Silly String

Without further ado.

I come back from taking a Marine to the hospital (not mine, and he’s fine; not injured, just some medical difficulties) to find my desk, chair, and computers covered with silly string. One of my co-workers just received a care package from home, and I knew it had silly string in it, so I knew exactly who the culprit was. One of my Sergeants showed me a picture taken a few minutes earlier of my platoon sergeant, also covered in silly string. Very amusing. I began cleaning up, gathering all the silly string in a pile on my desk.

I knew exactly what I was going to do with the silly string, except that once I got to my co-workers office with my pile of silly string detritus, I realized that his keyboards were spread out over his desk, and that they would make a better deposit location than just a single pile on his desk. So I returned the silly string. My platoon sergeant and one of our other co-workers were in his office and started laughing as soon as they saw what I was doing. I completed my task, walked back to my desk, and sat down. My platoon sergeant came back and sat down on the couch.

Sure enough, my co-worker appeared in my office door moments later with two cans of silly string. “I have more of these,” he promised, aimed, and pushed the nozzles.

“Got it.” I ducked my head and waited for it to be over. Spray, spray spray spray, wait, spray, wait, wait, spray...finally it was over. “I have more of these,” he reminded me again. “Roger,” I said as I started pulling silly string off my head. “Love you,” he called out in the sing-song-y voice that all the guys around here use when they’re playing around. “Love you, too,” I answered through recently un-gritted teeth.

One of my squad leaders, who had been sitting at the desk right in front of me, crawled out from underneath the desk, and we all started laughing again.

“Dumping all that silly string on his desk was totally worth it,” I told him a couple minutes later as I had cleared the area right next to my body and was starting to reach out to the gear behind me.

He laughed. “You keep telling yourself that, ma’am.”

Ten minutes later, I walked into my co-worker’s office again. Again, I was holding a handful of silly string, except this time it was all nicely piled up, formed in pretty oval shape, with no tiny bits of dusty string. “I have a nice new chia pet that I wanted to share with you,” I said, and deposited it on his desk.

Your tax dollars, hard at work.

We have one mission left before our replacements arrive and we start spinning them up on how things work out here. Roughly two months from now we will be back in Camp Pendleton, turning in our gear and wishing we were instead in Oregon/Michigan/Indiana/Illinois/Pennsylvania/Washington. Wherever home is.

I've been hear long enough that the gentleman that runs the morning grill knows exactly what I want for breakfast--omelet with everything, no jalapenos, please. This morning he didn't even bother to confirm with me, just nodded, said good morning, and started cooking. Is it nice to have a fresh omelet every morning? Yes. Would I rather have my own kitchen, where I could sleep however long I wanted and still eat a nice breakfast, and didn't have to pull my hair back into a bun just to walk to the kitchen? Most definitely. I don't mean to complain--there are perks. But I'm ready to be home again.

Love you all! See you soon.