With Dale gone, dinner has been a pretty unimpressive event for the last month. Not that it was impressive prior to Dale’s deployment, but at least I was forced to cook something. Last week Gabe asked what was for dinner to which his sister replied with a bit of eye rolling “probably sandwiches”. Since they can’t roll their eyes at school, I feel I must allow it at home, so that they have some level of preteen normality. That comment spurred me to action and I made a commitment to myself that I would cook decent dinners this week. I made meatloaf on Monday, chicken and rice on Tuesday, spaghetti on Wednesday, sloppy joes on Thursday, and by Friday I had run out of momentum. I watch the food network, I buy cookbooks, but I am just not someone who likes to cook. It is a chore to me. Sunday is probably the worst day to try to get me to cook. After church on Sunday, my Mom makes a big Sunday brunch of bacon and eggs and fried potatoes. Everyone gets so full that my Dad eats popcorn for dinner. I decided to be my Mom today and made bacon and eggs and biscuits after church. However, the kids wouldn’t agree to popcorn for dinner and ruined my plans. So, instead of cooking a decent dinner, I made pancakes. Eating breakfast for dinner is one of the unifying characteristics of families with a spouse deployed. Cereal or pancakes for dinner is a standard meal. Australians, however, do not accept pancakes as a meal. Pancakes are a dessert to be served with ice cream and sauce. The only time they eat pancakes for dinner is the Tuesday night before Lent starts. When my kids saw that Australians put ice cream on their pancakes, they decided that was a great idea. I, however, refused to allow it. They already spread peanut butter (Dale’s family), chocolate chips (my family), and syrup on them. Ice cream is out of the question. I have to draw the line somewhere. Josiah asked me the other day, “What would it be like to live in a family that ate healthy all the time?” As long as he’s living with me, I’m afraid he’ll never find out.
I went on another site visit recently. For this mission, I went first to Erbil, a city about 50 miles east of Mosul with a population of approximately 1,000,000. The entire city of Erbil is experiencing a construction boom. Among other projects, USACE is involved in the re-building of the Ministry of Interior government buildings, as well as the construction of the Erbil Police Academy. After spending the night at the office compound in Erbil, I went to Dahuk the next day. On the way to Dahuk, I visited a major electricy construction project in Akra. This USACE project involves the building of a power sub-station to receive electricity from Turkey and distribute it to transformers in various communities throughout the region.
After reaching Dahuk, I took a look at two sites for upcoming projects. The first is a road construction project, and the second is another well project. Gee insisted that we go see a palace after visiting the project sites. On the highest peak in the area, Saddam Hussein built a summer palace. Many families and villages were completely decimated during the construction of this palace. I don’t have any before photos. As you can see from the photo below, the palace didn’t hold up well against Allied bombings!
Part of the plan was for a cable car linking the palace at the top to a village at the foot of the mountain. This was one of three means of access to the top. The other two were the winding road and the heliport. Here’s the view from the cable car tunnel at the top.
The view is breath-taking. I wasn’t allowed to walk around on the grounds surrounding the palace because Saddam had the entire area covered with landmines. Due to the rocky terrain, it’s too dangerous to remove the landmines, so they are left in place with warning signs posted all around. Access to the site is completely restricted. But since my security escorts in Dahuk are Peshmerga, we had no problem getting in. Here’s the whole gang.
Over the last 5 years, I have been a bit removed from the effects of the increased security measures that have been implemented throughout the United States. The year after 9/11, I and the children moved to Minnesota to live with my parents while Dale was in Korea. When we moved to Minnesota, Abby wanted to know two things. 1. Do all Grandmas and Grandpas live at the end of dirt roads? 2. Why are all the people who eat at Culvers fat? So, I explained to her the fundamental principles of life in the Midwest. We then moved to Hawaii and were together as a family again. Hawaii may be a US state, but it is very different then the rest of the US and we soon learned why Hawaiians say “lucky you live Hawaii”. From there, we were off to Australia which is removed from the rest of the world by miles and miles. If we didn’t speak and pretended we were Aussies, the world looked at us fondly. At the end of Dale’s Australia assignment, we flew back to the US and the security situation becomes evident quite quickly. Watching Zeke, who is 3, get patted down because we were traveling on one way tickets was one part amusing and another part unnerving. We traveled into DC to watch the 4th of July fireworks and had to go through security checkpoints to sit on a blanket on the mall. What took me most by surprise, however, was the elaborate security procedures at the kids school. These procedures were put into place to counter the violent events that have occurred at campuses throughout the US. All the cars must line up and proceed through a school drop off zone where the teachers escort the children from the cars. When it is time for school to start, the children are brought into the building and the doors are locked. Those inside can get out quickly, but anyone attempting to enter must be buzzed in. In the afternoon, the children are brought outside and loaded into there cars at a loading zone area. You are issued a name sign which you must display. I was all impressed with myself when I actually laminated or as Abby termed it, lamented, my name sign. I just knew that if I didn’t laminate it, it would get spilled on, ripped, dropped in a mud puddle or thrown away by Josiah (who this morning threw away his school water bottle when he threw out the rubbish in his lunch box). My pride in my laminated sign only lasted a day, because I saw another mother who not only laminated her sign, but she also cut it down to size, clipped it to a child’s clothes hanger and hung it from her rear view mirror. I just can’t compete with the Martha’s of the world. I don’t know why I even try. If anyone else is picking up your children, they must be on an authorized pickup list and their ID will be checked. The driving pattern for all of this changes depending on if it’s drop off or pickup, good weather day or bad weather day. Americans love drive thrus, but I never thought I’d find a drive thru to pick up my children. I do find parts of this amusing, but the necessity for it makes me sad. Today is September 11th and I feel a tremendous grief once again for the family and friends who lost those they loved six years ago. We were living in New York during the September 11th attacks, approximately 1 1/2 hours north of NYC. I can still remember clearly the overwhelming fear I felt watching the towers collapse: fear for my husband, fear for my children, fear for myself, and fear for my country. I also recall the shock I felt when I realized that there were people in the world who hated me simply because I was an American. So, today I am reminded and I pray that “the God of peace will be with you”.
You may have noticed that I haven’t made any design changes to the blog lately. I’m actually pretty happy with my current design. The changes I’ve made recently have been transparent to the user. I’ve been focused on improving the blog’s position on Google search results. So I did some work on the keywords and description information in the header of the blog’s source code. Then I created a sitemap and indexed the site with Google. I’ve focused my efforts on queries for manry and manry family.
Today, if you Google manry family, the manrymission.com blog appears on page 3 of the results. If you Google manry the blog comes up on page 7. My goal is to make it to #1! So I need your help. You can help move manrymission.com up the Google ladder by searching for manry family or manry in Google and then clicking on the link to manrymission.com in the Google results. Google tracks the link you click in the search results to help decide a page’s search ranking.
Incidentally, if you Google Mugs Manry, manrymission.com comes up as the #1 result!
When my household goods arrive, there is a tremendous push to get things put away, flatten boxes and discard packing materials. Inevitably, at some point, I run out of energy and can not face another decision about where to put something away. So, piles to trip over sit around in various rooms. One pile that I had been unwilling to face was a giant pile of shoes on my bedroom floor. Upon seeing it, Josiah asked me, “Why do you have so many shoes?”. I told him to look carefully at the pile and rephrase the question, to which he replied, “Why does Dad have so many shoes?” As with the coffee cups, the sheer number of shoes, boots, and sandals that Dale owns can overwhelm any closet. He has 17 pairs. This is after I made him cull his shoes prior to leaving Australia. I told him Josiah’s question about his shoe pile to which he replied that the Army had issued him three pair of boots to go along with the ones he wore to Fort Benning. He also purchased new running shoes in Iraq. I know it could be much worse. My parents neighbor moved out of his house after living there for 30 years. He had 32 coats. His children tried to convince him that he did not need 32 coats, or for that matter 3 anvils. 3 anvils! I can’t imagine living with someone who keeps 3 anvils in the unlikely event that he might need them some day. This ridiculous scene next door has inspired my Mother to clean out her basement and give away all the strange gifts I gave her from my various travels. She asked my (she who throws everything out) permission and I told her to toss it all except for the saber which she can give back to me. You never know when you might need a saber. Probably as often as you need an anvil. She loaded it all up in the car for the Goodwill, but I’m sure she still feels guilty about giving away useless items that have been sitting in the basement for 17 years. Dale’s pile of shoes will be unused for the next 11 months, but they are not useless. They are a constant reminder of how desperately I want him to return safely so I can berate him in person about the number of shoes he owns. He can’t wear them now, however, for he is far far away. When I tell Zeke that Daddy is far far away, he replies “Zeke go far far away!” I wish we could, I really wish we could.
