Transition to Night Shift

So I have been brought over to the darkside now. Nightcrew!!! It's not that bad though. Gives me more time to study for my warfare and get things done that I haven't been able to do on days. Not to mention that I have no one else here with me so that saves the hassle of tripping over someone else in this small ass office! I tried to stay up all night last night so I could sleep all day today, but Mountain Dew and James Bond couldn't even accomplish that. So somewhere around 0445 this morning I fell into a comatose state after coming down off the caffiene/sugar high. But not before I got to talk to the greatest woman in the world! I Love You Brikkie!


Enough of that though. I also got to go flying for the first time the other day. Beats a day sitting around the medical spaces. I had a lot of fun. The crew chief let me test fire one of the 50 cals. Big difference from shooting off the side of the ship. It seems like all we did was fly military dogs around though. Every time we landed they were bringing more dogs onboard. I want a pet out here!! The only problem is if THEY catch you. THEY take the dogs and we all know what happens... If you don't then just keep thinking happy thoughts. :) It turned out to be a very long day though. We were told when we first took off that one of our stops was cancelled, so we spent the extra time on a couple of our stops just fooling around. But as we had just finished refueling we were informed that it was back on so we had another 2 hours of flying, and we were already over for the day. So anyway I got a couple of pics from the whole thing.


The first pic is of me test firing the 50 cal, and the other is me being the rear fire watch at the fuel pits. It is hot as hell standing right behind the exhaust. Not only is it 100+ outside but then you have the heat from the engine too. No wonder the new guy gets this position. Hey!! How come this position isn't in the syllabus?

The almost perfect morning.

So there I was, 0445 in the mornig. Already hit the snooze 3 times, so now the alarm won't go off anymore. Thinking to myself "I really don't need to get up this early. I already took a shower before bed and can brush my teeth at the shop. Go ahead sleep for another hour." First mistake of the morning yet it felt so good. Finally leave the barracks somewhere round 0615 to ride my bike to work. Beautiful morning! No wind, Not hot yet, and have brand new batteries for the MP3 player. Couldn't get much better. That's for sure!

My normal route to work is up the taxi-way right behind the squadron. No more than a 20 min ride uphill. As I reach the bottom of the hill getting ready to go up the taxi-way. I hear a very distinct sound even though I have Static-X blaring away on the head phones. "THUMP" THUMP" Kind of hollow. For those of you over or that have been over here. We all know whats about to happen. A couple of rockets have just been launched. So I start to peddle faster and look around to see if anything has landed yet. About 20 ft ahead of me I see 2 of my marines looking and running also, and out of the corner of my eye I see an explosion. The rocket landed no more than 50 yrds from where we were. I jumped off my bike and hit the deck. Thank god for the HESCO barriers, or we might have been swiss cheese! Laying there for what felt like forever I then jumped back on my Bike and headed for the squadron. No one was injured by any of this mornings rocket attacks. There was some structure damage to a couple things, but nothing serious. Other than that little piece of excitement it continues to be groundhog day all over again.

Medical and Mascots

We recently had a picture taken of the entire squadron, and Doc thought it would be great to get one of just the four of us. From left to right- LT Scull, HM3 Christie (me),
HM1 Hambrick, and HM3 Maras.

I completely forgot about putting our medical mascot up here until I found the pics I took of him when we first got out here. The flight attandants on our MAC flight from Miramar to Germany had gone out an gotten drunk the night before. While they were out they bought a lawn gnome. When I first got on the plane I noticed him chillin in one of the first class seats and tried to grab him but they just kept shoving us past to our seats so we could take off. After a 13 hour flight and swapping of clothes for the gnome. He was finally mine.