Message from Mike!

Not much going on lately. Today is Sunday and it’s slow here at the office, as usual. I’m trying to get over a cold so the extra sleep this morning helped. Yes, I have a cold in 105 degree heat. I think going from air conditioning to blazing heat and back finally caught up to me. Ah well. So it looks like everything is all set for me to leave here November 14 for my R&R leave. I’ll get to San Diego sometime on the 16^th or 17^th, depending on how things go. I can’t wait!

Oh, Happy Belated Rosh Hashanah and Happy Ramadan! They both started this week-end. I think that’s funny. So far everything has been calm, and I don’t expect it to change. We may hear celebratory fire, but that’s about it.

On my office wall I have a Notre Dame pennant and a Purdue pennant. I took a bunch of shit last week for the ND loss, but I haven’t heard much from all the Minnesota fans on their loss to Purdue! I met a guy here in our battalion who played for MSU in 2000, and the only game he started was against Purdue. He ended up getting hurt, lost his scholarship, played Division II in Minnesota, got hurt again, lost that scholarship and ended up joining the Guard to finish up school. Unfortunately he’s been deployed so much he hasn’t had much time to take classes! Many of the guys in the battalion deployed to Bosnia and Kosovo in 2002/2003 so they’ve been gone quite a bit, or I should say more than normal for the Guard and Reserves.

Anyway, I’m off to dinner - probably another cheeseburger and macaroni salad. Colleen thinks I’m weird for eating macaroni salad every day, especially since I didn’t eat it that much at home, but the four or five varieties of it here are pretty damn good. And consistent! I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger for today...