Too long and no excitement!

Wow!!! It's been a while since I have had the chance to write on here. Like I said before being put on nights is great cause I am all by myself. Well it was supposed to be that way. Then the LT thought it would be such a great idea for him to come over tonights also. AAUUUUGGGGHHHH!!! This was definitely a bad time to subside from indulging in all tobacco products. My nerves are shot! I swear I need a Q & A Board. Whenever he has a question he could write it on the board, and I'll come behind him and answer it. That way he doesn't ask the same question 20 different times in one night. If he tries thenI'll just tellhim to look at the board before he decides to ask me again. Come one! How hard is it to understand that a STS (Significant Threshold Shift) Is a average shift of 10 Db or greater in 2k, 3k, or 4k frequency, and/or a shift of 15 Db or more in any one of the frequencies. Is this so hard to understand? Really needed to get that out there.

So on to other business. They have destroyed the water pipes again. Here we are once again using bottles of water to bathe with. I just don't feel clean afterwards, so I created this little thing out of a 5 gallon bucket, a hose, and pieces from an old eye wash station. The only problem is having to crouch down in the shower stall if you want to get really good pressure because the whole thing works off of gravity. Really quite impressive if I must say. It gets the job done though.

What else have I been up to? I put a headlight on mr RC Truck so I could drive it around here at night time. It's not so much for needing to see where the hell I'm going as it is for where the hell the truck is. I know what direction I headed, but I just don't know how far out there I've gone. So I took one of those headlamps with the halogen bulbs and turned it into a headlight. I removed the bulbs and wiring and drilled the holes in the RC cars bumber then super glued everything in place. It worked OK for a sec but I think the battery pack for the light is interfering with the receiver. Have to find another place to put the battery pack. If that doesn't fix the problem then my ESC (Electronic Speed Control) is going bad.

I have decided to take a college class out here to pass the time. Algebra. Things that make you go HMMMM! I thought this would be easy. I haven't even touched a math book in a little over five years. This was very interesting. I realize now I should have just gone straight to college instead of enlisting. That way I would could use some of that stuff I retained for a little bit after high school. Now everything is Greek to me. I can't even remember basic stuff. I felt so retarded after the first class. I wanted to ask if they were offering a consumer math course instead. Now that I've been to a couple classes I feel it's coming back to me little by little. I think my grandpa said it right when I was a younger boy. "All you need to know is add, subtract, divide, multiply, and make sure no one is taking your money". I think thats the best advice I've ever received from anyone. That's it for me.

Later,

Joshua

Some more near death...

Last night was crazy! You've all seen the pictures of those sand storms right? Well last night about 2230 we had another one. This time we couldn't see it coming so we had no time to prepare. I was just sitting in the office trying to type up a plan for this Combat Lifesavers Course that I will be starting at the end of this week. When I noticed it was starting to get a little dusty. I had heard the wind blowing outside, but I really wasn't paying to much attention to it. When I decided to look out in the hallway I couldn't even see across to Maint. Control. Thena couple of the flight line guys came into maint. control and there green coveralls were now orange from the storm. One of the flight line guys said he was working on one of the birds and next thing he knew his tool cart was 3 birds down the line. Another one said he was in the gym when it hit and he tried to go back to flightline, but when he walked out of the gym he couldn't even see his hand in front of him. So he decided to come to maint. control. He said he made a complete circle around the gym tent ended up back at the entrance. So this went on for about 4-5 hours. That isn't even craziest part!

Apparently there was a C-5 that was caught in the storm, and was looking to land. If you don't already know this is by far the biggest bird the Air Force owns. Sitting in my office again using a cravat as a respirator. I hear the sounds of a plane flying overhead. All I can think is who the hell is actually flying in this storm? Come to find out this C-5 had mistaken our parking pad as the runway, and what I heard last night was the C-5 hitting full throttle and climbing before he smashed into all of our birds and took out the flight line shops. Never a dull moment around here. I haven't had the chance to download the pics from last nightbut as soon as I do you can check them out on my photopage.

This night is just starting so I'm sure I'll have more to write about by morning. Maybe I'll just hide out in Air Frames so I don't miss the "retard hours".

The People of Night Crew!!

I have been sitting here trying to write this blog for the past 2 hours. Everytime I think of something in my head it sounds good, but then when I type it up on the screen it looks and sounds completely different. I fear that I may never get this posted tonight. Screw it! I'm just gonna type it as it comes to me and hope to god it turns out OK. So, as I've said before I was brought over to night crew. These people are a strange group of individuals. I have no idea whether it's the lack of sun light or just simple pleasures for simple minds. Either way it makes for an interesting night.

It all starts out at the mess tent where you get a bunch of marines betting to see who will down 20 mustard packet in 15 secs to chasing each other around the shop with dead camel spider just to hear someone scream like a little school girl. I'm not quite sure if this has to do with the lack of sunlight altering the mental status, or just plain simple pleasures for simple minds. The Air Frames guys have come to call this the "Retard Hour(s)". This takes place everynight somewhere between 0400 and 0700. We all know this state. It's the one where you've been up for anextended period of time , and your coming down off you second wind , and all you really care about is making it back to rack before you fall asleep on your feet, or like a bum on the bench outside the tool room.

You have to constantly watch whats going on around you for the fear that you may be the next mark in someones evil little prank. God help you if your the one caught sleeping. Learn to do it with one eye open.


I don't want everyone to think that all night crew does is screw around. They just know how to have a little bit of fun just so it doesn't seem like the never ending groundhog day. I caught some of the marines in action last night performing maintanence and what not.


I want to thank air frames fro giving up a body to be my persona ldriver all night. Sells is the man!!! He drove me around in the flight line cadillac for a good portion of the night.


This is where it all ends. The sun comes up and we the night crew must say goodnight. I have my own little photo page if you would like to see more of the pics I've been taking since I've gotten to Iraq. http://www.flickr.com/people/35722325@N00 Just click on the photos link and should take you directly to my photopage.

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.

Just another lovely day in the sand box until someone decided to start throwing sand around!! This had to be one of thecoolest things I've ever seen. It was a nice beautiful day, and no wind. This thing just came out of nowhere. So I know I haven't kept my word, but it's been really hard and what not to fight back the paper cuts from verifying the medical records and getting everything situated around here. It seems like we have everything completed around here and then they find some more busy work. I really haven't had to much time to get out and visit the shops or get to many pics. So as soon as I can slip away from the drudgery of medical I will definitly get some pics of us in our enviroment.