We celebrated Christmas here with a small pizza party on Christmas Eve. During the party, we watched A Christmas Story, the movie about a young boy who dreams about getting a BB gun for Christmas. We also had a white elephant gift exchange. I ended up stealing a nice wood serving tray with an assortment of dried fruit from the person sitting next to me. That person ended up getting the gift that I wrapped, two cans of macadamia nuts fresh from Hawaii. I ended up sharing all of the dried fruit with everyone at the party and the serving try disappeared so someone got some use out if it.
On Christmas morning, we all got together for coffee and donuts and watched Elf with Will Ferrell. This is the first Christmas in an awful long time where I was not celebrating with family. I have to admit, it was kind of lonely here, knowing that everyone else was home with family members having a good time. Nevertheless, I kept a stiff upper lip and soldiered through the holiday knowing that my being here allowed many of my colleagues to be home with their kids. And, after all, it is the children who help bring the magic to this holiday.
It is getting pretty cold around here. Not New England cold but cold for here. It is in the high 20s overnight and creeps into the 40s, maybe 50 degrees during the mid-afternoon. We’ve had a lot of fog and dust that has reduced visibility as well.
I’ve started back up with my running again. I got busted by the base MPs for running with earphones in, listening to music while running around the airfield. For safety reasons, folks are not allowed to run on the roads here with headphones on. Anyway, one of our MPs “pulled me over” while I was rounding the east end of the airstrip and made me take off my earphones. I don’t mind running without them, I just prefer to listen to music or podcasts while running. I guess I’ll go without from now on or keep to the treadmill if I want to listen to something specific. So, this week, I ran around the airfield once (7.8 miles) and went out for two - 30 minute runs as well.
With so many folks home on R&R this week, it has been pretty quiet on the work front. The only real excitement came today, Friday, my “down day.” As with most Fridays, something pops up that causes me to be at work, besides, what else is there for me to do? This morning, someone used the men’s room in my office building. Apparently, the water line to the sink was frozen. Well, this person left the faucets in the sink wide open when he departed. A couple of hours later, our cleaning staff noticed that the large conference room on the ground floor of our building was covered with water! Sure enough, the frozen pipes eventually thawed out and with the faucets wide open, water flooded the entire first floor of the building which includes a conference room, bathrooms, and a server/electronics room. Three of us spent a couple of hours, armed with squeegees and mops, cleaning up the water and recovering wet equipment. I think we escaped this devastating end-of-year flood without much damage.
We are all looking forward to New Year’s Eve around here. They tell me that in the city of Kandahar, they celebrate like they do in the Big Apple except they drop a pomegranate instead of an apple. Pomegranates are the big money crop here (after poppies). Someone else also said that the Taliban were planning a shadow celebration, they’ll be dropping a human head. Just kidding!
I guess it’s time to go change out of these wet shoes and socks! Until next week…
