24 May

I am officially back at work now (which basically means I don’t have an excuse to sleep in any more). I spent my first two days back (22^nd & 23^rd) taking 168 out of phase. It was a nice reintroduction to maintenance – long, hot, frustrating days that culminated in flying right before sunset. The thing is 168 is a good aircraft and the whole process was relatively smooth. I was anxious to get back into the missions so yesterday I volunteered to take Jeff’s spot on the mission today. It wasn’t until I got home and relaxed a bit that I realized how tired I was and that doing a long mission in the heat wasn’t a very smart idea so I gave the flight back to Jeff. It was a good decision because this morning I went in and did a short test flight and by lunch I was beat. I guess I still have a ways to go to get back to 100%. Today was our first real taste of what summer has in store for us. It was 111 F and the wind was developing that nice blow dryer quality. Brian went on leave yesterday. I am going to miss having him around but it was good to see him go – he needs the break. I have been doing a lot more reading lately. For some reason I have to be continually reminded how much I enjoy it. One book I just finished is A History of Iraq. It’s not an encouraging book – history is definitely not on our side, at least as it relates to our current goals.

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This is Mike of our flight guys who gave up flying for this deployment to be a TI. Here he is relaxing with his ever present can of Red Bull. He pretty much lives on Red Bull and sunflower seeds. I don't know how he does it.

This is a picture of me reading. Not a bad life really except being away from home.

This is Brian in his usual movie watching pose. I think he sits that way because it allows him to see who comes in the door but still pretend he doesn't if it is someone he doesn't want to talk to.

This is a series of pictures of what we do on slow afternoons in the maintenance world. You might think Friend is hard at work but he is actually trying to kill the computer's tank before it kills his (which when I tried it it was actually a lot like work).

This is the table in PC where we keep all the logbooks (record of the maintenance status of the aircraft, plus much more). All the work done on the aircraft is recorded on these computers so it is the first thing we check to determine the status of the aircraft. We are required to always fly with the logbook on board so we added all the maintenance manuals to the computers. It has helped us on many occasions when we find ourselves with a broken aircraft away from home. For some reason Steve designed the table as a stop sign with the Arabic work for stop on it. It is an octagon so each aircraft had an edge but as you can see now we are down to only seven.

A baseball game some of the guys in the unit organized a few days ago. Most of them are on the night shift so they were pretty much dead by the end. We probably won't see much more of these. The last couple of days it has been in the 90s by 10 in the morning.

This is a rare picture of the two guys actually running PC (at least for now). L-R Friend (he is taking Steve's job until he gets back from leave), Brian (who just went is getting ready to go on leave) and J.R. who is hanging out looking for test flights (or not).

This is taken inside the maintenance office a few days ago. Some of the crew members were enjoying a cup of coffee and some conversation before heading out to work (L-R Jeff, Tim, Brian)

Here is Steve hard at work with all his gear on. We had some sort of threat on base so everyone had to get dressed up. It was a regular occurrence on our last deployment but thankfully rare this time around.

I had to post one more picture of dust, hopefully this was our last dust storm of the season (we haven't had one in almost a week). It almost looks like aircraft in a fog bank.

15 May

I am back at it – at least on a limited scale. On April 29^th I went running and after a mile I thought I was going to pass out – it was like running at 8000’. I then tried biking with the same effect. I felt perfectly fine except I had no energy and I started being unable to sleep for more than a few hours a night. On May 1^st I flew a mission and about halfway through I started feeling really bad with a fever and my whole body aching. I didn’t realize how bad I was until I got out of the seat at the end of the flight and had a hard time walking. At first I figured it was the flu but the only symptom I had was constant fevers. They would come and go day and night and medication had no effect on them. After a week of IVs and feeling sorry for myself, the Doc diagnosed it as Q fever and started me on antibiotics which stopped the fevers right away. Q fever is an interesting illness – I won’t go into details but you might want to look it up (the pictures I posted earlier of the dust have a direct bearing on this). It has been a week since then and I am doing much better. My appetite is back and I am trying to eat every meal to get my strength back. I am up to about five hours a day of being on my feet before I have to lie down. I will probably be another week before I can fly. It should have been a good time to catch up on my reading but mostly I have sat in my chair staring at the TV. I don’t know what sick people did before TV. As far as the unit goes things appear to be running as normal. 081 got shipped off to the crusher and they tried to take 174 (they need more parts for the F model) but we convinced them we could fix it so that is still moving along. There is other news – the promotion list came out May 1^st and I am on the list for CW4. I won’t actually pin on the rank until March of next year but it’s nice to know I made it. Also, it looks like my next assignment is going to be in Egypt working with the Egyptian Chinooks. It’s a one year assignment and right now I am working on the details to make sure Wendi is able to travel with me. So prayers that it will be a smooth process – we have had more than enough of living apart.

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