Life on the Vine

Yesterday (January 25) marked the 5 year anniversary of the Gulf Region Division. In early December we put together a communication plan that included a lot of different initiatives. The big ones being a press conference at the Combined Press Information Center, a ceremony at the GRD compound (including videos, cake and a special gift presentation), and finally a press release summarizing five years of reconstruction progress in Iraq. A lot of preparation and hard work went into getting ready for yesterday but everything went very well. In the office we have inherited this buzzer that when you push on it the song " Whomp There It Is" plays. We've started hitting it to celebrate little victories. Our office is also very narrow. I don't think I've commented on it before. It used to be a side veranda and it was walled in years ago to provide indoor space. So we often refer to our office as a bowling lane. In fact when DeDe was home on R&R she was going to p

Sorry so much time has gone by between posts. Things have been very busy here the last week or so. But being busy is not necessarily a bad thing when you are deployed because there's not much else to do but work. And it's just even more fun and fulfilling when you are enjoying what you are doing. Today is an historic moment for America. I just got done watching the inauguration of America's first African-American President, Barack Obama. It is a great moment for our country and even here in Iraq I can feel the sense of hope our nation has right now for a fresh start. We will see what the next four years hold. I will be praying for our new president. These are certainly challenging, complicated times he will be leading our country through. Because Friday and Saturday are considered our weekends here, we were given Sunday off for Martin Luther King Jr. day instead of Monday. A group of us -- Tambour , Belinda, Ralph, Doug and I -- spent a large portion of the day driving

Hello everyone. A few weeks ago I was flipping through some old issues of Essayons Forward, the magazine for the Gulf Region Division, trying to find some historical articles on a few projects. You can see the five years worth of Essayons Forward at this link http://www.grd.usace.army.mil/news/Essayonsforward/index.asp As I was doing this, I thought...it would be so much easier to locate an article if there was some type of database listing all the articles. Well, instead of wishing it was so, I got to making one! It's nothing fancy. Just used Excel and created a record of the 400+ articles that have appeared in Essayons since 2004. I listed them by sector (water, energy, security, justice, etc.), title and author. It took about three weeks, working on it here and there as I had time, but it is now finished. While doing that I came across an article that Steve Wright wrote in 2004 about the historical/religious significance of Iraq -- rather the region that is today

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year! It is well into the 1st day of 2009 here in Baghdad. We have today off so I had a chance to sleep in this morning. My room was overflowing with care boxes...remember from the video of my room ? I can stand in the middle and spread out my arms and touch the walls. Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but trust me it's not too far off. Needless to say I needed to find a way to unpack some of the boxes. So yesterday when I had a chance to swing by the PX, I picked up a plastic three drawer organizer. Just an easy, cheap way to give me some more storage area in my room. When I was talking to my brother Erik on Christmas, he asked if I needed anything. I told him I probably wouldn't need any resupplies until March :) The care boxes have been such a blessing. I got rather used to getting mail almost daily, and the disappointment of 3 days straight of no mail is hard to take, but I'm reminding myself that every week can'