Keeping to my semi-annual update schedule, here’s the latest! I am now free from the Army and living in Virginia. It is pretty awesome. As a guy I’m required to buy a giant TV, so that’s been getting a lot of use.

November 1st I saw Opeth in Baltimore. I was lucky enough to snag a VIP ticket, so in addition to getting a bunch of extra stuff (t-shirt, picks, poster, etc.) I got to MEET THE BAND! I can’t quite express how awesome that was. There were maybe 10-15 of us there and most of the people went straight for Mikael, so I got plenty of time to meet and talk with Fredrik, Axe, Mendez, and Joaquim. Got to meet Mikael briefly too! Completely forgot everything I was going to ask them but oh well. They all signed my guitar, it looks excellent! I was right up front for the show and managed to catch a Fredrik Akesson guitar pick and at the end I got a lyric sheet that Mikael was using. Awww yeah!

At the end of November I saw Red Fang, Dillinger Escape Plan, and MASTODON in DC! Complete insanity! Red Fang was awesome. I’m definitely not a fan of Dillinger Escape Plan but I guess if you’re into that sort of thing they were good. Mastodon was incredible, they played 22 songs and completely destroyed everything in sight. I caught two picks from Bill Kelliher – he threw one that hit me in the teeth! So brutal!

Other than that I’m playing and learning a bunch of new stuff on guitar, attempting to cook, and enjoying the area. The job I had lined up didn’t work out because the company didn’t get their contract, but I’m waiting on another one right now that sounds promising.

Whoops, guess I forgot I have this thing here. I’ve been busy enjoying the sights and sounds of our awesome country.

After getting back in April, we hung out at Fort Bragg for a while and then I took all of June off. That’s one good thing about the Army – 30 days of leave per year, and if you’re lucky you can take it all at once. I took the opportunity to drive down to Atlanta and eat some awesome food, notably at Rathbun’s Steak. I can say without a doubt that that was the best steak I’ve ever had.
After Atlanta I headed over to Kentucky to hang out with the old school leetnet crew, explored Murray State University, then drove down to Tennessee with Mr. Bofe to enjoy the craziness of Bonnaroo. Interesting experience, probably the last festival I’ll go to but I did get to see Opeth so that made my year.
Departed Tennessee and went back up to the great state of Vermont, hung out for a while doing not a whole lot, then came back to Fort Bragg.
Now I’m getting ready to get out of the Army and go to work in DC, getting paid more to do the job I do now but wearing more comfortable clothes. Looking forward to that!

I also completed my last jump in the Army on Wednesday, successfully falling out of a Black Hawk helicopter at around 1500 feet.  Even got a video of it!  I’m the second guy out.

Made it back from Afghanistan!  I’ll probably update this very sporadically as I’m enjoying all the stuff I’ve missed for the last 9 months.

My tractor won’t start, what shall I do?  Well, if you’re an Afghan, you light a fire under it.

Once in a while, it actually looks nice here.  If only it smelled nice as well.

My job involves creating maps and other geospatial products for the guys who get to do the fun stuff outside the way too familiar walls of our humble fire base.  How do I do that, you ask?  Well, I use a pretty cool computer to run some pretty heavy programs and print the results on a big-ass plotter.  I’m also required to have someone available at any time to do any time-sensitive things that come up.  My section consists of me and my one subordinate, so that means we work 12-hour shifts.  Every day.  Since July.  It’s not much fun, especially since we spend most of that 12 hours in front of a computer doing things that you might call boring.

In order to stave off boredom and keep ourselves sane, we joke around.  We joke around a lot.  These aren’t normal jokes, these are inside jokes so cloistered that you have to have been present at the event that happened prior to the event that spawned them or you won’t really get why they’re funny.  Tonight I’ll present you with one and try to explain why it’s funny, but you really had to be there.  This joke is actually a phrase which originally meant to leave, but has transcended that meaning and can be used in a variety of situations.

TO BREAD OUT: meaning to get out, or in place of any other verb before the word out.

Ex: Hey, I’m going to bread out.  Translation:  Hey, I’m going to leave.

Ex: Hey, did you bread those products out to Bob?  Translation:  Hey, did you send that stuff to Bob?

I’ll now attempt to explain how we arrived at this phrase.  Here in lovely Afghanistan, we eat at our local dining facility.  It’s a small building that at some point in time was named Shenaniganz and actually has the name painted on to resemble the restaurant from Waiting.  We eat all of our meals there and while they provide plenty of food, the quality is sometimes lacking.  This is due to two factors.  One, the food provided is from the Army, and the Army is not known for its culinary exploits.  Two, the food is not actually cooked by our well-trained and award-winning Army cooks.  One of our cooks was the post (base, fort, whatever you want to call it) cook of the YEAR.  The problem is that they are in charge of several Afghans who do all of the actual cooking.

Afghans are good at cooking Afghan food.  It’s actually delicious, despite the fact that its preparation is extremely unsanitary and would make you cringe to watch.  Just ignore how they’re cooking and eat it, it tastes great.  Afghans are not so good at cooking American food.  They’ve probably never seen most of the things we eat and thus have no idea how it should be prepared.  It took several months before we had fries and onion rings that were actually crispy.  Whether it took them that long to learn or the cooks didn’t bother showing them until then, I don’t know.

The cooks/Afghans have their good days and bad days.  Every Thursday is Taco Thursday and it’s awesome.  The tacos are great and we all look forward to it.  Sunday is barbecue day and again, usually pretty good.  The other 5 days of the week are hit or miss, and more often miss.  Some horrible, awful person thought that maybe they should bring up this discrepancy and mentioned that the food wasn’t that great one night.  The cooks are very sensitive and took this to mean that they, in their hearts and indeed in their very souls were awful people and liked to inflict pain on others via poorly made roast beef.  They resorted to what we like to call “whining” and we were subsequently informed by leadership that if any negative remarks about the food were overheard, we would be summarily kicked out of the dining facility and left to fend for sustenance elsewhere.

In our 12-hour-shift-induced haze we decided to impersonate the dining facility personnel, saying that “if you don’t like the food, you can GETTTTTTTTTT OUT!”  This was accompanied by a hand motion and ridiculous accent.  The accent on the word “get” eventually distorted it into mush, resulting in the second revision of the joke.  “If you don’t like it you can GEGIHRGHGIFGDTTTTT OUT!”

In a moment of inspiration or delusion, the distortion morphed into another word.  That word was bread.  Why?  I don’t know.  We get bored.

That’s the origin of one of many jokes, and if you don’t like it, you can BRRRRRRRRRRRREAAAAD OUT!

Been a while since I updated this.  Let’s see…

Still in the Army, still doing the same job, only now I do my job in Afghanistan.  I am currently enjoying the sun and dust (and sometimes cold) in south central Afghanistan.  It’s a nice place to visit if you like rockets and mortars, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a vacation destination.

Here I work a lot but do my actual job, so that’s cool.  Also got a nifty badge so far and maybe an award for coming out here and doing things.  Generals seem to like the maps I make too, so far I’ve had requests for my specific maps from two separate Brigadier Generals.  Not to brag or anything.

Merry Christmas!