Today was really cold, I don’t think it broke 30 even during the day. Last night was a bit rough, at around 7pm the lights flickered a few times and the pulses got more frequent and closer together over the next hour, followed finally by a total power outage. Luckily it was out less that 2 hours, and as it was the room was starting to get a bit cold. It would have been very unpleasant if it hadn’t come back. The safehouses don’t have any insulation and are just concrete walls, so the temperature drops pretty quick.
The up side to it being really cold is I’m not as worried about replacing my blister inducing boots. My tried and true Nike shoes handle ice just fine and are more than warm enough for the little bit of time I’m outside. They just get soaked when tromping through the slush. Now as long as I can stay upright on the solid sheet of ice that covers 75% of the base and the way to the safehouse I’ll be fine. I’ve watched several people take some hard spills (amazingly not Tera… yet), and nearly taken a couple myself. It’s good training for doing a contract down in Antarctica that I keep thinking about but probably will never end up doing. Raytheon and now ITT have or had contracts down there, who knows, maybe it’s an omen and I should think about checking it out one day.
I spent tonight sorting out finances. I finally rolled over all my IRA’s from Van Kampen who’s website really sucks, and seems to charge an arm and a leg for everything to Vanguard, who has a very functional website and seems to be highly rated. The money over here is defiantly noticeable and I’ve finally started investing it a bit with Vanguard. MaPS still has yet to return an E-mail for well over a week (3-4+ weeks if you count their contact us web form). You’d think they’d treat a customer who’s been with them for over 2 decades now a little bit better. Well, if that’s how they are gonna show their loyalty to me, I’m seriously thinking about taking my loyalty and $$$ elsewhere.
We’ve finally got a good Internet connection, I just need to hammer out a few more bugs in the WiFi link I’ve setup across the block or so to Casino House. I’ll probably start fiddling with VOIP here soon. For those that don’t know what Voice over IP is, basically I’ll be able to send and receive phone calls over the internet and finally get a phone I’d actually use for other than local calls. Vonage & Skype are the most recognized names, although not necessarily the best service. For the most part you can make free person to person calls anywhere in the world if your both using the same VOIP provider, and cheap long distance elsewhere. Something to think about if you have a broadband connection.
Speaking of phones, my new HTC TyTN cell phone showed up Christmas morning. It’s a “smartphone” and has a PDA built in, really spiffy. Among it’s cool features is not needing to be plugged in to work, unlike certain parantel units with a cell phone and deader than a doornail battery dating back to about the dawn of time. While on the topic of ancient hardware, I just realized my phone has a CPU that’s 200-400 times faster, has 100x the memory, 100x the storage space which runs infinitely faster (floppy disk compared to integrated flash, not even counting the micro SD slot I’ll be filling) of my first computer an Apple 2gs. All that while using probably 10% of the power. Ain’t progress grand, also shows why in the IT industry if your not constantly learning, your becoming as obsolete.
Well, I’ve rambled on enough for one night. I’m sure certain relative types will complain it’s not nearly enough, but I’m done for now.
Now ordinarily this wouldn’t be too much or a problem, but today is my day off, and I’m here in the room. Apparently when Tera went to work this morning, she decided to lock the door behind her. That too shouldn’t have been a problem, except for the fact I was still in the room, and my key for some reason only works on the outside lock on the door, and not the inside. So here I sit, locked in my own room waiting for Tera to come un-lock the dam door, so I can go pee.
Class is going good… really good in fact. This PKI stuff should be a pretty boring stuff, but our instructor is probably one of the best I’ve ever had. He’s normally a project manager for some DoD PKI stuff and REALLY knows the stuff. There’s a pile of PowerPoint slides he only occasionally glances at every 10-20 slides or so, everything else is from memory, which has a lot more relevant content than the slides. It’s defiantly been a positive learning experience.
I had breakfast with Heather and John thismorning.
Lastnight I finally decided to take the 11:30pm bus to Arifjan from Ali Al Salem to try and catch John in the morning before he got taken to Ali Al Salem at 8am (instead of just crashing at Ali for the night and trying to catch him there). Rather unsuprisingly he was quite supprised to see me in the morning. I called Heather and we went to eat at the Zone 6 DFAC and hung out for a little under an hour.
John should be headed to Kabul, which hopefully means Camp Eggers instead of Phoenix, but nobody was sure.
I only got a little sleep, despite having a record setting wait free trip, mostly because I scrambled around to meet up with John. It was worth it though, and besides meeting up with JT, I really didn’t have anything to do today other than scope out where class is tomorow.
When we got to Bagram we ended up in the middle of a couple different pitch battles between some Americans and locals. The locals outnumbered the solders, but were driven back through sheer force of will. Our truck got hit a couple of times and and I saw one soldier get hit in the head. It was a mean slush ball, and I’m sure he was digging snow out of his shirt for a while. It seems no matter where you go, snow just has a certain affect on people that reduces their age to the low teens. I almost thought about joining, but didn’t want to be wet on a cold airplane.
I made it out of Bagram by the late afternoon amazingly, and was in Kuwait by early evening.
Well, I’ve finally gotten around to up uploading a couple of batches of photos to my photo gallery. Mostly of Kuwait, some of Kabul.
Speaking of Kuwait, Tera is headed there for a training class in a week or so, and I might be going in a couple of days, and again in January. We’ll have to see how all that turns out, going to be a lot of traveling, but the training and certifications will be nice.
It started snowing about 2 days ago and really hasn’t stopped. Unfortunately it’s hovering right around 32 degrees, so it keeps starting to melt off and turning into a slushy mess, and then sticking again. I’m hoping it drops a couple of degrees and everything finally freezes up. It may be a bit slicker, but at least it won’t be so wet and miserable. The fact every square inch of Camp Eggers is paved doesn’t help, it makes for very poor drainage and lots of puddles, soon to be ice sheets.
We did a whole lot of nothing for Tera’s birthday yesterday, especially given that we shifted our days off this week for it. I got her a glass horse & kitty socks, my mom got her a dream catcher necklace, I think the Post Office is hiding anything else that may be in route.
We have a couple of boxes of Christmas stuff waiting to be opened, unless explicitly labeled to be opened early (unlike some people, who open Christmas packages in November). All our boxes have finally been shipped off. Nothing’s been wrapped due to lack of wrapping paper, and shortage of time.
Working 12 hour days wears you out a bit, but then again, there’s not a lot to do on your days off or anything. Burnout of both the short term and long-term variety is not a question of if but when. I’m starting to think about vacation here in a couple months, although I’m sure exactly where or when we’ll be taking it. We don’t get holidays, but get vacation in lieu of holidays so we can end up taking them at a more convenient time in a better location. We should be able to easily finish out this year before burnout sets in.
No clue what we’ll do at the end of this contract, but were not yet burned out and haven’t ruled out another year or anything. Heather and Tom really like Kuwait and have been trying to convince us to head that way next year. Not quite as good of money there, but much better living conditions, and a country you can actually go do stuff in. Supposedly their kitty is enroute as soon as Tony on Kwaj can part with her, so that would bode well for us heading to Kuwait and Spooky.