I’ve returned home to Mosul and FOB Diamondback. My coffee cup really missed me while I was gone. I ended up spending one and a half weeks in Tikrit at COB Speicher (pronounced Spiker). Part of the reality of deployed life is that you learn to tune things out. Mugs will tell you that I already have an innate ability to ignore sounds that don’t interest me. I grew up in a house where the TV was on 24 hours a day, so I learned to block out noise without much thought. It helps here in Iraq to ignore the various booms and bangs that are a routine part of our daily lives.
Anyway, while I was still in Tikrit last week, I was sitting in the conference room of the GRN headquarters downloading my email. For some reason, I noticed a peculiar noise coming from outside. After a couple of minutes I realized it was the sound of a lawnmower. Inside the USACE GRN compound in COB Speicher, there are a couple plots of grass. Here’s a shot of the contractor mowing the grass in the desert!
I am a bad fan of the Chicago Bears or I am a fan of the bad Chicago Bears. Pick either statement, they both apply. However, my dear husband is an obnoxious fan of the Dallas Cowboys or a fan of the obnoxious Dallas Cowboys. Both of those statements apply as well. For all you Aussies who understand only footy (Rugby or Aussie Rules), I am talking about gridiron football. Why I let a football game and football team matter to me so much, I can not explain. When the game is on I am transformed into a mad yelling nutcase complete with chants, boos, jumping up and down, and yelling obnoxiousness. Zeke decided that this was a fun game that Mommy was playing and he would join in: “Watch da foobal Mommy?” Soon he was chanting “Defense…Defense”, jumping up and down and telling me, “Give me high five, Mommy!” When the game started to look dire, I ran upstairs to get a rally cap. A rally cap can be any hat worn inside out or backwards or both. Wearing this on your head helps your team to come back when behind in the game. I am a great believer in the rally cap, but my husband is not. Our current home had been sitting on the market for quite awhile with no action. When we put in an offer to buy the house, I had a peace that this was the house for us and that everything was going to go smoothly. Well, someone was lying in the weeds and put in an offer soon after ours. Both offers were being presented to the seller at the same time and our realtor was going to the negotiations on our behalf. We prayed and called my family to pray. The realtor called and it didn’t sound good. Dale and I were watching a baseball game and it was in the bottom of the 12th, 2 outs, with a runner on second. The tv cameras scanned the crowd and I saw a guy with a rally cap on. “That’s what we need to put us over the top,” I told Dale and stuck a rally cap on my head. 20 minutes later, the realtor called to say we got the house. If that didn’t get him to believe in the rally cap, I didn’t know what would. I was convinced he would accept the rally cap’s validity, but he didn’t. He likes dominating winning teams, he doesn’t want the game to be close. I, however, like to think that all is lost and be miraculously delivered from misery. The change in emotion is fantastic. However, my rally cap did not work during the Bears/Cowboys game partly because my eldest son was sitting across from me with Cowboys gear reminding me that I had failed to win him to my side and mostly because the Bears quarterback once again played awful. My gloating, obnoxious Cowboy fan husband called me after the game. The one time, so far, I was glad he was thousands of miles away and he has to call me to rub it in. But, today, good news: our quarterback is benched and my rally cap is back on my head. I’ll see you in the playoffs where payback will be sweet!
Over the past week or so, I’ve spent my free time working on a redesign of the blog. Free time for me is basically from 2000 to 2200 each night. The time I spend working on manrymission.com is a means of relaxation. My other outlet is running. I usually go for a run at about 1900, take a shower afterwards, and then watch some TV, read a book, or work on the blog. All of this week has been devoted to the blog redesign.
One of my favorite parts of this design is the cubic globe in the header. To create this, I downloaded some satellite imagery from NASA’s Visible Earth project. I then used GIMP to tile the imagery into 6 tiles. Finally, I used GIMP to create a cube and paste the appropriate image tiles onto the cube faces.
