Well its June…only 5 days until I head home. Awesome! Finance unit took a helicopter down here today to hand out money (yeah right) and to fix finance problems. I have been being charged for leave for the time I spent as a recruiters assistant since I joined the army…because of that my statement has said that I am in the hole like 20 leave days which really sucks. N-E-way today I spent about an hour with them and got my 20 days back which is something I have been waiting to do for a long time. So that was my at least one productive thing I have done today. I am about to go back and master Free Falling tonight and that will make 2 things, oy yeah I am on roll. 

    Last night however, was very productive. As you know, my digital camera broke on the mission because I didn’t have a case for it and it had a dust intake issue. N-E-way also new camcorder showed up and it was really crappy. It has a terrible screen resolution, slow frame rate, crappy color. The last time I buy some not “top of the line” electric equipment. I always buy good stuff and I have no idea why I didn’t this time. N-E-way after about and hour and half of debating the issue with Gateway I finnaly found a boss’s boss that was sympathetic to the fact that I am deployed and I am past the 15 day return policy because I just got it, and also that I am not able to send it back for another 15 when I get home. Well, she gave me my money back, plus 50$ credit for the problem, plus free shipping coupons to send it back, and she sent my replacement camera out the very next day so I will have it when I get back. I say again: she sent the replacment, before I am even supposed to have the original in the mail!! Obviously I put a dress on the situation to make it look pretty and like I derserved this treatment…(loyal Gateway customer and soldier and all). But either way I was more then excited to recieve the VIP treatment from customer service. So I introduce to you my new line of moment capturing devices thanks to gateway….my new stuff on the left, old on the right.

The new camera is 7.1 megapixels, almost the best on the market. Considered semi-proffesional…The old one is 5.0. The new camcorder has a ton more features and is just a better camera by a long shot…better color scripts, better lens, and it is 4x as high of a picture resolution…1400k instead of 300+ on the old crappy camera. Looks like this vacation is going to be recorded in high def… thanks Gateway.

   Cause I am FREE….FREEFALLIN’, I learned my first song on the guitar, well not really the entire song but like the fist 15 seconds, which is really just the first 3 seconds repeated 5 times, but hey back off, it is hard. My fingers hurt like crazy and are really not used to contracting in weird ways to pin down metal strings. The only other thing I have ever done with my left hand is catch baseballs and flick off other drivers so it is quite a transition. I was doing alright and trying to remain calm and patient and then I discoverd that I could do the first 5 cords of Tom Pettys “Free Falling” and it changed my whole perepective on my guitar… very cool. Also today I learned how do read tabulature and I got the chords for Green Day “Time of your life”, which was half the reason I bought the guitar to learn that song so that is my goal for the next 3 days or unitl I leave…yowsa.

     Next issue: This has bothered me for a very long time and I have kept to myself, but not anymore, I can’t take it anymore. Bedroom Expressions, a seemingly innocent little furniture organaztion is nothing more then a band of perverts, using subliminal imigery to corrupt the mind’s of the innoccent masses. There I said it, now for the proof:

 Now I am sure that everyone has seen this image before and apparently the rest of the world is under the impression or at least thinks that all they are looking at is a pink outline of a bed…you see this is wrong. I ask you to consider example A:

   Do you see it now, do you see how these nasty perverts have advertised their semi-porn on our streets for what has been to long. HaHAHha…. I proved it…I told you they were perverts…or maybe I am the pervert for noticing but somebody is perverted that is for sure!!

    So unless this is your first time reading my site you are aware that I am about to start my journey back to the states via Kuwait, and Germany ect. I have been planning my vacation more and more as I leave in a few days. Well I got focused today and think I may have nailed down most of the details…my little itinerary has all the priorities included…here take a look:

Major Event #1:

   That’s right, what is more American then baseball, and there is no place like Wrigley, and no team like the cubs. And I will be there just early enough in the season to miss there yearly fallout where they give game and the pennant away…Arrrhhh, maybe a good luck visit from Afghanistan will serve them well this year. Either way, I am getting tickets, and if I don’t get tickets, I am scalping some….going to Wrigley. Here I come 8$ beers!!

   After the game, I am working on a little day date…you know…shopping, Italian food, horse drawn taxis….the works. Anything worth doing is worth doing right.

Major Event #2  (Road trip)

Oh yes, I can feel the mist…

     What a site…and only one country away from the beautiful US. This is on a list of places to go before I die… So I figure I should do it before I come back to war…(haha) alright back joke. But it turns out that after some investigating, this place has more to offer then just cascading water…

Casino??

   Ahhh yes, a little gambling….Don’t mind if I do. I feel lucky anyway.

     A 30,000 square ft indoor water park…sweet. I might have to drown a couple of Canadians in the pool but otherwise should be good clean fun…unless that fat kid in the top picture pees in the pool. Then not clean…but still fun!!

   Thousands of butterflies flying around and enjoying life…sounds like a Woodstock hallucination to me, but it has been described to me by a very persuasive person as pretty cool. I guess the idea is to wear a bright pastel shirt to trick the butterflies into thinking you are a 6ft walking flower and then watch them try and cross pollinate your sleeve with someone else’s shoulder. Should make for some crazy pictures and another thing off the list of things to do. That’s 2 in as many days.

    I hope that Emmy doesn’t mind a few hours in her cage in the car with the windows down. I will just have to make sure to wear her out during the day. I know it sounds impossible to wear out a puppy and even harder to imagine for anyone that has met Emmy, but I have a plan…

    Other then plenty off space to play at the campgrounds, (Great sites, fireplaces, grills, basketball, tennis, pools, you name it) There is some of the best hiking and “Whitewater” hiking trails in the Midwest within 10 miles of our site. I am sure she will need her rest to process all the new smells we’ll find her on more then 30 miles of trails…all on her leash…(she loves to swim) Plus the bulk of the trip is going to be hiking and camping and RELAXING by the grill with steaks soaked in Jack Daniel’s and enjoying the good company so I think she can take a few hours in the car while we eat or go do whatever.

And then finally:

Notice the view of the falls, good eats, great memories

I know someone that will love this place…MMmmm

Oh yeah….I love it. Just what I need, something from deep in cyberspace to boost my ego even more and make me even more cocky and arrogent. I love it…yowsa that’s hot

    I got mail…I had to get a special flight from KAF to pull it off though….turns out it wasn’t the army’s fault it took so long, all of my battery’s mail was in the charge of one person to make sure it made it out to the all the bird and then out to us and apparently he sucked at his job…ohhh that makes me mad. You come all the way to Afghanistan to do a job and when you get here you mess it up, retarded! Anyway thanks to all for the mail, it felt like a real Christmas morning getting last month’s mail all at once. I got a ton of food sandels, pictures, camcorders, guitars, accessories, you name it. When I got done tearing everything open it looked just like Christmas morning without the colorful paper. I would have taken pictures but of course, my camera is broken…sorry I intended on taking pictures when it all showed up. Thanks Mom, Grandma, Grandpa, Jamie

    Another day in Afghanistan…still no mail! That sucks but I leave for Khandahar, the Kuwait, then Germany, then home in less then a week now. I have spent all day trying to plan a camping trip or get a cabin for a few days and I am so tired of looking at places. I want to take Emmy and that would mean that I couldn’t go to most of the cabin sites. I think I am just gonna pack the truck for camping and head north and ask locals and people at gas stations for advice and just roll with it. You would think there would be more sites that would list like top 10 places to camp in MI or something but there apparently is not. I think that I am going top try and make it to a cubs game when I am home and go to the Niagara fall and drink a lot of beer and play with my dog. Other then that I am just glad that the trip is going to take up a month of my tour over here. Well I am off to go to sleep or something just as boring so…yeah….GTG

      Ok here are the pictures…No movies this time but I have some awesome movies of flybys and us blowing stuff up and other cool things and I will put them up here at some point. I will add some of the commentary about the mission later there was some pretty cool stuff and some good stories. I slept close enough to the SF commander to smell his farts and laugh at his jokes about the bad guys chances of hitting us with the rocket we watched them set up with our binoculars. The rocket missed by about 900 yards and the bad guys never made it off the mountain. Anyway it took all day just to upload all these picture so sorry about the rest…enjoy!!

(I don’t even know what to say about this picture…one of the strangest things I have ever seen… my whole life I thought that lizards smoked menthol cigarettes and this guys runs by with a Camel Light?? Makes me wonder how many other things I am wrong about)

(you should be thinking to yourself…this is a picture of the mountain top…then you should think, how cool is that, they climbed a mountain and hung the flag…right about now you should be thinking…wait, how the hell did they get the truck up there??. And right now you should be laughing to yourself about the lizard picture again. You can go back up and look again if you want)

       More pictures of helicopters, some look pretty cool but I am so used to seeing helicopters land and fly and pick stuff up that I don’t even care lately. But they are still pretty decent pictures. I am glad to be back on land.

      Alright here is the setting: We were on the last mission, the only place that was considered a crapper was a terrible little room with a metal bucket cut in half and boards laid across it to sit on. Then once a day the bucket was drug out by hand and lit on fire with gas to empty it and then the steaming crap was put back in the terrible room for the next day. Apparently this is standard procedure on missions due to the fact that despite the priority of a decent place to crap, the recourses and initiative are apparently low. So I built myself a crapper without the walls and flies of the community crapper out of a stack of cinder blocks and a MRE box. While I was given many “cool” points for the initiative there was another faction that was for some reason offended by the act and thought that IT was unsanitary in comparison the the shitty shitter. That is the army for you. NE-ways I got in trouble for the crapper idea and had to empty the bucket and burn it the next day as punishment and it was somewhat of an ongoing joke for the next few days. Fast forward to the next mission (this last one)… we have been on the mountain for almost 2 days before the issue of where to crap came into play. Obviously thinking they were giving me a hard time, they all volunteer me to build said crapper thinking I would loath the notion. However, me being the extremely stubborn and competitive person that I am had notions of my own. I was determined to build a crapper so fine that it would become the thing of legend…I rummaged for material and assistants and got to work with designs written on a piece of toilet paper and materials not fit for such an undertaking…

I realized shortly that this, being the only raw material on the mountain, was going to be imperative in the construction of my crapper…so I carried it to the top of the mountain to begin planning. My proponents already becoming disheartened by my enthusiasm for the project.

I realize that it looks as if we were posing for this picture and not actually working at all, but on the contrary, this was just bad action photography, and I was sawing my heart out to produce a comfortable backing for my crapper. This was after an hour of prying nails out of the board to preserve it and make use of the beams…

     Notice the delicate balance of the crapper on the rocks, the camo net for privacy, the retractable lids, the convenient seat backing, the cardboard seat covers for comfort, and the disposable bags to keep the crap away from the actual crapper, a unique design feature now adopted by the SF permanently. Not pictured: (Toilet paper holders, and magazine rack…added later) I was later asked by the colonial…”Why did you make 2 seats when noone is going to sit next to each other to crap?”….to this I replied…”protecting America’s freedom sir!”. He asked “America’s freedom?” looking confused. I replied, “That’s right, freedom of choice sir!…God Bless America”. He immediately seemed to understand the need for 2 seats.(True story)

 

   Unfortunately, there were not very many pictures taken of the process because noone anticipated the results: Here it is…The colonial admitted it was the finest shitter he had ever seen on a SF mission including ones inside the houses of locals. I was recommended for an Army Achievement Medal by the SF colonial for the “Shitter with a view”…it’s name… A.K.A “the shitter”. Everyone raved about how great the view (it was on the mountain side), and the design , and the cleanliness of the crapper. And the best part is what was supposed to be a bunch of highranking SF guys teasing me, ended up with me being a partial celebrity as the engineer of the shitter, and maybe getting an award from the Special Forces for my efforts. HahAH bitches!!…PFC Myers laughs last again.

Here are some pictures of me. I took a ton and liked a few. I was determined to take a few pictures of me that I liked, I would say I came close.

(this is about as much as you will ever see me pose for a picture…Damn I look cool!)

(alright THIS is the most I’ve ever posed for a picture, this was for hot or not.com…so far I am hotter then 95% of the people on the site in this picture…rated a 9.6…yowsa…that’s hot)

(this is me doing a little cliff hanging….)

Please note: (not actual cliff… also… not actually hanging…but it is me)

(this is day 5 before my morning bottled water shower. I look a little grubby, would never get away with this unless we were with SF.)

Please note: (Bottled water showers are freezing cold and suck terribly)

(this is me after the shower, the smile is fake I am thinking about starting a fire or something warm)

(the famous section pic, that is the whole gang. We are the brains of field artillery. Except for Crane…and Benny…Really I am the brains. haha

   Here are some of the pictures of the terrain. It was a very cool place to spend a week. We were at just above 7000ft. We had a great view of the valleys and everything else around us. We got to see a firefight below in the valley and then watch the bombs drop all from our vantage point. There was beautiful sunsets/sunrises…here are a few of them:

(Those are the same sunsets on different night. I have never seen a sky so dark without the moon, or so bright with the moon as I did on this  mountain in the middle of nowhere.)

(That was the other side of the mountain in the morning, 40 degrees in the morning, 110 during the day, makes it kinda hard to pick an outfit, good thing we have uniforms)

(This was my bed, makes me glad not to be a sleepwalker. I would have only survived the first few steps before tumbling almost half a mile over rocks at a 75 degree downhill slope. Notice my high-speed mattress between me and the rocks!! (hah!)