Hi, my name is Rick.

Abstract, Rick

I found this shot buried in the depths of my external hard drive.  I think it’s pretty funny.  Many of you may have seen the fabled Army-Navy football game.  Some of you may have even attended said game.  Before the game, all the Army Cadets and Navy Midshipmen march onto the field.  Separately of course.  Army wouldn’t want to soil their impeccable marching abilities with the vile lack of marching abilities annually demonstrated by Navy.  In standard Army fashion, however, before every Army-Navy game, the West Point cadets are forced to show up ridiculously early.  Like, 4 to 5 hours before the march-on and therefore 5 to 6 hours before the game.  Which, my mathematically challenged readers, is generally 6 or 7 AM.  Not too early, but when you consider that everyone there that early is recovering from a night replete with compensatory drinking and partying, the pain is damn near palpable.  So what happens?  Exhausted and hung-over cadets, waiting in a parking lot hours earlier than necessary, curl up in snake-pit like balls of grey to catch up on much needed sleep before marching into a stadium to freeze and watch their alma mater get destroyed by Navy.

There’s always next year.

Philadelphia, PA, Point & Shoot

Firstliest, Eva came to see me at FOB Hunter on Saturday and was here until about 2 hours ago when I saw her off in a Black Hawk back to Tallil Air Base.  It was great to see her again.  We’ve been beyond lucky with the frequency with which we’ve been able to see each other thus far.  Granted this luck and frequency is the purest form of relativity imaginable, but we’re lucky just the same.

This is a shot of the Chicago skyline, looking more or less northwest from the Shedd Aquarium.  The effect you see is texturizing.  I superimposed a picture of a cracking and chipping wall I found in Seoul, Korea over the shot of the Chicago skyline.  I think it looks cool.  If you don’t, click here until the vindicating link pops up.  Oh, and that tall building on the left is the Sears Tower.  I dare you to tell me otherwise.

Chicago, IL

Seeing clouds was, as hard as it may be for you all to believe, actually quite a novelty.  Yesterday was the first day I’d seen a single cloud since I landed in Kuwait on April 23rd.

Something else I would be remiss were I not to mention, is how nice the night sky is here.  I’ve never seen so many stars.  You can see the milky way every night.  It’s really cool.  Then you look back down and realize you’re surrounded by a 360 degree horizon of 12 foot high cement barriers, you’re wearing a uniform and you’re working on Sunday night, and the clear sky novelty dissipates like the inexplicable 1980′s appeal of Corey Feldman.

The shot today is of the silhouette of our 2-13 CAV Squadron guidon as it rests silently during a lull in what is a generally relentless hot wind.  I spoke with an Iraqi that works on the FOB here and he said he thinks it will start cooling down in about 7 days.  We’ll see.  I don’t see how it could get much hotter.  It has somehow also gotten mysteriously humid so I’ve been sweating like Eliot Spitzer at dinner with his in-laws.

I apologize for the sporadic nature of my recent posts.  Things here have been busy and, to put it bluntly, the internet connection has sucked.  The guy I spoke to about the weather happens to run the internet service here, and had, until yesterday, employed the gentleman named Sallah whom I wrote about not long ago.  Turns out Sallah no longer works here.  We asked the aforementioned weather man where Sallah went.  He told us “Sallah went on vacation.  A long vacation.”  I don’t think we’ll see Sallah anymore.

Iraq

Scroll down a bit and look at the photo of the sign posted below so the rest of this makes sense…  So, what did I find strange about the sign?  Take a look at the face in the top right corner of the sign.  That, my friends, is Muqtada al Sadr.  If you scroll down to the 2006 section of that link (or click here) you’ll read about the al Sadr Mahdi army’s capture of Amarah.  Al Amarah is the nearest large city to where I am right now.  That probably explains the sign.  Either way, I’m not a big fan of seeing signs lauding, in any way, Mr. Muqtada.  He’s mean.  And his beard looks gross.

The photo today is an abstract shot from inside the loop in downtown Chicago.  Click the photo itself to check out my Flickr Photostream if you haven’t checked it out in a while.  It’s pretty sweet.  Trust me.

Abstract, Chicago, IL, Iraq

I have not fallen off, oh my little droogies.  Far from it.  My internet has been finnicky the last few days.  The internet provider out here is a sketchy Iraqi guy named Sallah who I’m pretty sure would sell me to the Jaysh al Mahdi for a high-five and a happy meal.

Speaking of the Jaysh al Mahdi!  This is a picture of a sign I took on my drive from my last FOB to my current FOB.  Do you notice something peculiar about the sign?  I’ll point out what I found strange in my next post.

Iraq

The saga continues.
“Where the hell is my scorpion?”  We’d left him, again, on the shelves near my roommates bed.  He was dead, and, as such, unlikely to escape.  Or so we thought.  We started combing the room for the resurrected scorpion.

“What the hell is that?”  Said my roommate–the one who’d been stung.  “What?”  I asked, making my way over to the shelves on his side of the room at which he was looking quizzically.  “This,” he said, pointing to some little black dots on the top of his shelves, “these little black things right here.”  We looked at them and thought for a bit.

We have mouse traps set up all over our room.  One day a few weeks ago while my roommate and I were studying up on our Army doctrine and counter-insurgency techniques, (read: playing Gears of War 2), a mouse zipped across the floor, apparently realized he was out in the open and in the light, spun like a furry top and raced back into the hidden darkness under a bed.  It took this little event recurring exactly once for us to realize the bugger would likely complete the trifecta, and we set up the aforementioned traps.  Since then we’ve caught the little bugger.  Don’t worry PETA, he went quick.  I doubt he felt much and, in all likelihood, even enjoyed a final smidgen of peanut butter before the spring powered metal rod catapulted down on his rodent spine, snapping his mousy neck and leaving him lifelessly pinned to a dull and miniature mouse guillotine.  A few days later the scorpion struck with a fury.  Was it reciprocity?  Perhaps vengeance?  We can only speculate.

“What the hell is that?”  We were staring at the tiny black sprinkles.  Finally, “I know what that is dude,” said my roommate.  “It’s mouse $#!T.”  Sure enough.  Rodent excrement.  And it was on the shelf leading to what had been the final resting place of the regaled scorpion of terror and no mercy.  But said dead scorpion was now gone.  We believe the mouse that defecated on my roommates shelves absconded with the corpse as a snack.  Perhaps in the land of mice, dead scorpion is a delicacy.  Perhaps the mouse gave the scorpion mouth-to-mouth and miraculously resuscitated him.  This is all speculation.  What we do know is that the scorpion is gone.  Again.

A little slice of heaven.
On Wednesday last week I flew to Tallil Air Base where Eva lives.  I was there from Wednesday afternoon through Friday.  I got there on a Blackhawk and the total travel time was four and a half hours.  In 130 degrees.  In all my gear.  And gloves.  It was worth it though.  The picture today is of Eva and me on Thursday night, the night before I flew back to FOB Hunter.  If you don’t know where FOB Hunter is, it’s about 20 km or so south of Al Amarah.  The next time I’m supposed to see her is in Novemeber for R&R, but who knows… maybe I’ll luck out again.  Rest assured that if I do, you’ll read about it here.

Eva, Iraq, Rick

Let me explain.  I must first and foremost assure you that I did not make this up.  I couldn’t make this up; it’s far too horrific.

Last night, whilst I lay peacefully in my bed, slowly falling asleep after a day wrought with cabin fever inducing trivialities and boredom, my roommate suddenly sprung to life.  I in my restful state, however, did not see him leap out of bed and dash to the front of the room.  It had been dark when I set down my book (“In Cold Blood” by Capote), turned off my reading lamp and closed my eyes.  Suddenly the overhead light was on again; my roommate was clasping his hand in pain.  “Dude, dude, I got bitten,” he said.  I was groggy, exhausted, half asleep.  I didn’t understand what was going on.  “What?” I asked him, utterly confused.  “What happened?”  He came around the curtain which separates our sleeping areas and looked at me, his hands clasped and his eyes wild, “It bit me man.”  I blinked against the light, bewildered by the situation, my confusion compounded by his answer.  I asked him what bit him.  “I don’t know,” he answered, “I was lying in bed watching a movie and I saw something kind of like moving on my poncho liner; I had it pulled up to my chin.  I kind of reached down without looking and felt something that felt like twigs.  It was about as big as my hand, I mean, I could fit it in my hand and hold it.  And then it bit me so I threw off my poncho liner and got up.”  He started jerkily removing small items from his bed: his towel hanging on a bed post, his pillow, his poncho liner.  As he removed the items, he threw them on the floor, jostling them with his foot as he did so, searching for the culprit.  I sat up, now wide awake and somewhat alarmed.  “Wait; what bit you?”  “I don’t know man,” he replied as he continued reservedly sifting through his stuff, “I think it was a camel spider.”  This little tidbit of speculation made me feel sick.  I hate camel spiders.  Some of you may remember a posting not too long ago wherein I recounted my experience of having a camel spider hurriedly scaling my shorts en route to my neck so he could chomp my jugular.  I’ve since seen them in the gym and outside at night, lurking in the dark.  To put it mildly: I don’t like camel spiders.  That being said, the idea of a camel spider biting my roommate and escaping into the recesses of our camel-spider-hiding-spot packed room made me, shall we say, a little edgy.  I got out of bed, (it was 2AM mind you), and started helping him search for the hell spawn; I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until the blood-thirsty little cuss was found anyway.  It wasn’t on his pillow.  It wasn’t on his towel.  He picked up his poncho liner, draped it over a chair, and started peeling back the folds.  Eventually he pulled up a fold exposing the beast.  But it wasn’t a camel spider.  It was a scorpion.  3 or 4 inches in length, off-white in color with its stinger tail curled up in waiting.  We scooped up the scorpion in a water bottle with the top cut off, and my roommate went to see the medics with the scorpion in tow should the sting prove to be poisonous.

The sting wasn’t poisonous and he’s fine.  But it doesn’t end there.

He came back from the medics an hour or so later; I was still awake, thinking about scorpions and how many scorpions were inevitably in my bed at that very moment.  He came in the room still holding the water-bottle prison we’d fashioned for his assailant.  He set it down on a shelf.  He vowed to keep it as a pet.  The next morning, (that is today, and was in fact 2 or so hours ago as I write this), my other roommate decided to take the scorpion outside to take a picture of it for a PowerPoint slide in a meeting we have tonight.  He got the shot, brought the bottle back into our room, and set it on a different table.  A table that happened to be in the direct blow-path of a fan.  A table that touched the foot of my bed.  He left the room and went back to the office.  While he was gone, the fan blew over the water bottle prison.  The scorpion escaped.  I was the first one back in the room after the escape; I walked in and saw the bottle knocked over, devoid of a scorpion.  I solicited help from my roommate who’d been stung.  We grabbed a black light which one of our neighbors had, turned off the overhead, and searched every nook and cranny of our room.  Eventually we found the little demon half dead under a book case.  We decided to make him all dead.  He’d made his way back to my roommate’s side; I think he was on his way back to have another go.

The photo today is, predictably, of the little bugger that did the stinging.  My roommate is holding it in the hand which was stung.  Walk a mile my friends: imagine finding this guy, very much alive, in your bed.  Then imagine it stinging you.  Then imagine catching it and feeling relieved, only to have it escape and lurk, once again, somewhere in your bedroom.  Horrific.

Iraq

“In the wintertime, it is the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty; the cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs?”                  – Sarah Palin

Yikes.  She really bugs me.  What, pray tell, was McCain thinking?  Honestly, if it wasn’t for her we might not be facing a nationalized car industry which should have been allowed to fail, and a pending, seemingly imminent poorly planned and forced nationalized health care system which will also fail.  Or it will just trudge along ineffectually for decades, mired in bureaucracy and stagnated by an incomprehensible national deficit which, in all honesty, can’t afford the trillion plus dollars that nationalized health care will cost.  Nationalized health care.  Darwin is rolling over in his grave.

This was the view from Eva’s apartment in Seoul, looking west.  I’d say that in less than 5 years, this view will be gone and in its place will be gigantic apartment buildings much like the one from which I snapped this photo.

HDR, Seoul, Korea