No more guard duty!

Well, Sunday was my last day of guard duty. Now I'm cleaning out my area, throwing stuff away, and packing things up in order to get ready for my flight to Phoenix. It's weird, but I'm even MORE bored now that I don't have to do guard duty.

I should be at my home in less than 3 weeks, God willing. We're all really happy that it's finally over. The New York national guard unit replacing us, they're only doing 9 month tours in country, so they will be leaving here right around Christmas of this year.

Webb has come back to stay with us, from his having been sent down to Spin Boldak. As usual, he has lots of interesting stories to share. White was so bored yesterday that he cleaned his M4 and his M9 really thoroughly (which is a waste because they will just get dirty again in the 2 weeks we have left in country). SSG Knight has relaxed considerably since the end of combat operations, and Anderson has been taking sleeping medication that makes him behave really oddly (in a very amusing way).

I've also watched "30 Days of Night," which was terrible. Not as bad as The Mist, but really weak, all the same. Josh Hartnett reminds me of a young Tommy Lee Jones, so I enjoy watching him in movies, but this one was just too full of logical problems to really be enjoyable. I've been in the high latitudes (once) and I know that when the sun sets for 30 days it doesn't get pitch black dark. I also know that if you have a light on in a darkened room on a dark night, and open a small crack in the window, the light is visible literally for MILES. And 2x4 planks with corrugated tin roofing material provides essentially NO insulation whatever, and you'll freeze to death if that's all that's between you and the Alaskan winter.

Finally, I've finished another book by the guys who wrote "The Relic" and have decided that The Relic was about their best book. The rest are just odd in different ways.