Day Six

…Day Six
01 August 2007

We're woken up at 0800 to the news that our secure comms are down. No one bothered to let us know until then because, "We just thought it was down for a while." Seriously? Come on people. Okay well, we troubleshoot and with some help from my team back at Spiecher, we have it back up and running by 0830.

My team chief will be happy to know that immediately after resolving the issue, I went online and started researching the equipment that was giving us the problem. I have been programmed to do this, and can't really think of anything else until it gets done. It's not such a bad thing really; it just kinda feels robotic, but not quite puppet level, ya know? Research continues until a lunch that was actually pretty good.

The entrée was a well seasoned mix of chicken and bell peppers. The chicken was boiled, I think, but the bay leaf and seasoning mix did the trick. The peppers were of every color that peppers can be and roasted to an almost perfect tenderness. The Iraqis can cook veggies, I'll vouch for that! Of course I had a backup plan of one of those standard pepperoni pizzas in case the chicken didn't work. Oh, and an apple that seemed to be confused as to whether it should be a crisp, tart green apple, or a soft, sweet yellow. The result was less than great, but not bad either. After this, we head next door to check progress.

And find there is nothing for us to do. The contractor and his techs are doing what they can without the equipment and we just sit around and watch them do their thing. Eventually we do the usual check up on the guards and go back to our building. I mean, come on, if you're gonna sit around doing nothing, wouldn't you rather do it at home (or the closest thing you have to it)? Yeah, I thought so.

I started killing time by checking out some of the blog sites out there, and found one that seems decent (and free!) called, Blogger. I set up an account there and put up the first few days to get the feel of it. It actually allows pictures to be uploaded directly so that's a big plus too. Check it out at http://tannerism.blogspot.com (that is if you're not reading this on that page already) if you want to see the pics that go along with the story. Well it gets boring somewhat quickly and I fallback to one of my all time favorite time wasters: movie watching.

I pop in the Jackie Chan disk and settle in for the wild wild fun of "Shanghai Noon". I don't know why but this movie makes me laugh every time! "Uno mas?" HAHA. It kills me. When he jumps onto his drunken horse backwards and grabs it's tail, "Where's it's head?". Classic.

An uneventful dinner leads to another uneventful progress check. A couple lines need to be run but nothing else can happen until the shipment comes. That's all there is to it. So it looks like I've got some more down time. The upside is it's about time to give my wife a call.

The phones are finicky here but eventually I get through, and I'm plunged back into my happy place at the sleepy, "Hello?" from the other end. Half way around the world and that's all it takes to make me feel the warmth of home. Roughly 11,000 miles away and all she has to do is say hello and I melt as if I were next to her. We talk about how our days have been going and how things are at the house. I wish I could tell her how much I love and miss her, but this feeble language just doesn't have the words. I'd spell it in stars if I could but that wouldn't even be enough. And with the click of the handset to the receiver, I'm back on earth. *sigh*

More time to kill now. It's movie time again, and it only makes sense to watch "Shanghai Knights". It's not as funny as it's predecessor, but it's still good. I can only take so much of Owen Wilson's static style, though. He was better in "Zoolander". Oh man, I wish I had that here! Now there's a comedy classic right there! I, like so many others, refused to watch that movie just on principle, but when I was peer pressured into it, it became one of my favorites right away. There are too many good quotes from it to get into here. Do me a favor though, and post your favorite Zoolander quote as a comment. Thanks.

Sometime after 0200 the sandman comes and sends me off to…