'Twas The Day After Christmas

This tree kinda sums up how I felt most of the day yesterday: pretty sad. Three of us celebrated Christmas Eve by going over to the clinic and getting our H1N1 innoculations. I had an extra bonus shot with an anthrax vaccination. Yessir, we know how to have fun on Christmas Eve in Baghdad!

Christmas was a full day off for us and I finally had an opportunity to sleep in. So, of course, I woke up at 5 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep. The shoulder that took the anthrax shot felt like Mike Tyson had landed a huge blow to it. No bruise marks, but man, was it sore, and I think my body's reaction to the H1N1 shot left me feeling a bit down, too. And I wound up not getting any coffee in the morning, for no good reason at all. Combine that with my main gripe: this was the second Christmas in a row that I've been deployed to Baghdad and away from my wife and friends and dogs. So with lack of sleep, lack of coffee, sore shoulder, H1N1 shot, and general Christmas blues, I was not exactly on top of the world yesterday. Waaah.

So what did I do? Caught up on my reading. Opened a few Christmas presents from family. Went to the gym to push some weights around and loosen up my shoulder. Finished up a painting. (At least, I think I finished it up ... often I don't know until sometime later whether it's really finished or not). Not much else.

Our DFAC has been the butt of many of my sarcastic comments, but yesterday they did a good job. The DFAC elves worked overtime to redecorate the place during the night and to cook up quite a spread for lunch and dinner. Ham, turkey, steak, veggies, several different salads, soups, deserts, and more. Quite a big variety. Was it much better than normal? Well, no, not really, but it was a lot of enthusiastic work and I appreciated their effort.

The decorations, though, still make you scratch your head and go "huh?". Gone is the Thanksgiving painted backdrop with the Spanish conquistadors and in its place was a styrofoam-and-plaster Santa, with sleigh and reindeer. That was good, but we didn't understand the styrofoam-and-plaster woman with gorilla arms in a white dress, sitting with her feet in a pond with some styrofoam ducks. There was a big section of the dining area that had been cordoned off for a couple of days; yesterday a big structure appeared there. We think it might be a chapel, but nobody's sure. It's made out of styrofoam, of course. They must have gotten a helluva deal on styrofoam. And in front of the White House, there's a figure that we think is President Obama, along with a hunter toting a shotgun. Any of that make sense to you? Me, neither.

After making a run to the Green Bean with some friends in the afternoon for a cappuccino, I felt much livelier. And we had another beautiful sunset to cap off the day as we were getting ready to head over for dinner. Despite the occasional bout with the blues, life here really isn't bad.

And today? Today's Saturday. It's another full 10-hour workday.