And again.....More from Spin Boldak

So here we are, running into the next segment of my (our) journey!

This is from when I was standing by as one of the helicopters spun up, and yes, it got incredibly windy all of a sudden!!!  I took the opportunity to take a silly picture, because what else could you want to do at that moment!  I titled it and again, because we were supposed to be back in Kandahar by this time, but no worries.  I am still safely here and enjoying every possible moment that I can!

 This is a view of one of the gorgeous mountain ranges that surrounds the FOB Spin Boldak.  Depending on how much dust is in the air, you can see the mountains really well or not at all.  This is actually fairly clear- there are days when you can hardly see past those cement barriers in the picture.

  Below is a picture of one of our corpsmen, HM3 Navarro.  He was the mastermind behind the fairly successful bar-b-que we held in about the middle of our time here at Spin.  He was so clever with all of the titles!!!

  Here's a close up picture of the board.  I don't know how much time he put into this, but dang!!!  I still think it's absolutely fantastic!  The things one does when there's "never-ending" time on one's hands....

  So I'm sure as a person can imagine, it can be somewhat difficult to get meat for said BBQ in the middle of Afghanistan.  I'm not really sure how we ended up with it, but there was something about having to talk with some of the guys that go outside the wire, and it affectionately being named "same day cow".  Let the comments begin.  All I can say is that as we were butchering it that afternoon (cause they were just huge chunks of meat), there was still some hide attached to it.  We did our best to keep it clean and under proper temperature and what not, but again, we're in the middle of Afghanistan.  The meat was all properly cooked though and nobody got sick!  (I personally saw this as an accomplishment in and of itself)

  And here is a picture of our chicken.....our very solidly frozen chicken.  We were still attempting to defrost it just before placing it on the grill.....but in the end it turned out pretty darn delicious!!

  So being a Boehm, and just myself in general, I refused to let the guys have all the fun of butchering the meat.  I was using a knife that was gifted to me by Zac, as the other knife was ridiculously dull.  We were using scalpels at some point as well, us being medical and all.

  And here's a fun pose- I was apparently the only one paying attention.  I can say though that room temperature meat is not that easy to cut into nice looking steaks, but we did a pretty darn good job!

  And here was the end product of our meat cutting.  We also had two trays of chicken- so there was definitely a ton of food!!!

  These are two of our fearless physicians, proudly manning the grill.  Dr. Hodgson is in the tan shirt and he's our ER physician.  Dr. Alexander is in the yellow shirt and is our Anesthesiologist.  I've been able to pick his brain a little bit about becoming a CRNA, and he's offered a lot of good information.  Both of these guys are ridiculously intelligent and are able to repeat any historical fact at a moment's notice.  I'm learning something new every day from them.

  So personally, whenever I think of charcoal I think of the bags that we all tend to purchase from the hardware store, grocery store, or wherever you choose to purchase from.  Again, being in the middle of Afghanistan, that's not really an option.  I have no idea where this came from, but it is the most authentic charcoal I've ever seen.  I think they said it was made in the village, but nonetheless, it made the meat taste delicious.

  And here's a picture of some of the chicken on the grill.  The chefs did a fantastic job of cooking it, and I must say, it was so refreshing to have chicken that wasn't just cooked into oblivion!!

  This was the sunset that night.  I thought it was pretty :)

  Another surprising moment occurred when my roommate and I were napping one day.  We woke up to a pitter patter sound, which in this case wasn't mice.  It was actually raining outside!!  Acting as though we had never seen rain before, we ran outside, and were treated to a lovely rainbow.  It did indeed turn into a double rainbow, but this is the only photo I have.  Oh, and that's the top of our row of CHU (container housing unit) in the very bottom of the photo.

  So a brief interlude....who can tell me what the below are?  If you guessed wheelchair you would be correct.  I thought these were hilarious and couldn't help but take a picture.  I guess they work.......

   Ok, back to some fun.  This is a picture of Juanita (my roommate) and I getting ready for our firefighter debut during the 9/11 festivities.  Yes, this is the famed firefighters challenge that I've built up a bit.  We are currently getting instructions on what to do, and how to properly get dressed up in all of the gear.  The hose down by my leg is fully charged with water, and we have to drag it down the length of the basketball court, knock down a cone, then drag a 180 pound dummy back the full length of the court.

  We took a before picture with Mariea, who was our coach and friend for this challenge.  She's really nice, but unfortunately just left here to go to a different FOB.  We just didn't want to disappoint her!

  So after our instructions and posing for pictures, we were off!!!!  We got dressed in a hurry...and then everything slows down from there.

  This is actually just after my fall- they're encouraging us to continue on....and giving me back the helmet that saved my face.  I need the pictures from my roommate (I have yet to actually receive them from her.....) so I can show y'all the actual fall.  My roommate stumbled over her own feet, and stopped dragging the body.  I was still trying to drag him, so my arms were behind me.  When she stopped it completely jerked me, and I face planted.  I'm willing to bet good money that if I wasn't wearing the helmet I would have busted my head open.  I got a beautiful goose egg over my left eye anyways, but thank goodness for that helmet!!!  Anyways, we had fun.  That's really what we set out to do, and we very much accomplished our goal.

  I'll sign off again with yet another gorgeous sunset.  This was taken by Dr. Alexander on the night of the 9/11 festivities.  He did a really good job capturing all of the colors.  As always, the best is yet to come :)