Weblog not to be used for the other use.

Here are some pictures of Qatar for those who are interested.


Chili's/The Pool


Me enjoying my bunk.



And the rest of these are just pics of the city of Doha.~

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha12.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha11.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha10.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha9.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha8.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha7.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha6.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha5.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha4.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha3.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha2.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y189/reykas/QATAR/doha1.jpg

I.. don't know what FMPP stands for. But it's basically a 4-day pass to Camp As Sayliyah near Doha, Qatar. Qatar (pronounced "cutter" [and no, Doha isn't pronounced "DO HER", Cat. :-p]) is a little country that sticks out into the Persian Gulf, right next to Saudi Arabia, not far from Kuwait and Iraq.

I left on Friday, 26 August. I got an early flight out and was able to actually do stuff for a few hours before crashing on day Zero. The trip was long though and I didn't eat anything all day, so I found myself feeling sick. Some Motrin and some food helped some though. After I was feeling better me and this other PFC from my flight check out the PX and the gift shops (which were lame) and then went to "The Oasis" (original name, no?). The Oasis is the club here.. the young crowd goes there. There's a dance floor and a bar (they just sell certain beers, coolers, and champagnes.. and there's a 3-drink limit [which is easy to get around]). I had a Guinness and a pineapple cooler thingy. We went early though.. like 8-ish, so there was hardly anyone there. Supposedly it's hoppin' when it gets late. But I'm not much for clubs.. they're mostly for hooking up and such. If my girl was with me I'd have enjoyed it perhaps. But no, it's just a meat market really. The male-to-female ratio is terrible (fantastic if you're a girl, I guess) and I wasn't there for females anyway.


Day 1

After calling Cat in the morning, I went to the pool and caught some sun. There's a tiny Chili's RIGHT NEXT to the pool. Like here's the pool... *walks over about 5 steps* ...and here's Chili's! They had a limited menu, but it was still good. And they DID have the chocolate volcano cake thingy that is one of my favorite deserts ever.

That night I got a massage, which was awesome. Not only did it feel great, but it really loostened me up for the following days. I could feel it in my feet and in the way I walked that I wasn't as tense. It actually made my arms and shoulders hurt a little from having the muscles loostened for the first time in a long time. It was highly theraputic and I highly recommend it. Although you're better off getting one from your girlfriend. She may not be a professional, but ya never know what might happen afterwards. Rarr. Oh, and also it's free tht way. :-p


Day 2

I had to wake up a little early (Like 8am! GASP!) so I could be at the USO in time to sign up for one of the off-post trips. You can sign up any of the days, but my group had priority on day 2, so it made it easier to get a slot. I signed up for a trip to the "big" 4-story mall in the city of Doha.

After that I headed to the pool again and got some more sun.. making sure to get plenty of sunscrean on those little spots on my back I missed the day before. I burn super easily. I just went into Chili's for a bottomless coke afterwards this time.

That night, after I showered up and whatnot, I went to the Top Off Club.. which is the place to drink other than the Oasis. It's more of a quiet place. It's just like.. in this giant warehouse kind of place and there's some couches and a TV. There's a small bar with a variety of beer. There's also darts and pool. I had a Heinekin and two Guinnesses there while playing pool. It was quiet and nice. I like to be able to think and chew on my Guinness in peace.

After I finished there I got online and talked to Cat until the wee hours. Great conversations too.. usually when we talk there's tight time constraints or there are distractions or other priorities that come into play (Like work. Bleh!). It makes me miss her though..


Day 3

I had to get up kind of early to go on the trip to the Mall. The mall was fairly nice, I guess.. but they didn't have the kind of stuff that someone like me who has to go BACK to Iraq would want to buy. I bought a couple of DVD's and payed too much. I had some McDonalds which was so-so (I had a Royale with Cheese, Pulp Fiction fans!). Mostly the trip was just too long though.. I got bored and tired of walking around. I also didn't like that we had to go around in little groups.. minimum of 2 people together. It takes your freedom away. It'd be better if you knew or liked the people.. but they were boring and awkward and weird. They were fairly nice though. The highlight of the mall was getting a white chocolate mocha from starbucks.. with caramel on top. Mmmm. I got a grande... should have made it a venti.

More interesting than the mall though was the trip to and from. The city of Doha is pretty large.. and it looks like it's rising from the ashes of something. There's lots of old decrepit and dingy buildings.. some of which are still barely functional, but most of which are just rubble. A lot of that rubble is in the process of being cleared out. The roads look like they're trying to modernize, but it's still chaos on the streets. People just.. go when they WANT to go. Our bus totally cut off a cop and he didn't seem to give a crap. Also interesting are the cop cars actually. 3-series beamers, every one. Crazy.

What was really cool is that there are TONS of tall buildings. All of them are beautiful and unique looking.. much better architecture than the average building in a big city like NY or LA. And for every one of these buildings there's at least like 2 or 3 around it being built. The entire city looks like a fantastical work in progress. They also have other huge structures.. domes and zigurrats and such.. all very modern or futuristic looking. It was really interesting to me. It seemed like there weren't enough people in the city to even fill all of the buildings that were already built. ..but maybe that's because everyone is inside.

It definitely felt strange though. Like someone was building a huge elaborate hampster cage in the way of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or the Truman Show.

After I returned from that I really just kinda.. chilled out for the rest of the day. That night they posted our formation time for returning home. Crashed a little early to try to get some Z's.


Day 4

We had our formation and got my final formation time, which a little bit later tonight. After the morning formation I went to the pool once more... there's not much else to do. It wasn't as sunny today so I kind of napped in one of the adorondac chairs. And that's.. all. I really did for this, the final day.

So yeah, all-in-all Qatar is really boring. :-p But it's nice to have a change of pace.. something to break up the long months of being in Iraq. I just have a few more months to go before I'm done.

As you can probably tell if you've been reading this blog for more than a day, the layout has just changed. Serenity isn't even out yet and I already dumped that theme. I was tired of the dark blackness... too generic-feeling. This one's more cutom. I actually put a little effort into it, with some help from Cat. This more light and airy and condusive to entertaining reading, methinks. It's still a work in progress.. not sure how I want to change it though. Who knows if I ever will. Cause I am LAZyyyyyy. I do things on a whim and if the whim passes.. well then I don't even finish what I'm...


So yeah, I basically figured I should post to christen the new layout. It doesn't mean I have anything to actually write about or anything. Right now I'm on staff duty.. which is like when you stay up all night and housesit the office for the most part. It's not so bad cause Catrina is on to talk to me. We have actually gotten to talk a lot lately which is really nice. It's nice to continue to grow closer to someone even when you're far away from them. She'll be going to UCSD soon so I'll probably see less of her then. By then I'll only have a couple months left of this wretched deployment though. I'm trying to count them more these days. (Fantastic girlfriend, near-finished deployment; that's two at least!)

I get to go on on Pass to Qatar on Friday, as I've mentioned. Perhaps I'll have more tales to tell when I get back from there. I'm kind of hoping not though, because my main goal is to just relax. And to tan. :-p So yeah, possibly a new post then I come back.

As usual, the new postsecret update is great. I particularly like the wal-mart one. I love wal-mart and I can never understand the arguments against it. It pays decent wage, offers low prices.. hell, it even sells cheaper gas and SAVES gas (and thus the environment, right?) by being a good one-stop-shop kind of place. It's too bad they censor their CD's, but hey. You can still go to Best Buy for Eminem.


There's a new uniform out for the Army. It's the Army Combat Uniform (ACU) which is replacing the Battle Dress Uniform (BDU). It's still in transition but my unit should be switching to them when we redeploy back to Fort Bragg.

Here's the old uniform:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/militaryhistory/img/media/638_l.jpg


And here's the new one:

http://www-tradoc.army.mil/pao/fact_sheets/ACU/ACU2.jpg


The digital pattern is weird, but actualy blends in better. And the lack of black in the uniform is supposed to catch the eye less. I like the pockets and I'm glad we're adopting the suede leather boots like wear with our DCU's (Desert Camoflauge Uniform), but this new one is supposed to be wash-and-wear. You're not supposed to iron it. I think after a few washings it's going to look shitty. I've seen a lot of people whose name tapes are all bendy and it wrinkles the whole front of the overshirt. And velcro? I mean it's good for somethings but there's a reason velcro shoes stopped being popular after the 80's. I imagine if you crawl around in the dirt enough all of your velcro shit starts to come off.

Overall I think it's good but I'll bet they'll make slight changes to the uniform in the next year or so and we'll all have to buy new ones if we don't want to look like shit. And oh yeah, whereas a set of BDU's costs about $45, a set of ACU's costs like $80. Yeah.. So I think I'll just buy two to start out.

Like you care. Moving on! Next on the agenda is the end of this post.

I was flipping through the AFN channels this morning and I ran across a movie called The Straight Story. It's about this old hick guy, Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), who decides to drive his lawnmower, towing a big trailer, to Wisconsin because he wants to make the trip on his own and his vision is too bad to drive a car. I didn't catch what state he was from, but it looked like Illinois. If it wasn't Illnois, it might as well have been. I don't know why it caught my attention, but it did. To be honest the movie looked really boring, but I guess maybe I was drawn in by how real it looked. I mean the people seemed genuine.. like they were really from the countryside of the midwest.. not that bullshit you see on TV. I think some people from big cities have no clue what life is really like for the majority of Americans. Don't get me wrong, I like big cities of course. I'm more of a city person myself. That's why I moved from Podunkville, Illinois to Los Angeles, California. Still though, I can feel the isolation from the rest of America when I'm someplace like LA or NYC.

Anyway, it was kind of interesting and kind of cheesy. The story culminates pretty progressively. First this old geezer meets this hitchhiker along the way. He guesses correctly that's she's running away because she's pregnant. He goes into how it's better to get flack from your family and risk rejection from your boyfriend than to not have a home and all of that.. in the way that old wise hick men tend to speak sooth. He talks about when his sons were young how he'd give them sticks and tell them to break them. Then he'd take all the peices and bundle them together and tell them to break that in half. And of course they couldn't. And he would say, "That's what a family is." The whole stronger together than apart thing. Kinda cheesy, but still sweet.

He also gets passed by this bike marathon and catches up to their camp site that night and spends time with them. One of the guys asks him what the worst part about being old is to which he replies, "Remembering when you was young."

He also meets this other old guy along the way and they go out for drinks. He drinks milk instead of booze though as apparently some preacher helped him stop drinking after he returned from WWII. He told the other old man a story he'd never admitted to before about how in WWII he was a sniper. He had a friend in his platoon who reconnoitered for them and was really good at it. One day they were waiting for the enemy and Alvin saw something moving at a distance, sneaking toward them slowly. After a few minutes it moved again and he shot it. Later his platoon found their scout shot in the head. They assumed he was killed by the Nazi's. They all still thought that to that day or until their deaths except him, as he knew what he'd done.

More expriences he has along his journey kind of lead up to how important he has realized family is and it turns out he is going to see his brother, to whom he hasn't spoken in 10 years, who just had a stroke. I use "just had" loosely as this whole trip takes him like 8 weeks or something.


I guess it was interesting to me because you see these looney old men and think you can't relate to them at all. I can understand a hobo on the street in the city much better. But it got me thinking how normal these crazy old hick folk from Illinois were probably once like, and probably still are. I mean I guess I always knew they were.. but you don't think about it very thoroughly. You just don't.

I didn't see the end of the movie so I don't know if he made it. I assume he did. I don't know if his brother was still alive when he got there or not or if they made amends. But I do know that that old guy sure looked happy driving his little john deer lawnmower, eating hotdogs made of braunsweiger (sp?). And that actor sure did a genuine-looking job of looking teary-eyed when he reminisced.

I'm always getting those retarded chain emails, as I'm sure do most of my readers (both of you, probably). Especially annoying is when it's a decent email, but it's ruined by the thing at the end that says, "You must send this to 15 people within 5 minutes or you will have back luck for 7 years and your hair will fall out." And ya know, it seems like everyone complains about those emails.. but how could that be. If everyone is annoyed by it then how could anyone still be sending them, much less starting them. Maybe it's demons.. I don't know. But I know a lot of people in my detachment say they hate them but very occasionally I'll get one from them. Bewilders the hell out of me. I guess everyone gives into it sometime. And this is my time! But I'm toning it down. I'm not mass-sending an email or anything with threats of horrible reprisal if you don't pass it on. It's just an old Irish proverb/blessing that I've seen before and I got in an email and thought I'd post here. I love the Irish.


May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

May God be with you and bless you;
May you see your children's children.
May you be poor in misfortune,
Rich in blessings,
May you know nothing but happiness
From this day forward.

May the road rise to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the warm rays of sun fall upon your home
And may the hand of a friend always be near.

May green be the grass you walk on,
May blue be the skies above you,
May pure be the joys that surround you,
May true be the hearts that love you.


It's even better if you use an Irish accent when you say it. Blessings have to happen when you say it all celtic-like. But if your accent sucks then you will get 7 years bad luck and your hair will fall out.