The Christmas Edition:

I guess that since I haven't posted lately(and that I have even more cool pics), I guess I'll fire away again. The Christmas spirit is everywhere here... even the Muslims(ok...non-practicing ones) are wearing santa hats right now, and the food has gotten better for some reason(the press coming around more often?), and of course, come the Christmas decorations. Recently, one of the guys here had received a 6 foot tall inflatable snowman. His first response of course was to say "What the **** am I going to do with a 6 foot snowman in Iraq?!" The next one was to somehow make due with it.
In the wildly popular tradition of troops deployed to Iraq, we have decided to mix life of both home and our jobs together. As we are combat engineers in Iraq (which has now became sort of a group of "Explosive Ordinace Disposal units' assistants"), we decorated our lovely snowman with IEDs... deactivated and gutted ones of course, and mixed the string pressure fuses with Christas lights... and TA DAAAA! A combat engineer snowman.... boredom brings invention.
Finally, my date for leave is now in stone. I should be home by the afternoon of January 28, making it before my birthday(Feburary 1). I do intend to have a series of "birthday/homecoming" parties throughout this great state, from Paragould to Stuttgart to Fayetteville to Arkadelphia. As most of you are from NEA, most of you will go to the Paragould ones. Until then Merry Christmas and a happy new year.