sunny day

I'm sitting here at the computer eating strawberries and enjoying the weather- it's not too hot and not too cold with a mild breeze blowing. The pollen count is high (playing hell with my allergies) but the day couldn't be prettier if it tried.

I've been having trouble sleeping for whatever reason(s); last night I didn't fall asleep till 1AM but I slept like a rock- I woke up just before 10AM. I lay in bed listening to the birds (I throw seed out for them everyday; I enjoy watching them and the squirrels). After a brief period of doing nothing, I slipped on my biking clothes and went mountain biking.

The drive to the state park was nice, very little traffic, and I drove with the window down- my new truck rides beautifully. After putting some air in one of my bicycle tires, I rode for about five miles (I need to readjust the computer on the bike). Nothing hard and I didn't push it, I just enjoyed the ride. I still broke a decent sweat which felt good too.

Back home I finished off last nights leftover piece of steak by putting it between two slices of homemade bread (well I made it in the bread machine anyways). Two bottles of water and a shower later and I'm feeling great.

There's a ton of things I need to be doing, but right now sitting here on the deck seems like the most important. Living in the now I guess...

Sean and Christie are coming in this weekend so that should be fun. They'll be bringing my CaphalonOne cookware too- yeah! I have to admit, I spoil myself at times. I enjoy cooking and I've found that having decent cookware and utensils makes that more enjoyable. What the heck, the stuff should last my lifetime with proper care.

As for school, well my microbiology class has decided to go see the department head about our professor. We're tired of the bad attitude and pompous air- dude; you teach at a two year technical school, get over yourself. Your job is not to weed students out, but rather to teach them the key concepts they need to proceed with their academic careers. Everything else is going pretty well school-wise.

Well I should go do some studying…….

Slack, slack slack...

yep, that's me! Once again I had forgotten my password for this site so I had to reset it again.

Again in no particular order; school stinks- I should have taken a lighter load and gotten back into the swing of things. I'm struggling and not having any fun. I can do better I know but I just can't seem to get motivated for some reason. Yes, I know exactly how inportant it is, but that doesn't help.

The Jeep is still waiting on the headers to come in- talk about a long back order.

I bought another Toyota Tacoma (I used to have one before some punk kid ran into it and totalled it). It's a black 2005 access cab with everything- SR5, TRD, 4WD, V6, 6 speed, etc. It's very nice but I can tell it's going to be very hot in the summer. Oh well, it looks really cool. I had the camper shell put on it the other day now I just need to get a roof rack on it to carry the kayaks and I'll be set to go paddle.

Speaking of paddling, the weather had been nice for a while and suddenly decided to get cold again now that it's the first of Spring. When it warms a bit I plan to wet a paddle so to speak; I need to get some easy paddling time in before hitting any bigger water. That shouldn't be hard as I moved near a small lake (more on that later). The wife of my late friend gave me his whitewater kayak so I paln to try that agin too- I did some whitewater when I was in college, but haven't done any since.

I moved into the apartment on the back of a friend's house- again. Yep, I lived here before buying the house up on the lake and now I'm back- weird. There is a pond across the street and a small lake just up the road (upstream and connected to the pond by a spillway). I will be able to paddle up (literally maybe two minutes of paddling) and then pull my boat into the bigger lake. It's still barely qualifies as a lake in my book- more of a medium large pond. Still, it will let do some paddling and work on my roll.

Nothing new on the romance front- any single women who want to adopt a guy going back through school?

Hmm, that's about the excitement for now.

So long Iraq..........

Damn, it's been so long since I've signed in I couldn't remember my password.

Well like the title says I’ve left Iraq. It was getting time to move on and try something different plus I needed to get registered for classes anyways. I’m going to miss the paycheck and some of the people but overall I’m glad to be back. I owe Jean a huge thanks too for getting me back in such a timely manner- thanks!

I suppose I ought to write up a “Things I learned while I was in Iraq” piece and maybe I will later. I suppose I could also speak freely about the company now that I’m no longer employed with them but what would be the point? I knew it was going to be a learning experience going into the job and it was. I expected things to be much worse than they were so honestly I can’t complain too much. It still amazes me how many folks are showing up and whining though- for all of those arriving now and complaining, you are a bunch of wimps! Get over it or go home.

So anyways, in the short time I’ve been back I’ve visited some friends, registered for classes, gotten the VW camper back, started looking for a place to stay, drank too many frappachino drinks, finished Call of Duty and the expansion pack, celebrated Thanksgiving with my family, dropped Chris’ Jeep off to get the power steering fixed and basically accomplished little else of note. I need to complete the on-line financial aid form this week for school.

Hmm, what else? Well in no particular order: Dremel Tools has excellent customer service! I sent in a broken Dremel Tool and since it was less than five years old they fixed it and had it back to me in about a week for free and even threw in a grinding stone attachment. That’s service! I didn’t get that kind of service on my expensive 18V Dewalt drill.

The Westy is running extremely well although it’s sidelined at the moment awaiting a new fuel filler gasket. Yes, the old one decided to start leaking so now it leaks fuel out the right rear fender well, particularly when making a left hand turn (the fuel sloshes into the filler pipe and out the cracks). I need to finish the headliner and install the overhead light as well as the mud flaps. I don’t see me restoring another vehicle any time soon. It’s a never-ending process where you can just keep dumping money into it.

I still need to find a place to live and a place to store my junk. Yep, my stuff is still stored on my old neighbor’s property until I can figure out where to put it. I’m thinking I ought to just get rid of most of it too. Kudos to my neighbors though, they just don’t make folks like that anymore- they are truly nice people.

I went and saw the Trans-Siberian Orchestra the other day. Wow! While they might not be exactly my type of music they do put on a hell of a show. The technical side of the show was extremely good and the musicians were all very tight with each other. It was an interesting show and I recommend it to anyone who can catch them- they are worth seeing. Eighties hair rock and Christmas music- who’d have thought of that?

Not much else than I can think of off the top of my head. Anyone with questions, feel free to ask them.

Back in Tikrit

Well I figured I should update the old blog. I made it back to Tikrit the other day after several weeks in Kirkuk. I won’t go into what happened, but I will say it was eventful. It’s amazing how quickly things can escalate into a bigger issue, especially when the higher ups drop the ball and start pointing fingers. My supervisor and medical advisor did an outstanding job of showing where the error occurred and covering my butt and I owe them a big thanks for it.

I met some really nice folks up there including the EMEDs staff at the Air Force hospital. They were very professional, helpful and friendly- I tribute to all of the folks who serve. A special shout goes out to the lab tech- not many folks could have convinced me to take some dance lessons. Yes, you heard me right; I took some Latin dance classes in preparation for a Latin dance night at the on-base club. Unfortunately I had to catch a flight out on the night of the dance and ended up missing it. Such is life in Iraq.

Kirkuk is a city with a mixed ethnic heritage- some folks there like us, some don’t. The ones who didn’t were a little rowdy at times and we had bunker call several times during my stay there. It started on the second day I was there when I had a rocket go overhead (luckily it was a dud) and involved several more including one that exploded at the wire while I was standing on the flight line waiting to climb into a Blackhawk. It was neat looking explosion though.

Flying back was awesome as we flew nap of the earth between sand dunes and past oil rigs. We skirted towns but flew over some residences and over herder’s camps with campfires burning. The gunners’ tracked potential targets on the ground with their M-60s (medium machine guns) that I couldn’t see without the benefit of night vision goggles. The flight was thankfully uneventful as was the convoy back to my base.

With Ramadan upon us are we having to take extra precautions. The fanatics have stepped up their campaign of terror by blowing up more local citizens. As evil as it sounds, I sometimes feel that people who would blow up innocent women and children should be executed and their dead bodies fed to hogs. They deserve no better than that and maybe, by making an example of them, others would think twice before doing something so heinous. Sort of like the old practice of putting heads on stakes outside of the old cities to deter criminals.

I suppose I’m just tired and ready to head back to the States, it won’t be too much longer now…………………….

Kurkuk

The medic for this site is going on R&R so I got sent up here to fill in. My clinic is slower and the camp is smaller so a new medic is handling mine while I'm here. The trip up was pretty uneventful except for the Russian flight crew having to change a tire on the charter plane. Seems they had one blow out when it landed in Tikrit. We stood on the runway watching- I swear I wouldn't have been surprised if one of them had grabbed one of the others by the nose and started leading him around while yelling "Whoop, whoop, whoop" and smacking his head like the Three Stooges.

They got it changed though and we flew to BIAP and then traveled to Victory. I was really surprised by how smoothly it went; my previous experiences there had been awful as it had been crowded as hell. The last time was of course in July when the airport had been shut down by the security company going on strike. The Baghdad airport looked cleaner this time and was slightly more efficient. It could really use some updating though- the color schemes and the phone booths that look like helmets out of the movie Space Balls are pretty goofy.

Of course nothing says welcome to a new location like incoming fire and last night was no exception. I collected an hour’s worth of “Bunker bucks” (pay for sitting in a bunker after work hours) as they call it after a rocket exploded; seems there were at least two but the second didn’t explode. The EOD guys found it this morning and blew it in place. I really wish the bad guys would quit this crap.

So, in other Iraq news, I met a really nice Major here who is almost infectious with his enthusiasm working with the locals. He has an Iraqi counterpart who is apparently well liked locally and together they go about the surrounding towns and villages doing good deeds such as small scale civil engineering projects, medical checkups, handing out food and other gifts, etc. He believes it is having a positive effect as they get more tips on the bad guys and more locals seem to be interested in talking to them about how to open businesses including getting loans. With the national unemployment running over 30% putting people back to work is a prime goal here. They are also working to get the religious leaders to sit down and talk to each other.

I should be back at my site in a couple of weeks. A few weeks more and I am out of here! I’m still waiting to hear back from the admissions counselor at the school I’m trying to get into but hopefully that will go well.

Having your cake...

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. It’s an old expression but one that has shown to be timeless.

The moonbats are screaming for the president's head (again); the reason this time is a slow response to the hurricane victims plight. Of course they are also screaming about the president bringing in the military, abuse of power, how this presidency has taken away more of our rights under the Homeland Security Act, etc.

Now I’m not going to sit here and say I think that the government needs to be given more power- I certainly don’t, but which is it folks? Do you want the government to be able to provide you with more services or don’t you? As the people continue to demand more from the government they are going to have to give up more to the government.

Personally I prefer my freedoms and as such believe that I and I alone am responsible for myself. That doesn’t mean I don’t need other people, just that I accept the responsibility to take care of myself without expecting others to do it for me.

Think about it folks, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

The man-made disaster in New Orleans

I thought this was worth reading (I wish I was smart enough to have written it myself but alas I'm not):

TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
By Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades.
Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed; they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion.
They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in
America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on. "The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened
Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

"'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets, she said. They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will."

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News
Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America.
"The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city
corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005