Happy Halloween!

As a kid growing up in South Dakota, one of the most exasperating things was being told that, no, you couldn't have the Halloween costume that you reeaaally wanted because there was JUST NO POSSIBILITY that your mom was going to be able to get your parka to fit underneath. So, it comes as quite a shock to me that here in San Antonio, it was 75 degrees on Sunday. Had I known that there were kids in the world who GOT TO WEAR WHATEVER THEY WANTED for Halloween, I'm not sure I would've taken it very well. But, as a grownup, it has been alternatively nice to have the warm weather, and a little poignant because I miss the first days of fall when things start to cool down. I'm guessing that I'd probably have to stay here until January to get a taste of anything approaching fallish weather at this rate. This has been the warmest October on record in south Texas, and needless to say, by this point, I'm totally goofed up, season-wise. No turning leaves, no brisk fall wind. A big group of my classmates actually went TO THE POOL on Saturday afternoon. Outside. Eighty-five degrees and humid, anyone? Thank goodness for air conditioning... My Halloween fun fact? If you've been watching the Today show, you may have seen Frankenstein castle on television this weekend. So what's fun about that? Well, Frankenstein castle is located in none other than duh duh daaaaah: Darmstadt! So, if you want to do some real trick-or-treating this time next year, give me a call and we'll head on over to the castle. Happy Halloween and have a good Monday!

Civilization!

Well, we're back! It was quite the week, and it's fair to say that we're all still a little tired. Minus a bunch of nasty fire ant bites (youch!) and more of the random bruises that I'm quite fond of, however, you could say that we made it back here in what could roughly be considered one piece. The first four days of the week were pretty jam-packed of all sorts of fun/crazy stuff to do, but the final day's activities were punctuated by lots of excruciatingly boring patience-building exercises (read: sit around and wait for hours in the hot sun with nothing to do). Needless to say, a group of 330 twenty-somethings left in a dirt field for 8 hours with nothing to do can get pret-ty creative when it comes to making up things to do. Everyone was so loopy from not really sleeping by then that I cannot tell a lie: if your sense of humor by that point was still at the 3rd grade level, you were downright sophisticated compared to the rest of us. Things that you never imagined you would find funny were suddenly passing as hi-lar-ious as the day wore on. After they turned us loose late on Friday evening, we spent a good part of the weekend properly celebrating the events of the week and some of the things that happened in our absence, like the passing board scores of our Physician Assistant classmates that came out while we were away. It went quickly, but we're right back in the swing of things this week, trying to get all of the loose ends tied up before we graduate here in a couple of weeks. Hopefully, though, I'll have some time to do a better retelling of some of what went on while I was away, but for now, I'll just say that the only wildlife I encountered was a freakishly large jackalope-type rabbit...no snakes, no mountain lions: Phew! Have a good Wednesday!

Radio Silence

So, I'm headed back to the field tomorrow for 5 fun-filled days: Sweeeeeeet! Given that I'm probably not going to get a shower while I'm there (which is a completely different story in and of itself, I can assure you) I'm going to go out on a limb and say that adding new posts this week is probably, well, just a little out of the question. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that this week will be full of the kind of funny events that have made the whole Army experience particularly hilarious thus far. This suspicion was initially confirmed for me on Friday during a platoon meeting where we started discussing potential, uh, topics (read: targets) for the 6-7 minute skit each platoon puts on for our class Dining In in early November. People were already throwing tons of funny ideas when Cpt. J., our instructor, interrupted the discussion by saying, "Hey, you guys should just wait to have this discussion until after you come back from the field: you'll have way more than enough material for a 6 minute skit!" Aw yeah...this is FAN-TASTIC news, because I figure, if you can write a skit about it, you can certainly blog about it, right? Unless I'm the subject... Anyway, check back in with me about this time next week: this should be a good one! So, wish me luck and say a prayer for me that the spiders, the snakes, and the mountain lion that my classmate swears she saw during our last training exercise out there all find me as unappealing and as non-snack-worthy as possible. Have a great week!

So you want to be a Combat Orthodontist...

Well, bad news: there's no such thing. Just in case you wanted to try it anyway, I found out this week that there are in fact classes available to you in which you can attempt to learn all SORTS of things that might come in handy to you, were you a wannabe-combat-orthodontist, not that I'm naming any names here. Or maybe you're a wannabe-combat veterninarian, like my friend N.: there are all sorts of possibilities here. In fact, these classes are so readily available that the Army was nice enough to just provide all 330 of us here at OBC with a full slate of them, and believe you me, we couldn't be more excited. The excitement reached such a fever pitch in my platoon's classroom that by hour five, we had lost, oh, probably three or four people. Not lost like, they were confused-type lost, I'm talking serious public snoring, followed by a couple of cases of lost balance and people falling out of their desks...you name it. These classes are just-that-fascinating. ANYWAY, after sleeping casualty numero 5, just before lunch, we got an, ahem, pep talk regarding the whole sleeping-in-class thing from our instructor, Captain J. His advice? Oh, he's a man of three words: "Don't do it!" I think there might have been an implied "Or else!" on the end of that. But anyway, Captain J. seems like a pretty decent guy, so we resolve to try extra hard to stay awake after this. That was the intent, but it just turned into a huge game of rat-out-your buddy for the rest of the day. And poor N., our very own combat-veterinarian-in-training, was the first victim. We'd all had a big lunch and gotten back to class when the fun began again. Not that I have any trouble staying awake: personally, I just can't hear enough about combat strategy! Unfortunately, N. had had enough and was fast asleep not even a half an hour into class. So, of course, this is more than enough for the guys in our class to give her a hard time about for the rest of the day. They were teasing her about not even being able to keep her eyes open, and of course she's got to defend herself: she's a combat veterinarian, after all, right?! So she says, "Noooooooo! You don't understand! I was awake! I was blinking....just reeeeeeaaally slowly. That's all." Me, too, N! Me, too. Anyway, my mom is here this weekend to see all of this in person! And it's been a lot of fun, hence the lack of posts for the past few days. You may remember those t-shirts from Casa del Rey that had a dotted line that extended horizontally across the chest, right about armpit level, and the slogan was, "Fill with margaritas to this line"? Well, I'm pleased to announce that despite not having one of those t-shirts, my mom and I are pretty sure that she is just about theeeeees close to being full to that line with the best mexican food available here in San Antonio. And there might have been a margarita or two. Who's to say. At any rate, she will be heading her back north tomorrow, even though I wish she could stay longer here in Texas. Happy Columbus Day to the Texans and Happy Native American Day for the South Dakotans!

"If you're gonna be stupid..."

Friday was more fun in the field. We did lots of fun things, most of which I'm going to have to cover later, but one of the things that we all need to know how to do is act the part of the crazy combat medic..whoo hoo! What exactly does that entail, you ask? Well, in a training capacity, what you wind up doing is getting into a group with three other people and you are issued a litter (basically a field stretcher...think canvas rectangle with a pole on each side for carrying a person) and a dummy to act as your "casualty". Sounds easy enough, right? Well, to be honest, there's a little more to the exercise than just making friends with the dummy. The instructors are nice enough to set you up with an obstacle course through the same Blackjack-infested forest that I fell in love with a couple of weeks back. So, I'm the only girl in my group, but lucky for me, one of the three guys that I'm grouped with is a former combat medic...score! So what if I'm a good 6 inches shorter than everybody else in my group, I'm tough, darnit! This is going to be too easy! No looking stupid for me today! We take off, and combat medic guy is in charge. Things are going along swimmingly, and I'm holding my own with no problem when we turn a corner in the woods and come up to an 8-foot high concrete wall. Aha, I think, so this is what puts the obstacle in obstacle course. The objective of this lovely part of the exercise is to get the litter, the dummy, yourself and your three teammates over the wall. No problem, right? So, we're about 12 or 14 feet away from the wall when combat medic dude glances over at me and says under his breath, "Hey, if you need me to help you up..." which totally lights me up and I'm like, "No way!" as though I've ever tried to scale a completely smooth 8-foot concrete wall in my entire life. But, hey, I've got my pride, right? Anyway, we get to the wall, prop the litter up on top, and combat medic guy stands back like, "Well, I gotta see this for myself." So I back away from the wall, take a good run and jump....FLAP! Right into the wall! You could acutally hear my kneecaps hit the concrete. It felt great, I gotta tell ya. Somehow, I did manage to throw my arms up and over the wall, but the, uh, other problem that I didn't totally anticipate (beside the complete lack of any toeholds on a completely smooth concrete wall) was that the concrete slab was easily 18 inches thick: my fingertips barely reached the opposite side of the wall. So, I'm just casually hanging on the wall, working out my next move and trying to act cool. I can still pull this out of the fire for all womankind, right? And that's when I realize that my fingers are coming loose from the opposite side of the wall. But I'm not one to give up easily: oh nooooo! I'm hanging on, darn it! So, instead of just jumping back down and admitting defeat, I slid, in total slow-mo fashion, mind you, ALL THE WAY back down the front side of the wall. Fortunately, the combat medic guy still had a pretty good sense of humor about the situation at this point. He gave me a boost and wound up pretty much catapulting me over the wall: I went absolutely flying across...the sand pit on the opposite side was my new best friend for a couple of seconds. So, just when you begin to wonder if the fun is really over, there's always some barbed wire to save the day! We turn the corner and ta daaaaa...more sand with barbed wire strung up in a criss-cross pattern about 24 inches above the sand. The idea is that you have to, you guessed it, crawl under the wire without disturbing it or losing your patient. Anyway, we get up to the obstacle and I give the command to put the patient down on the ground. At this point, I'm in charge of the show, so this next part I have absolutely noone to blame but myself. We all get down on the ground and are ready to duck under the wire, and for some reason or another, when I yelled the command to start crawling, the guy behind me got so motivated to get the heck back out of the sand that he pretty much threw the litter, dummy and all, up into the air. At this point, I've got a face full of sand, and I totally don't see this stretcher and dummy flying through the air from behind me, and lucky me, the whole operation landed on the back of my arm, right above my elbow. It didn't hurt too much at the time, fortunately, but I can tell you that that it's gonna be one sexy-lookin' bruise here in a couple of days! Good grief, I say! Which brings me to my favorite saying of the week, courtesy of one of my instructors: "If you're gonna be stupid, you better be tough." I be-lieve you, sir.