Grimey Augusta

So here I am in lovely Augusta, Georgia once again. Last time I was here I drove past a lot with thousands of cement lawn ornaments for sale and it intrigued me, but it was a little too close to the van with the pit bull for me to stop at the evening hour I passed it. So I set out in the bright day light to check it out today.

Imagine a lot half an acre long and at least 50 feet deep jammed packed of cement lawn ornaments. There were thousands. Easily. I started browsing along the front and I came upon the owner of this lot. Based on the warning sign posted out front, I'm assuming this was Mr. Grimes. Mr. Grimes was black guy who was approximately 190 years old.

Immediately he starts in on my tattoos. He was really hard to understand. I think his ignorance was catching his tongue. What I gathered was he wasn't a fan of the tattoos. So I kindly excused myself and kept browsing. I had gotten to the end of the piles of lawn ornaments and started to walk into an inner chamber of lawn ornaments when I hear Mr. Grimes yelling, "HEY GIRL HEY GIRL!" So I popped my head out.

He was all worked up into a tizzy, shaking his cane at me, shouting at me to come out of there at once; he didn't want me taking any pictures in there. Because, "if you're taking damn pictures in there you ain't gonna buy nothing."  

This didn't really seem very hospitable, or a sound way to treat a potential customer. I made my decision to leave then (even though I had seen a stone gargoyle that I really wanted). Good ol' Grimey decided to make my decision to leave concrete (ha ha, pun intended). As I'm walking past him he says, "If you're back there you're gonna steal."

Steal? Steal a 50lb lawn ornament?

He says to the back of my head, "Look at all those damn tattoos. It's a shame you did that to yourself. What the Hell kind of job can you have looking like that?"

Well, Grimey, I proudly work in the United States Army. Of course he didn't deserve that answer. I said nothing to him. As I left I took a picture of his lot out of the window of my car. Just to spite him. What an ignorant jerk.

My Boy

Look into his lovely little face and tell me you don't want him.

Army Medicine At Its Best

The skinny of the situation is that I'm having a surgery that the Army is going to preform. It seems my back has just had enough of my large breasts and it's time to downsize for the sake of my 2 mile run. Now that we have the facts out of the way...

My plastic surgeon is at Fort Gordon. I drove 7 hours to Augusta, Georgia yesterday in anticipation of my first appointment with my doctor.

Let me tell you about Augusta. Augusta is sketchy. Or, at least, the parts I saw were sketchy. I went on a search for food and ended up in the wrong neighborhood. I turned around at a gas station to right my wrong turns. There was a van parked with items for sale scattered around it. These items were spandex pants in a multitude of colors, all displayed on half manikins. A nursing mother pit bull wandered over to my car and stared at me like she was willing me to buy these pants. I got out of there asap.

I hid at the hotel until it was time for my appointment this morning. I showed up 20 minutes early-- like a good Soldier. And what good did it do me? The receptionist told me the doctor was on leave and my appointment had been rescheduled for next Wednesday, and hadn't anyone told me?

WTF.

No, no one had told me. Why the Hell else would I have driven 7 hours to hear it from your mouth if someone had told me!? It certainly wasn't for the ambiance of Augusta!!

So I drove home. Another 7 hours. And I get to do this again next week. Ugh. Yay Army medicine!

Fortune?

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to take this as a fortune....

This is a if a tree falls in the forest kind of situation.

March Came In Like A Lion

So while all these tornadoes were ripping through central Tennessee last week, I was in the field. Range Control issued a tornado watch to Fort Campbell and left it to the "Commander's discretion" if we were going to retreat back to post where we would be safer. Well, Commander's have too much discretion sometimes and my Commander's discretion was to sit tight and wait for the weather to pass.

I survived the Tornado Field Exercise of 2012!

Once the weather quit storming on us (no tornadoes touched down on our range, by the way) we were able to commence training and make the best of our 3 day & 2 night fun filled field exercise.

The first fun thing we did was fill in tire tracks in the mud by hand:

 Then we ate MREs. And we definitely leaned the cooker pouch on "a rock or something":

 Then we took naps because the sun was out and it made us sleepy:

And finally, I found the prettiest patch of wild daffodils way on the other side of the range. Spring is here at Fort Campbell, and it came in like a lion.