How hot is it??

OK, the official temperature was 116°F today (Don’t ask how hot it is in the port-o-john)…  When you go to walk to the chow hall—why else would anyone go outside?—it is just like stepping into a giant clothes drier—only windier.  Maybe it is more like walking into a very large hairdryer set on stun…  Whichever, by the time you get to the chowhall, which is an 8 minute walk away (doing good time), the idea of food is just revolting…  But, it is too hot to walk back right away, and the chowhall is usually pretty well air conditioned, and they normally have almost cool drinks.  The drinks get taken out of the fridge so fast that they rarely have time to get truly cold—although there are occasions, when the planets have aligned just so, and I have gotten an ice cold diet coke—I think that has happened twice since I have been here—what a great day!!.

Anyway, you eat, drink, whatever…  then I have an ice cream—actually, it is an ice cream bar covered with Dark Chocolate—very similar to a Dove bar, the one with the nuts.  Quite tasty—very creamy, the milk products here don’t concern themselves with being low or non-fat.  For some reason the ice cream makes feel warm though—doesn’t really cool me off—very odd.  Now, time to gather the strength to amble back to work.  Even hotter than before—I always tell myself that I won’t go to lunch again—just too hot in the middle of the day.  Problem is, I go running in the morning (no other time is reasonable) and miss breakfast, so I just cannot seem to make it past the lunch hour without becoming a ravenous beast.

So, as Johnny Carson would have said:  “It was so hot in A.A. today”…….how hot was it? “It was so hot that if you ordered at Burger King, they said – if you want it your way, make it yourself”.

In fact, it was too hot to go to Burger King—which is on base.  This is another thing.  I am over here deployed.  I have no desire to go to Burger King, or Subway, or Pizza Hut—I rarely, if ever go to these things when I am home.  I don’t want the base to feel like home, maybe I like the drinks warm, maybe it’s a good thing when they run out of ice cream and I don’t get to have dessert.  I want it to be different.  That way I will want to go home.  If it gets too comfortable here, I might not want to leave…  So, for the same reason that I didn’t bring too many personal mementos along, I don’t really feel the need to go to an American fast food restaurant in the middle of Iraq—I want the deployment to be a bit rougher than everyday life—it reminds me that we are, in fact, in hostile territory—better not to get comfortable and complacent…  Did I mention it is hot here today??