Gary's Iraq Update

We are now a little more than half way through this deployment. Gary's time in Iraq is almost half way over. I expect him to be back in the states by the beginning of May. He'll go back to North Carolina for a while, but I'm still not sure if it will be for a week or two or it could be for a month or two. They haven't told us for sure, and even if they had, I've learned that with the Marine Corps nothing is for sure until it actually happens. They constantly tell you one thing and then do another, so whatever they say I don't believe until it happens. For now the story is that he's only supposed to be in North Carolina a couple weeks and then will finish the last part of it at Camp Williams where he can stay at home and commute back and forth. If he's going to be in North Carolina for a while I'll probably go out there again to see him, but since I had to change his flights four times when he came home on his leave in Sept. I'm definitely not making any solid plans until the last minute. This first picture is of Gary's whole company (Charlie Company).

Since Gary won't be able to post anything on the blog, I took some of the things he's told me through letters or over the phone and typed up something to post using his descriptions and the pictures he sent to illustrate. Then I had him read through it and add details, so this posting is a joint effort.

Gary has been keeping pretty busy. He says he tries to go to church on Sunday when he can, but other than that days are all the same to him. It's hard for him to keep track what day of the week it is because it is all the same and he doesn't have a lot of spare time. There are computers on base he can use to get on the internet, but he rarely gets on the internet, and if he does it isn't for long. If he wants to use the internet with his laptop (so we can use the web cams and instant messaging) he has to pay $5 per hour. Since he doesn't have time for that we haven't used the web cams since he left North Carolina. I've been checking his e-mail for him and usually send it to him through motomail or read it to him. Letters and packages have been taking two weeks to get back and forth, so I've relied on motomail and phone calls. The motomail has been really nice to get messages to him quickly, I just can't get messages back very fast. Gary is only supposed to call once a week and has a 30 minute time limit per call. Lately it's been more like twice a week, and I usually keep him longer than 30 minutes. Our communication is so limited, it has been frustrating, but we make it work for us.

Gary has learned a lot about the Iraqi people. They are not soldiers or very militant. It isn't in their character as a people. He's spent some time around their interpreter and has had a chance to talk to him and learn more about the area and the difference between the Sunni & Shiites & Muslims in general. Here are a couple pictures of them on their convoys.

He says when the sun goes down it gets really dark. When he's at the vehicle check points working with the Iraqi Police they are out in the middle of nowhere and it gets so dark that his night vision goggles don't work very well. He's noticed there aren't usually any clouds in the sky, so at night he can see the stars really well and he says it's really pretty. During the day the clear blue sky is pretty as well, but he says when you look back down to the horizon you see ugly brown, dirty, dingy gray color.

With no clouds it makes the nights colder and days hotter. When Gary first got to Iraq the temperatures averaged 90-100 and would cool down to the 80's at night. It was hot and it was already past the summer months. Now the high is around 50 if he's lucky and the low's dip down to the high 20's and low 30's. Mornings are very cold now. Gary says the gunners bundle up like the kid in "A Christmas Story" because they have to ride up in the turrets of the truck. They've had a few missions that have required them to move at night and he says it can be miserably cold. Most of the pictures he's sent me the scenery looks all the same, just like in this picture.

This is one of the few pictures I've seen with greenery and palm trees.

Gary says the food there is pretty good for the most part. For Thanksgiving he ended up not going on a convoy that most everyone else went on because someone was using his vehicle. That left him on base with four other guys for a few days. It was his idea for them to go to the big, main chow hall and eat Thanksgiving dinner together. He said there was a ton of food--turkey, ham, prime rib, stuffing, and all the other usual Thanksgiving food. He said the prime rib there is really good. They feed him steak quite often and he says it isn't very good so when he gets back he's not eating steak anymore. I'll be lucky if that lasts a day. He'll be back to sneaking steak in the shopping cart again while I'm not looking the first time he goes grocery shopping with me.

The truck he drives has mine rollers attached to the front of the truck. They meet frequently with the military and civilian contractors who perform maintenance and upgrades to the rollers. He says they run them pretty hard so they take them in every couple weeks to get something fixed or upgraded. Sometimes the upgrades and repairs only get halfway done because parts are on order. He thinks it is pretty funny when the truck comes back with duct tape wrapped around one of the main pins to hold it together.

They have a couple dogs that patrol with them sometimes. One of the dogs and the dog handler ride in the back of Gary's truck when they go out. Gary becomes security for the dog and the handler when they get out to search or investigate something. It is fun for him to work with the dogs and it broadens the things they can do. All the guys love having the dog with them too. The dog never wants for attention. There is always a Marine willing to sit and pet the dog. The dogs seem to really like going out too. Sometimes a game of Frisbee gets started and it drives the dogs nuts to see the Frisbee flying around. Now Gary wants to get Josh a German Sheppard when he gets home since he's been working with one out there.

To fortify and add extra security to the compound he is staying at there are big bins lined with burlap and heavy cardboard then filled with dirt and encased in chain link to keep the shape. These are the walls you see in the pictures of them playing a little baseball.

He really misses home, and is looking forward to coming home soon. Time seems to go by quicker for him out there, than it does for me at home. He is in a constant routine of finding out when the next mission is, preparing for and working up to it, then debrief, fix the trucks up, and prep for the next mission.

It's been a while!

The past couple months have been insanely busy for me. I started this posting a week ago. Holidays are nice, but stressful. I set a new record this year for having five Christmas parties scheduled within one week. It has been crazy. My time on the computer is very limited thanks to my little helper. He discovered the switch on the power strip, so if he's in the computer room with me I usually end up rebooting a few times while trying to do stuff on the computer. My computer time has mostly been devoted to making a DVD to send to Gary. When we bought our camcorder a year ago we were told that the video would transfer from the hard drive of the camcorder to the hard drive of the computer and then you could burn it to a DVD. I was told all I'd have to do is plug the camcorder into the computer and push the button. For technologically handicapped people like me it isn't that simple. I spent a ridiculously enormous amount of time figuring how to get it to work, the whole time wanting to cuss and swear and smash the stupid thing to pieces then throw it out the window. Luckily I figured it out before it came to that and I even got it mailed in time for Gary to get it for Christmas. So in the past month and a half besides getting ready for Christmas and making Gary a DVD here's what we've been doing. I picked out new carpet and got it laid in our downstairs living room. This was to replace what was damaged when my fridge broke and leaked into the basement. I thought picking out new carpet would be fun, but it really wasn't. I've never picked out carpet before so I had no idea what to look for, and I am very indecisive. The samples all look so different when you look at them in different light or turn them different ways. Josh isn't much of a shopper either, but he enjoyed running all over the carpet stores and climbing on top of all the rolls of carpet. I liked how it turned out, so hopefully Gary will too. I also got a new kitchen floor put in to replace what was damaged because of the water mess. This was really easy to pick out because I liked what we had before. Gary liked it too so I got something pretty close to what we had before. So far I like this better than what we had before. The water damage warped some shelves in the food storage area, so they built me new ones. They have replaced the drywall that was damaged, and fixed a light fixture that shorted out because of the water. I just have to have them adjust that a little and I think they'll be done with the repairs. I've almost got everything put back together now the way it was before the water mess happened. Josh likes to do everything Mom does. He's seen me use the eye lash curler, so he decided to try it too. I took the makeup away before he put it on so I wouldn't get into trouble with his Dad. Josh sees me cuddle up under a blanket all the time, so now he does it too. The other day I was sitting on the floor and he put a pillow behind me, got the blanket and his books and brought them to me because he loves to read stories with the blanket and pillow. Melissa was doing a little studying for finals, so Josh decided he'd better do some reading too. He loves to climb on Melissa. In case I haven't mentioned it before, Melissa (my younger sister) moved in with me at the beginning of the semester. She's finishing up her teaching degree at UVSC. This semester she had a pretty heavy load, so she wasn't home much, but still it was nice to have her around. Next semester she's student teaching at Payson High and probably won't be as busy as she's been this semester. One night Melissa and I had a little fun tearing out the divider in my front room entry way. I wanted to replace the ugly vinyl in my entry way, and thought I may as well make it match the new kitchen floor. Gary and I had talked about pulling that divider thing down, so Melissa and I were trying to figure out how to do it. She picked up a hammer and experimented a little. Then I took the hammer and started banging away. Before we knew it we'd ripped it out. I had never actually used a skill saw before, but power tools are always fun to use. So I borrowed it from my cousin who lives a block away and Melissa kept the camera handy since working with power tools always makes things more interesting. I managed to get by without losing any fingers or toes or anything else. Now we've just got some patching to do.

This is what the room looked like after we tore that thing down. It makes the room look so much bigger and really opens it up a lot. I like it so much better. Gary really isn't going to recognize the house inside or out by the time he gets back.

I managed to get the Christmas decorations up. I still have a couple things that I intended to hang up but still haven't gotten around to it. I didn't even finish putting away Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations until a couple days ago. This calendar was the first thing I put up though, and each day I let Josh pull something out of one of the pockets and put up. We had a calendar like this when I was a kid and we always fought over who got to put up the baby Jesus on the 24th. We used to rearrange the calendar putting camels in the sky and angels in the stable in an effort to make my youngest sister, Andrea mad. My mom still had the pattern to make one like what we had as kids so she made one for each of us and Josh loves it. It is usually the first thing we do each morning, and during the day he'll stand under it and whine because he wants to put more on it. Each time we put something on it he tells me what each item on the calendar is.

This is my pathetic looking tree. The night it was first decorated it looked nice, but since then has been redecorated on a daily basis. I put all the ornaments I don't really care about near the bottom of the tree. Josh pulls them off until he has accumulated a little collection. Then he tries to put them back on the tree. He can do it, but not very well. In the process he bends the branches every which way. I got tired of picking up ornaments pretty quickly so they slowly made their way out of Josh's reach until the top half is now heavily populated with ornaments and the bottom half is rather bare, and the branches are all out of shape. At least Josh is having fun with it.

Gary sent me a DVD full of pictures and little video clips he's taken with his digital camera. Sometime in the very near future I intend to post some of those pictures and do an update for him. More than likely it will be while I am in Richfield at my parent's for Christmas because more people will be around to entertain Josh while I do it. I haven't even had time to see all the pictures and video clips yet, but I am very much looking forward to a couple days off work so I can hopefully get some things done that I haven't had time for.

Happy Halloween!

I found a cute monkey costume for Josh to wear for Halloween. Then I came home and put it on him and he cried and cried. He was scared of it. So I returned the costume and had to find something that wasn't quite as scary. Plan B was a costume my boss let me borrow that her boy wore when he was Josh's age. He wasn't scared of it and seemed to like wearing the hat, and got good use out of the "feed me" pouch on the stomach. Josh got to come to work with me for a while. Halloween is big at Nu Skin. The top executives of the company wander around each floor of the building and if you are not dressed up they will "boo" you. I wasn't going to dress up, but the day before Halloween I was talking to my aunt (who also works at NuSkin) and she suggested that I wear Gary's cammies to avoid the humiliation of being "boo-ed" in front of my co-workers, so I did. Gary will get a kick out of seeing me wearing his cammies.

Josh went trick-or-treating to a couple houses with all his cousins (minus the newest one). We went trick-or-treating to Grandma and Grandpa Wood's and had fun raking up some of the leaves in her yard. The kids had so much fun.

We went to Grandpa Paul's house and he got his bird out for the kids.

Big Projects & Big Messes

Gary made it safely to Iraq. He flew from North Carolina to Main, then to Germany, then Kuwait, then to Iraq. They gave him a small pox shot before he left so he was sick for part of the journey but he made it to Fallujah where he will be stationed. I have updated his address on the blog, and to send letters/packages you do not have to pay international postage. It took about ten days for a package I sent to get to him. He mailed me a letter two weeks ago and I still haven't gotten it, so it takes longer for me to get things from him than it does for him to get things from me. If you go to http://www.motomail.us/ you can send him a letter that will be downloaded and delivered to him fairly quickly and then it saves a stamp. To set up the account you have to get the information off his address that is posted on this blog. For the first couple weeks he was in Iraq he was only able to call once a week and was limited to 30 minutes, but this past week he's been able to call more and it has been nice. There's a phone in their barracks that they use to call Tooele and ask to be connected to an outside line, then he uses a calling card to call me. That way we don't have to pay international rates. There is an article at the link listed below about what the unit he's replacing has been doing and it gives an idea of the types of things he'll be doing while he's there. http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf/main5/184DBEB57E7C24AD8525736E003915D0?opendocument

Things have been pretty crazy around my house these past few weeks. There's been some big projects that needed to be done before winter comes, so I've been keeping my neighbors and family pretty busy. I keep telling them that by the time Gary gets home they will wish they were in Iraq instead. I had a huge weeping willow tree in my backyard that was mostly dead. It was basically just wired together in the middle, and could easily split if there was a heavy wind storm, and then it would end up in my kitchen. My next door neighbor, Bob, and his family helped me out by cutting it down and hauling away what couldn't be used for fire wood. I really owe them big time not only for cutting the tree down, but also for finding my wedding ring that I lost during the process. Thank you Manookin family!!

This branch split after one of the other branches came down.

The back yard looks so much different without the tree. It looks a lot bigger now.

Now I've got a pretty good wood pile to get me through the winter.

My next big project is a result of a valve breaking on my fridge. As I stepped inside my house one day after work, I could hear running water. Never a good sign when you've been gone all day. The valve on the thing in the freezer that fills up the ice dispenser with water broke, causing the water to keep running. Water was pouring out of the ice dispenser and when I opened the freezer water came gushing out. It was all over the kitchen floor and had leaked through the walls into the basement. It was a mess.

The water dripped through a light fixture at the bottom of the stairs to make this really big puddle. The carpet was wet half way down the hall in the basement and also half of the carpet was wet in the downstairs living room. There was water dripping from the ceiling in the food storage area. The floor was wet in that area and under the stairs. I had a lot of stuff boxed up underneath the stairs. The boxes were ruined, but luckily it didn't really hurt anything inside the boxes.

I called Lance, our insurance agent, who is Gary's old roommate and of course he was on vacation. The people in his office took care of me though. They had me call a construction company they work with a lot to come clean up the mess. They pulled the carpet back, and threw out the padding underneath that had been ruined. All the water was vacuumed up, and then they put fans all over the place blowing above and below the carpet. They took some baseboards off the wall and drilled holes to get air up into the wall to dry that out. After leaving the fans blowing for a few days they came back and evaluated the damage. Lance filed a claim for me and the construction company is beginning the repairs today. I told Lance he'd better not go on any more vacations until Gary gets back.

I am hoping that the roof will be the final big project on my house until Gary gets back. With the luck I've had recently I've invested in new smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors just in case with fire extinguishers to follow shortly. I've got MRE's for food storage, but no water yet. I intended to get some water for storage after my water main broke, but have been too preoccupied with other things to follow through with that. I plan on getting everything in order as quickly as possible though because I keep wondering what will happen next. The problem with the roof was that the previous owners of the home had the water leak from the swamp cooler, run down the roof, and drip onto the deck. You can see the damage in one of the pictures above of the tree being cut down. It ruined the shingles and damaged the plywood underneath. We had the house inspected before we bought it and were aware of the problem, but decided to have the people we bought it from come down in price and then we were going to fix it ourselves. It turned into a bigger project that we anticipated. We ended up having to strip off all the shingles on the back side of the house, remove all the rotted plywood (which ended up being about half of the back side of the roof), replace it with new plywood, and then put on new shingles.

Bob had a few days off work, so he and his family helped me out again. Mom and Dad came up from Richfield to help, and other family came to help as well. While Bob and Janna were scraping the shingles off they put their feet through the plywood a couple times where it had been damaged.

The swamp cooler broke just before Gary got home for the two weeks in September. I decided to have them take it off the roof and patch the hole in hopes that we'll be able to get central air in the Spring. If not I guess we'll have to find a window unit. Our house had some solar panels on it that didn't work and so they pulled that off the house and patched the holes. This is the mess of stuff to be hauled to the dump. The finished product. It looks great!! Once again, a big thanks to the Manookin family, Mom and Dad, and everyone else who helped!! I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate all your hard work. When Gary gets back you can put him to work at your houses! I'm not sure if Josh is trying to mail himself off for a visit to his Dad, or Grammy Debbie. If one more thing goes wrong at my house I may crawl in the box and go with him or maybe we'll try it anyway!

Baby Caleb

Josh got a new cousin Thursday afternoon (27th). Jared and Carrie are naming him Caleb Jared Wood. He was 7 pounds 8 ounces and 19 inches long. I was hoping to get pictures posted for Gary to see before he lost access to the Internet for a while, but didn't quite make it back from the hospital in time.

Gary left North Carolina early Friday morning. They weren't told what route they'd be taking to Iraq, so I have no idea where he's at right now or how long it will be before he can contact me. He thought he might end up in Kuwait for a few days, but he wasn't sure. I have changed his address on the blog, and they will be giving him a new e-mail address that I will post when I find out what it is. I will be checking his hotmail for him and forwarding things to him while he is gone.