A post for Spring

Back home it is now officially the first day of Spring!  Over here, however, it feels more like summer.  It's been averaging in the 80s getting into the 90s the past week or two.

Here are a few different photos from over these past weeks:

This first one is of me having pizza at the new pizza/Italian restaurant that opened up here.  The pizza really wasn't that good.  It was a bit weird.  $13 for that small pizza!  I figured I would try the place to see what it was like once.  That will probably be the last time.  

Here's an interesting photo.  I was walking to dinner one day and noticed some police lights flashing not too far down the road from my room.  The commotion was about this used up ordinance.  Someone threw this away, which caused EOD to be called.  Fins like a bomb sticking out of a dumpster usually will alarm someone.  You can see someone wrote on it, "Hey Dumbass Butts Only No Trash!"  I guess this was being used as a butt can before it became garbage...

Here are a couple pictures of a moth I found.  I was getting ready to go to bed a few days ago when I saw this large bug fly from beam to beam on the ceiling in our room.  I was curious what the heck it was, and also wanted to make sure it wasn't in our room while I slept.  It turned out to be this big moth.  Using a broom to brush it off of the ceiling beam it hung out there long enough for me to take some pictures and let it outside.

March Update

Today felt like an early summer day, like in May, in Seattle.  It was a blue sky clear day (every day here pretty much), the sun was warm, and there was a little breeze keeping you cooled just right.  I was walking on the boardwalk back to my room from chapel, and there was a BBQ going on.  The smell of BBQ in the air with the way the day felt reminded me of an early summer day.  It was an encouraging feeling because that means I am getting a lot closer to being done over here and getting home!  We have the rest of this month, and about 3 more months to go...

Last Sunday I went to TGI Fridays over here for the first time.  I got a mudslide, boneless buffalo wings, and chicken tenders.  Unfortunately, they were out of hot sauce, so the buffalo wings were just popcorn chicken, basically.  The mudslide was virgin, of course.  The food wasn't that bad, but WAY over priced for here and what you get.  They had real silverware and nice plates, which was surprising.  Below are some pictures from dinner there with Chen and one of his friends/co-worker.

A couple days ago I was coming back to my room from work.  I noticed the sunset and the clouds looked really cool.  I went to take some pictures of it and noticed a C130 was coming in for landing right under the sunset with the rays going through the clouds.  It was pretty cool.  I got a pretty good picture of the C130 coming in with the rays going over it.  If you zoom in on the picture you can see the rotors.  I like the picture of the sunset with the clouds blocking the sun and the rays peeking through around it.  It almost looks like an explosion in the sky.

Here is a link to some of the photos I took on the way home for leave on the different planes and in Kuwait, and heading back going through Shannon, Ireland and Kuwait. The first aerial shots are coming into Seattle, the last ones are leaving Seattle (you can see the Cascades, Glacier, the Columbia and Vantage), and some of Ireland:

Home on Leave Feb 2010