Bye bye Devers

after spending 14 hours a day, every day, of the past 6 months together, my corpsman is about to head out with our advanced party. they were actually supposed to head out of here a few days ago but they got to the the departure point and was told they weren't going to be able to get out. there were some pretty unhappy people that day, but can ya blame 'em? at least we were able to delay the withdrawal for a bit. seriously, though, i have to say that i totally lucked out getting someone who was motivated, who worked hard, and who actually knew what he was doing. our military is taxed all around and when you get someone who is augmented from their command simply to go on deployment with you because there simply aren't enough corpsmen around, you never know what you may end up getting. some have been relieved of duty for huffing canned air, others were caught sleeping around and still others were sunbathing naked. mine, i did have to deal with the sarcastic wit, esp during our political discussions, but i can handle that :). if ever there's anything i can help you with, you look me up!

with our advon getting ready to head out, i'm that much closer to going home. less than a month to go and all i can think about is getting out of here. ironically, i'm busier than ever...i just don't want to do anything anymore. i know...i'm terrible! i have interview every single person in the squadron before we head out of here. i have to finalize the grades and submit all of the paperwork for my anatomy class that i just wrapped up (it was much more work than i anticipated!). i have to get ready for my own turnover. and i still have that mishap investigation to finish up. ok, i'm whining. i just don't want to do any of it so i'm procrastinating like you would not believe. it will be very nice once our replacements get here. they should be here not too long from now and we're all chomping at the bit waiting for that day the TOA (transfer of authority) comes.

instead of working tonite, i just watched superbad. it was an awful bootleg copy but that movie is frickin' hilarious! you guys def have to check it out. final shoutout to wash, the new guy who's gonna help me get through the rest of this deployment. he may have not big ben's wit, but he does have a mouth of his own. i appreciate him extending his time in iraq here just to help me out.

Counting down the days...

it's so sad that we've been here 5 years now and not only does it seem like we don't make much progress in the country, we can't even seem to figure out some basic logistics like our f'd up laundry service or our even worse internet! i've been trying to get on to the internet cafe for the past couple of weeks and it's been so incredibly slow i haven't been able to even log on to my blog :(. it's often worse than dial-up. unreal.

anyway, august did go by fairly slowly, but we did have a one of our birds go down (i'm still working on the mishap report...ugh!) and so it was a fairly busy month. thankfully, september is here now and there's just over a month to go. i'm about to work on our post deployment health assessments (we have a pre, post, and post reassessment...completely retarded and designed to eke out ptsd and other psych issues but have not proven to be valuable at all thus far).

at this point, i simply can not wait to get home. it's so close we can almost taste it. the big issue is trying to remain focused on the job at hand which is getting more and more difficult to do. unfortunately, makes my job harder as the marines get more and more reckless....but whatevers...we're going home soon :).

mrs. skinnee, thanks for all your postings! it's great reading them and i'll be seeing you soon! to, jes, just had a couple of bdays. hope you guys had good ones.

and finally, a couple more pics from the vector control trip. one of the russian migs saddam buried that i was telling you about last time. many are still unearthed...here's one that was partially dug up.