 seconds. It was no big deal though as it was just a practice test. The real test will be in two months, which I will pass with no issue because as previously stated, I’ll be working out quite a bit hopefully in the next 3 months. There really isn’t much else to report right now. I stopped in the new PX that opened up on Leatherneck and it is drastically better than the one we had prior. They are having problems keeping it completely stocked right now but it still blows our old one away by leaps and bounds. Where KAF was extremely busy when I passed through, Leatherneck seems to have taken a step back, or perhaps just spread out more. Lines to the chow hall and laundry and significantly shorter. I started working back out at the FASP again, which hasn’t changed much since I left. We hear rumors of more ridiculous taskings coming down in the near future which sounds like it will tax our work force pretty hard, to possibly include my crew. I suppose we will just deal with that as it happens. Not sure if I mentioned it in a previous entry or not, probably not, but I’m going to try and run a fantasy football league while I’m over here. We will have our draft on Sept 1st and SPC Hartwell and myself have volunteered to track stats and convert them to points manually since we will probably not be able to get everyone on the internet every week. Should be a lot of work but I really enjoy it and it should help to kill what little time we will have left.
Ok, upon going to post this I have discovered that I no longer have the ability to get this on my government laptop to upload it onto this page. I therefore was forced to retype the entire thing as my laptop with not read flash drives or even disks anymore. I force this being a problem in the future….