we finished our first week of training yesterday, just in time for a nice little blizzard and a severe drop in temperatures. temperature today is around 25 degrees, which is a nasty turn from the balmy 40s and 50s we were enjoying last week.
i still don’t know if my offer to forgo the training of the Iraqi police and spend 12 months as the goalkeeper trainer for the Iraqi national team has been accepted, so more to follow on that…
one other noteworthy event from the week that was – one of our soldiers decided to hang an item of clothing from the fire sprinkler in his closet yesterday. now, on the surface, this may seem like a fairly innocuous action. but rest assured, the consequences were far-reaching, i.e. as i sit here writing, two floors directly below the site of what i will heretofore be calling “the incident” (short for “the incident that has put thoughts of bloody murder and mayhem into my mind regularly for the lat 24 hours”) there are two new pieces of furniture in my room.
one, in the back corner of the room, is a bright orange industrial strength fan, which has been emitting a constant drone for the last day, and by the door a small refrigerator-sized dehumidifier, draining the water from the air in my room into a bucket. and there is an alarming amount of waer being pulled out of the air.
the biggest inconvenience is not the noise, however (which has become a surprisingly soothing cacophony) but the various contortions and olympic-floor-exercise gymnastics maneuvers that i must perform just to reach any part of my room from any other part.
(for those of you who did not trace my comments on the effects of hanging clothing from the sprinkler in one’s room back to the cause, it turns out that when said person who hung said clothing on said sprinkler went to pull down said clothing, said sprinkler began to sprinkle. which, after wading into my room soon thereafter, brings into question the moniker of sprinkler for a device that, from the slightest provocation, spews 50 gallons of water everywhere.)
fortunately the equipment (mentioned before the diatribe within a diatribe) should be removed later today, and i can replace the drone of the fan with the normal drone of the icy wind sweeping ’cross the plains. (any other Oklahoma fans out there? just me?)
anyways, that was pretty much the most exciting event of the month i’ve been here so far, doesn’t bode well for the next two months. but our team of 11 is getting into a good rhythm, and i really like the guys i work with. we’ll see what another 60 days does to the warm fuzzy i have about our team chemistry.
well, i promised idle ramblings, and i guess i can chalk one up in the ‘incoherent diatribe’ column for this week. talk to you all soon.
