01/27/2011 1951

I swore that I would never take a cold shower here because of a lack of hot water.  I swore it!  I would never have faced a time where I would willingly put my body into an already cold environment and hose it off with cold shower that leaves a very creepy, slimy sensation no matter how hard you try to scrub it off... but that's another gripe for another blog day.  I swore that though I might rinse off, by choice, with "colder" water just to cool down, but I was NOT going to take a shower when there was no hot water to be had.  That's what I have a year's supply of baby wipes and no-water shampoo for.  Oh, for the record, the "No Rinse" brand of no-water shampoo?  Avoid.  But I digress.  I swore I would not stand in the shower with my teeth chattering, cursing Afghanistan and all its inhabitants, miserable and angry, all in an attempt not to smell vile.  Apparently, I was wrong.  I don't know what happened, really.  I had a great workout and was really excited about the shower.  For those who haven't yet gotten a description of them yet, the showers are a decent enough little set up.  I think there are about 6 or 7 stalls in each (never bothered to take an official count and I just can't picture it well enough right now), two sinks with two faucets, mirrors, a bench for our belongings, and hooks.  They request that we take "combat" showers, which means that we only use the water to wet & rinse, while keeping it off during the soaping/shaving/shampooing processes.  There are two of these shower trailers for the women, quite a bunch for the men.  The women's showers are at opposite ends of the block.  That means that one is not very convenient to get to, but that's okay.  There's not usually a need.  Sometimes it's bad enough to get to the close one.  We have to walk over the rocks, through the engine bay, over more rocks, across the road, over the bridge (it's a 4' bridge but it still counts), across more rocks (such a theme here!) then we get there.  It's not awful but I'm not a fan of the rocks.  To get to the other requires even more rocks.  You can see why I prefer the closer one, right?  Well.  I get to the shower and there are about 3 open, but two of them have shower heads that have sprung a bit of a leak.  And by that, I mean that the water doesn't come out of the shower head but instead it sprays out of the hose at various points along the route.  Pointless to try to shower there!  So I take the last open good one.  I get it.  It's just as wonderful as I think it is going to be.  

...and then. 

I noticed the next time I turned the water on that it wasn't very warm.  I did not approve of this situation at all.  Not only was it not warm, it wasn't even tepid.  I got to take a downright cold shower.  One of my roommates was in the stall next to me.  She complained bitterly about it.  I tried to keep the word "invigorating" running through my mind.  It seemed that the more I mentally said that word, the less room I had for the cursing that was trying to come out.  Do you know that there are people in this world who take cold showers on purpose?  And worse than that (aah, this is where I reground myself), there are a lot of people who never even get to take warm showers.  Ugh.  How can I complain about that so easily?  That reality is brutal sometimes.  I thought it was bad washing my face in the mornings with my cold bottle of water.  I guess it's not so bad, is it?  

At any rate, I got to have my first unwilling COLD Afghanistan, slimy-watered shower today.  Woo hoo!  :)  

And in other news, we got a call from our vehicle tech on the radio asking us to call Vector Control because there was a fox outside the station.  A fox!  I was so excited.  Granted, the little baby was pretty mangy looking, but she was a cutie pie!  She was drinking from the puddles of water around our big water bladder.  So very wonderful to me to see wildlife.  I miss it so much.  I miss animals with every ounce of my being, but even wildlife was enough to restore me.  I guess we'll be seeing her a bit.  Seems as if Vector won't do anything with them for a while.  Yay!  Okay, nobody needs to remind me of the diseases that a mangy animal can carry.  Don't rain on my parade!  

And speaking of rain, the weather shocked me today.  First day in months where we were above 65, and they said our high was going to be 71 but it felt definitely warmer than that.  It was downright comfortable in the sun!  And sweatshirts to dinner with no need for the gloves, scarf, and/or beanie.  I'm sure we'll still have a few more weeks, if not a month or two, of very chilly nights, but it felt great to have my skin bake a little bit today.  

Alright, kids.  It's bedtime for this redhead... and I'm very ready for it.  I'd been having a horrid string of sleeplessness again but I think I've shaken it for a while so I'm going to try to take full advantage of it.  Sorry there are no pics today but I didn't have time to grab my camera for the fox and I didn't think it would be a good idea to give visual aids of the showers.  At least not while occupied. 

Goodnight, all.  And to those of you on the other side, Good Morning! 

01/25/2011 1049

It needs to be established here & now that the details of my actual job really trip me out sometimes.  If you would have told me that the easiest forms of communicating in my job would ever involve yelling, I would never have believed you.  Seriously.  Sometimes I’m starting to feel like this is a fire department.  We had three days in a row where we had real, actual calls.  That lulled me into a false sense of excitement about our potential.  Then we had a few days of nothing.  That’s more common.   But today we broke our streak of nothing again!  We had a call.  And how was it dispatched?  Lemme tell you.  It was a chief screaming down the hall to the guys, then screaming to me to dispatch the engine.  Uh… to what?  So he yelled the details to me (all two of them) then I “dispatched” it and the engine was already responding because the chief had already summoned them.   It’s far from perfect, but in the big picture, it works!  See, once upon a time, I worked in a job where we regularly complained about our radio system.  About our tone alert system.  About our CAD system.  About all sorts of things.  But even when I was complaining about it and how antiquated it was, I always knew that in the big picture, we’d get the assets to where they needed to be.  That’s what we do.  All dispatch agencies everywhere manage to get it done, even if it’s not pretty during the process.  So here I sit in Afghanistan with a radio system we share with the entire camp that sometimes works when we’re 10 feet away from each other but never from one side of the camp to the other, NO CAD, NO tone alerts, a doorbell to alert the crews of a call, NO mapping system… and we still get it done.  If I go back to my little dispatch world in the states, I’m going to laugh at the blatant dissimilarities of my two jobs but the fact that no matter where we are or what we have, we’ll get it done.  

I should apologize right now for not being in touch for so long.  Things have been sort of… funny around here.  I’ve had a lot going on, been trying to get quite a bit of stuff taken care of.  Some days I really don’t feel like doing much of anything but watching a movie or cross stitching while I wait for yet another 12 hours to pass.  Horrible excuse, I know.  I’m sorry! 

 

So what’s happened since I last wrote?  Well… Christmas, New Year’s, my grandparent’s 66^th anniversary (today! And I know it’s irrelevant to my living over here but I just wanted to point that out to everybody that reads this simply because I’m so happy for them), a few calls here & there, many movies, many workouts, finished a great book…  It’s really not been terribly interesting.  And that’s good.

Christmas was nice.  It wasn’t depressing as many of my coworkers said it would be.  It was fairly late in the day, but I had dear friend that I got to have my Christmas dinner with (okay, breakfast too, with proof in the picture below, but the dinner was the Big Meal so I'm just counting that). One of the most spectacular things we get here are the Styrofoam creations by the DFAC workers.  They are awesome and I can't keep all of their talent and production to myself so here are some pictures of the ones we had waiting for us on Christmas.    

I really had a halloween moment here, expecting someone to jump out and scream at me... The legs look so real!

The wild gazeindeeraph.  Gazelle/Reindeer/Giraffe.  I guess they guide the sleigh in different parts of the world.

Do make note of the Christmas Bunny.  Not sure which story he falls into, but cute nonetheless.

Juli and the Smurftue of Liberty! 

Our Christmas decorations were quite cute.  We had dispatch looking nice, I had a few in my room, and there were a few interspersed throughout the camp.  It's always nice to see twinkling lights when walking to laundry in the wee cold hours of the night.  

My cute little tree and a few presents in my room

Andy's snowman

My tree during the day with more presents. It was tough to wait until Christmas to open these!

Stuff in a care package from very appreciated, yet unknown people.

The cards and letters in those care packages are priceless. 

What would life be without a green Christmas flamingo pen? 

The presents kept increasing.  It is so nice to feel so loved by my friends and family.

From my mom & baby bro (LOVE the calendar, Mom, thank you!!!) (love the clothes too!)

From Joe (can't wait to get to the book & cookies, and to start posting some of the Mad Lib responses we come up with!)

From the Cruz/Malloy/Workman groups.  All so much fun and so useful!

So as you can see, this was a very wonderful Christmas.  I didn't post pictures of Jill's care package because I was too busy digging into it and stuffing my face with the contents to take pictures.  I feel really bad about that, but those products-- the shampoos & conditioners, the Glee episodes & Christmas movies, the candies & microwavable treats, the Christmas decorations... everything was so wonderful.  Thank you to you & John, the kids and their contributions, and to your (our ;-)) mom.   And thank you to the rest of you who have been keeping me in your thoughts and prayers.  Thank you for the Christmas cards (all of which made it onto the wall), for the boxes of candies & other goodies, for the emails, and for the encouragement.  It is so comforting to know that I really do have the best of friends and family, even when 9000 miles away. 

I also posted something on Facebook about our weather.  The chilliness.  The frost.  The trauma of going into a port-o-potty that had ice on the walls.  It actually turned into a very amusing string of comments, but just so you can all enjoy the concept, here are some pictures for proof.  

The weather actually never got much worse than this.  Some think that we're making a turn around and it's all up from here, but we're still hitting the low 30's some nights.  We had a few days of clouds and about two whole separate "storms" complete with rain once and drizzle the second time.  The camp actually got beautiful after the night of rain.  I was very impressed with the way things looked.  Granted, we can't really say the trees looked good because we don't have a tree anywhere in our line of sight, but the rocks showed their colors... 

Alright, gentle readers.  It's about time to head to lunch.  Rumor has it, we've got chicken available today.  We have chicken available almost every day!  They do feed us well.  Our DFAC is still reportedly about the best in all of Afghanistan.  It's just up to us to try to be creative and as healthy as possible.  Some days aren't easy, others are.  The healthiest meals usually involve those when we decide to skip.  All I know is that I was hit yesterday with the most profound sadness when I realized how much I miss Rachael Ray, my pots & pans, and VARIETY!  But that's okay.  I just think of how good my formerly familiar food will be when I get to feast again. 

Love to you all,

D