It's not all bad here

Just for the sake of balance, there have been some cool things happening here that offset my bad luck and the dust storms of late.
On sunday night, they dragged out a screen and a projector and played the movie "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" on the wall of the gymnasium before a crowd of about 250 people, including me. The cool part was that most of those people were lounging in the pool next to the gym. I was using the stars and stripes floatie ring that my friends gave me before I deployed. That's right, I was floating in a pool in the middle of the desert watching an almost-first-run movie. Not too shabby.
There was a surprise waiting for me in the mess hall on Wednesday. No, it wasn't my Wiley-X shades. Those are apparently long gone. The surprise was lobster tail. as much as you could eat. I took two and still felt guilty about it. The lobster was pretty good, but not really good. It was roughly Red-Lobster-quality, but hey, we're in a flippin' desert 10,000 miles from home. Red Loster ain't too shabby.
So, life in the desert continues. We're settling into our routine at work and finding things to keep us busy during our off time.