Clarification

It's come to my knowledge that there's some confusion in concerns to my thumb and its injury. So this is just a paragraph to let everyone know the exact injury. What happened was some equipment on one of the vehicles fell on the tip of my thumb, and sliced through the bone but not completely through the thumb. Some of the pad of my thumb was still attached so the doc just sutured it back together so that the bone was back in alignment. The nail completely popped off so I'm in the process of growing a new one. It takes awhile so I'm told. So my thumb wasn't completely amputated and the injury occured above the joint so my joint isn't messed up either. I hope this relieves any confusion.

Michael and I have been doing well. We've been watching movies while I steadily work through my math course. We're happy in our box. It's really nice just having each other for a year while we live in this desert.

I've been progressing through my platoon's end of tour awards. It's an interesting task. One that I like doing just because I feel like I'm contributing. I also get time to work on my math class so that when I get home I don't have to do anything but relax and spend time with Michael.

Right now it's incredibly hot. Today it reached 120 I believe. Dry or humid, 120 is just plain hot. The sandstorms are almost an everyday occurance. When you walk outside and the atmosphere is pure orange, it's kind of like being on Mars. It's especially fun when you can't see across the street the air is so pure with dust. And it's not like it's coarse sand, it's this blasted moon dust. It's very fine and incredibly annoying. The air starts to whip around and it gets in your eyes and eyelashes to the point where you try to rub your eyes due to the dust blowing in it, but wind up grinding more dust into your eyes because of the dust caked in your eyelashes. Very frustrating.

Anyway, not much to update here. It was my turn to write, so I am. I'm excited for my psychology course. It starts in about 10 days. I'll have my first math test this weekend. I really hope I do well. I'm going to spend some time doing review questions this week, and then spend a day this weekend working through the test. We'll see how it goes. So I think that's all. TTFN.

R.

Sunday

Rachel read to me this morning then watched all these charmed shows then she starting singing and doing absolute values on her new Texas Instrument graphing calculator...I looked up Medic E-6 promotion points for this month. According to my math I made cut off so that is good news, if its true...I'll have "Rache"nhiemer check it out with her new spiffy TI-83+ to be certain...

I want to get out along the drive from the coast up to the snowline picking berries all along the way...Salal, Salmon, Huckle, Black, Rasp, Blue maybe some Oregon Grape for a tart little zip.....then get up there and get some good clean snow and put it all in this Vortex hand-crank blender that I have been coveting for a while and make her the nicest fresh berry slushie...I have read mixed reviews on the crank blender..I guess I could just put them all in a gallon ziplock and squish it all together...I have some time to decide and try the bag trick first...

It has got to be 117 degrees outside right now, that is what my watch said.....I just got back from a chow run, no clouds or sand in the air so it's just Shams blasting down...sizzle.

Fishing anyone?

Michael exaggerates. I'm not up all night doing Calculus. We actually stay up late watching the latest movie we've either borrowed or bought from the local shop of pirated DVDs. Yes, my Calculus can be a very real nightmare. It's necessary, though. I need it to get to where I'm trying to go. So even though I might speak in tongues while working on my homework, telling myself the benefits of the Pythagorean Theorem, or 'a' is tangent to the x-axis, or the wonders of the coordinate plane, or the equation of a slope and which numbers are the y-intercept, x-intercept...blah blah blah...makes someone go a little crazy after awhile.

My calculator finally arrived. Just in time too. I was getting to the sections in my math class involving the calculator. So now a brand new used TI-83 Plus graphing calculator is now among our possessions. Yeehaaw.

Thumb is doing good. It's just the fine detail healing in progress right now. Michael and I are getting ready to watch "Lucky Number Slevin." I have a psychology course starting in about two weeks. My goal is to get five online classes finished while I'm in this Mesopotamian paradise.

One down...three and a half more to go...

There's this chart up on the wall that I made that tracks all of my assignments, and I "X" out ones I've completed. It makes me really happy when there's a whole bunch of "X's" up there. Very motivating.

Not much is really happening. Right now I'm a "desk manager" or "administrative assistant" or "PAC clerk" or however you want to put it. That's my light duty until I'm fully mission capable. It's alright. I don't mind paperwork, but it does get kind of boring. The schedule is very ideal, though. Michael and I are getting a lot of time together right now, which is really good for us. It's almost like having a normal, civilian work schedule...almost.

Anyway, I told Michael I'd blog today, so I am. There's really not too much going on. We're getting overrun by ants, which Michael thinks is cool. I sent several scores of them to their deaths earlier today with some toilet paper...I wonder if ants have medics?

The insects here are so scrappy, they come back from the dead sometimes. I smashed an ant one time while cleaning the floors in here, and watched it for several minutes while it straightened out its limbs and got back to normal doing its ant business. Kind of stunned me. Shouldn't suprise me, though, since the flies never die. You smash them and they're back to attacking you with newly resolved vigor.

The fish in the lake here are called Mangar...look them up. The carp here eat baby ducks, and there's videos out there to prove it. There's these spots by the lake where they accumulate and swim all over each other, and it kind of looks like a swarm of snakes...very freaky looking. I like watching their mouths separate from their faces like prehensal trunks when they're eating the bread that people throw out to them...that is, when they're not eating baby ducks. They're certainly not the beautiful fish that people get tattoos of when you see them in their natural state.

Anyway, Michael and I are going to watch our movie now. It's chow time soon. I'll probably do my vaseline treatment tonight on my hands...and Calculus. So...TTFN. Ta Ta For Now.

R.

mathiological disorder

Rachel is too busy to write here because she is doing claculus all night when she gets home. I will try to keep you up to speed on current events for us, while the mad mathmatician goes at it tooth and nail....

Hi

Rachel is "speaking in tongues" right now...the tongue is Calculus-Manius...and I am not a prescribed interpreter per"regulation" so she should really cease..BUT...I sort of like her semicoherent rants and hisses"...quadriatic...retangulate panel of land..Pathagliate theorem...", I am not even exaggerating here. It seems to do her good and that does me good.

Whew...Cancer and Bottled water?

"In the United States, plastic water bottles are regulated by the FDA as "food contact substances" and held to the same safety standards as food additives.This means, among other things, that the FDA has reviewed test data on the safety of the plastics used in water bottles -- including the potential for hazardous chemicals leaching or "migrating" from the plastic into the water -- and established that they pose no significant risk to human health. The water itself is also tested and must meet basic quality standards similar to those set by the Environmental Protection Agency for public drinking water.That is not to say that bottled water is absolutely free of contaminants, nor that chemical leaching never takes place. Studies done on water bottled in FDA-approved polyethylene terephthalate (PET), for example, did find trace amounts of potentially hazardous substances believed to have migrated from the plastic. The important point to take away, however, is that these amounts were very small and well within the safety limits set by FDA and EPA regulators. According to Dr. Rolf Halden of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, consumers face a much greater risk from potential exposure to microbial contaminants in bottled water -- germs, to you and me -- than from chemical ones."
American Cancer Society: Plastic Water Bottles http://www.cancer.org/docroot/MED/conten…

Whoa, Rachel...come up for air...

That was DEEP...I feel like a chimp now with all the Scrapple I write here and she is getting all sincere and factual...
Listen people, Rachel just gave me WAY too much credit for what has been going on here. I think this is some rare strain of Stockholm Syndrome where she is a shut-in captive and all she has had to listen to is my mess, her own semi-coherent musing and I-tunes @ .99$ a pop...

She is describing th 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, about things falling into disorder/disarray if left on there own...blah,blah..She has just sat here this last month and deliberately tuned her heart to what is most vital and prioritized herself into a focused, motivated, efficient bumblebee...MY bumblebee..my Pink Bumblebee...

TIWTMH...ha!

Actually if you all must know what the REAL meaning of Superfatting is.... Well, it is a little know fact in the military that AR 600-9 is a program where a unit is self sustaining via cannibalism. we Superfatten certain preselected members of the unit and they carry around our daily protein and fat requirements until such time as it is needed. In this way the army is cutting down on the financial burden to the taxpayer of longterm healthcare of the superfatted staff and defrays the feeding cost of the unit as a whole as well as reducing the need for freezer space and power needs. I think that the Army got the idea originally from Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal" written in 1729 about relieving Ireland's famine and financial burden. The Army has refined the whole process and it is only practiced outside of US territorial waters AND during time of war. That is what superfatting REALLY is.


A person so inclined and properly motivated can cut through cell bars with dental floss and toothpaste...T or F?

I am a thrift store enthusiaficionado...I like my khakis broken in already and my t-shirts on the vintage side. I draw the line at socks and shoes though, usually.

Name an Eskimo watercraft that ends in K besides kayak?

I can't wait to get a slick, powerful (easy to clean) blender and a nice produce section so I can make my wife healthy, bright smoothies and slushes all the time...

She is nearly spasmodic and acting sort of torettes-ish over this foreign language that she is learning called calculus. It seems to be a replacement cipher of sorts, a type of code where letters become numbers and I become the unknowing participant in the calculus disco...

I like to have a couple of phrases handy at all times in case something pops off and I need to handle it through verbal aikido (the new judo)...sort of all purpose sound bites like"... it is not what it appears to be..", "I'll be the judge of that", "so the saying goes...", "a giraffe of a different color..."look both ways before you sneeze..."...things to buy some time to think or escape while my conversation companion is trying to figure out what they missed..."it is lost in transliteration..." it is helpful if they are or sound like well worn clichés that seem deeper than they really are...kind of like the seemingly deep blue of the cobalt abyss in a port-o-potty that is in actually mere inches...that my fellow blogovinites is an awesome analogy, in my faux humble opinion.

This Is Where The Magic Happens...

adieu blogoroos