Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone!  Goodbye 2009, hello 2010!  This means the end of my time over here in Afghanistan and the beginning of me being back home for good is getting closer.  January is our half-way point.  In about 27 days I go on R&R leave also!  It can't come soon enough...

For New Year's Eve I planned a big party for our unit plus other friends we invited.  We had a small ceremony for promotion and reenlistment, and then a lot of food, music, karaoke, smoking cigars, and having fun bringing in the New Year!

A funny thing happened with our food that night.  I had ordered a lot of food from this one dining facility that is more American called Harvest Falcon.  A guy with a thick accent from the UK (sounds Scottish) is the manager.  I ordered the BBQ menu, which provided BBQ ribs, hot dogs, hot wings, salad, dessert, drinks, etc. not a bad setup.  So, all food is suppose to leave the DFACs "cooked," even BBQs now.  They failed to mention that meant cooked but chilled.  We had picked up all the food, brought it back, set everything out, and were pulling the trays out of the hot pack box that holds all the cooked meat about ready to dig in and enjoy dinner when I realized, as I was handling the trays, that they were all ice cold along with the meat!  We were given fully cooked chilled meat.  What an important detail to forget to mention to us.  We then scrambled to figure out how to heat the meat up.  While our new acting commander ran to the PX to find BBQ briquettes, I searched around the compound we were in for a BBQ. Thankfully, there was one nearby and I grabbed some of our guys to carry if over.  Soon after moving the BBQ the briquettes arrived.  Next was figuring out how to light them.  Use JP8, diesel, gasoline, or is there lighter fluid somewhere?  It just so happens that hand sanitizer gel is flammable, and kinda worked for lighting the coals.  Thankfully, I found another BBQ that had some matchlight briquettes in it which allowed us to properly light the coals.  About 2 hours later after figuring out all the meat was cold we had found a BBQ, got coals, started it, and got all the meat cooked!  And the ribs, hot dogs, and hot wings were really good.

I hope you had a good New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.  Happy New Year from Kandahar, Afghanistan!  May God bless you this New Year.

Cheers,
~Aaron

Here are some pictures from New Year's Eve:

Setting up

Part of the spread of food

Salinas reenlistment

Baker having fun being dj with his ipod

Cigars that night thanks to Thompson Cigar

Karaoke

This is interesting- there is a TGI Fridays being built here in Kandahar on the boardwalk!  We all noticed it just this week.  I wonder if they are going to serve any of their mixed drinks?...That would be nice, but probably not. Who would have thought a TGI Fridays would be built over here?

Earlier in the week there was a thunder storm with rain and hail.  These are a couple shots of the hail that day:

Out front of our office building

Hail on the ground.